March 23, 2009
Once upon a time, there was a senate blog. As my senate project, I’ve decided to reinstate it. If you’re yearning for more senate news after watching Jared’s youtube channel, then hooray, huzzah, and welcome. This is the place for you.

I think it’s safe to say that usually, the Red Room is the Place To Be on Monday nights. Forget Gads. You want drama and amusement? Come to a senate meeting. Admittedly, today was a bit underwhelming, but I guess that’s to be expected on the first day back from spring break.

Moving on to business:

8:51 pm – twenty minutes into the meeting. My laptop made a bit of a scene while turning on. We approved the 21 pages of minutes from last time. We passed the BC minutes. The Amherst College Republicans are getting three hundred plus dollars to sign up for Smith’s shooting club, in order to exercise their interpretation of second amendment rights. Saumitra seemed surprised that there were no objections to the minutes as a whole. I suspect this had something to do with the guns, but I may be wrong.
We’re currently discussing funding of the Career Center’s “Junior Jumpstart” series, which is designed to “help Amherst juniors gain a head start on and better understanding of senior year options with early fall deadlines.” We’re discussing funding this because the Senate has set aside a fund to cover programs that have been dropped or could not come into existence because of budget cuts. Things we’re already taking over include Frost community tea, free condoms, and half of TYPO. A separate committee has been formed to deal with this.
9:00 pm - We discussed the all-school mailing list. Chris suggested we come up with a more efficient way to approve (and proofread?) emails that go out to the whole student body, because “every time there’s a typo it makes us look dumb.“ Fair enough.

9:16 pm - We tried to appoint a chair of the Elections Committee. This was tricky, because the chair had to be someone currently in senate who is not running for any sort of senate position next year. Michael volunteered.
9:21 pm - Claire gave an update on the Joint Projects Fund: a new collaboration between the AAS and the CCE, that will act as a budgetary committee for community-awareness, CCE-related student projects. They will meet biweekly. Hooray.

9:30 pm - Adjourned. Shortest senate meeting yet. To put things into perspective: our last meeting ran until 11:45. See the 21-page minutes for more details.

Further incentive to go look at our minutes: When Saumitra (our VP) brought up approving last week’s minutes, Chase said “yeah they’re accurate, but are we sure they don’t make us look dumb?”

See? Fun stuff.