SGA proposes four amendments to Constitution for spring 2024 election
Among the changes proposed for the SGA Constitution include the creation of an at-large senator position and the consolidation of various positions including student organization senators. Graphic by RENEE ELEFANTE, Editor-in-Chief
With voting for the 2024-2025 school year underway, Chapman University’s Student Government Association (SGA) is looking to amend their Constitution with four new amendments. The Constitution was last amended in 2017, according to a Feb. 26 email sent out to the Chapman community.
In order to pass the constitutional amendments, SGA must get a campus voter participation rate of 20%.
Previous election years saw that the changes proposed at those times did not get passed as the voter participation rate was always lower than the required threshold of 20%. Current SGA President Rachel Berns explained to The Panther one possible reason why the proposed changes for previous years had a harder time being passed.
“I think in recent years, some of the proposed changes have almost been underexplained, like we tell people to vote (on) the Constitution but we don’t always explain to them why it’s important or why it should matter to them,” Berns said. “And so, we’re going to try and be super explicit and transparent with everything and why we’re doing it and why we think it’s important.”
First two proposed amendments would consolidate positions within SGA
The first amendment calls for the creation of two new positions within the Executive Council: the Director of Operations role and the Director of Senate role. According to a file emailed to the Chapman community on Feb. 26, the Director of Operations would assist the Executive Council with any logistical needs. The Director of Senate, meanwhile, would assume the responsibilities from the Director of Elections and the Speaker of Senate.
In the second amendment, SGA proposes restructuring the Senate to have four class senators, one of each for freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. Currently, SGA has one underclassmen senator and one upperclassmen senator. Additionally, the number of student organization senators would be reduced from five to two, and the position of an at-large senator would be created.
According to Berns, the organization has noticed for the past few years “how specified SGA has gotten.”
“Of course, if you start with a group of 10 students, people start to think, ‘Oh, we should make a senator for this because we want to increase representation for this group, and we should make another senator for this group on campus,’ which is not a bad thing at all. I think over time, we’ve done so much of that (that) we’ve almost gotten over-specified. And so, I think right now, student government at Chapman is very segmented, where you kind of just have a lot of individual people working on different things.”
According to Berns, some of the senatorial positions in SGA, in particular the positions for the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and the School of Communication, have increasingly become more involved in college and departmental operations like planning large-scale events, running social media feeds and chairing student leadership councils. While Berns supports having senators be involved in conversations about the college they are representing, she does not feel that they should “inherit administrative duties just by means of their title.”
“I think they’re filling a lot of roles that shouldn’t be their jobs, planning events and things like that, when their job within their constituencies should be to hear concerns, bring those concerns to the Senate, be a channel for communication (and) activate the student body when big issues arise,” Berns said. “We need that full force of the student dissatisfaction in order to make change.”
Berns continued: “Like, that’s really what the role of a senator is: to bring any concerns from their constituency to the full Senate. And then the full Senate should be devising a plan for action and putting that into place, and really, every student in student government should be interested in advocating for all students, not just whoever that senator is for that constituency. And so, a lot of the shifts that we’re proposing in the Senate structure are to really, hopefully, bolster that by sort of de-specifying some of them and just kind of regroup what it means to be a senator.”
According to Berns, the proposed addition of an at-large senator would enable students who are passionate about student government but aren’t part of a specific group or organization on campus to get involved in SGA. Currently, a majority of the positions within SGA require students to belong to a specific college, group or organization; for example, students interested in the Dodge Senator position must be enrolled in the school, while those interested in the Leisure Student Organization Senator must be part of a leisure student organization.
“So, if there are students who are really passionate about improving this campus and (who) love student representation and advocacy and all those things but don’t really have a place where they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I feel super connected to this group on campus,’ or maybe they’re an undeclared student who doesn’t have an academic college, whatever that might be. It just kind of opens up an additional space for someone to get involved without having to be associated with one of those subgroups,” Berns said.
For any first-year students who are interested in joining SGA but are concerned they don’t have as much experience on campus compared to sophomores, juniors and seniors, Berns had this to say:
“If you are a first-year student and you are experiencing what it’s like to be a first-year, you have the most valuable firsthand experience to be able to say to the group, ‘Hey, this was a problem that a lot of my friends (and I) struggled with as we’ve been transitioning into this first-year experience, and SGA should be advocating for this process to be better or for this resource to exist that we didn’t have.’”
Berns continued: “We don’t want SGA to be something off-limits or for it to seem like you have (to have) this robust knowledge of the university, because you don’t,” Berns said. “All you have to do is care (and) be a student who’s willing to listen to others and who wants to make the university a better place. And you can do that from your first day here until your last day here.”
Third amendment increases number of finance/allocations committees
The third amendment, if passed, would call for three finance/allocations committees that would be overseen by the director of finance and assist with the student body’s financial needs, including funding. Additionally, the committees focusing specifically on diversity, community outreach and other areas would no longer exist.
According to Berns, the Community Outreach committee was originally created years ago to help address tensions between the university and Orange residents, which was starting to affect the student experience. In the years since, this role has since been assumed by the university’s Community Relations department, so according to Berns, this particular SGA committee is not really needed anymore.
“We don’t have the convenient availability to shift the committee’s purpose to be more aligned with current student needs because it’s embedded in the Constitution,” Berns said. “So, we feel it will be more productive to house any committee infrastructure in an alternate document, likely our bylaws, that can be modified with just a majority vote of the Senate so we can be a lot more adaptable to the ever-changing needs of the student body.”
Should an issue arise that necessitates the creation of a task force or subcommittee, however, they could be created to address that issue at that time. According to Berns, SGA will be reworking their documents and including more specific instructions regarding these task forces and subcommittees.
The fourth amendment, meanwhile, proposes including general overviews of specific positions in the Constitution, while more detailed descriptions would be put in other SGA documents.
SGA seeks to increase voter turnout this year
To help increase voter turnout, SGA is offering a few incentives, which include bringing food trucks to campus and entering voters into a number of drawings for prizes like a Stanley Cup, Beats by Dre headphones, a dinner with Dean of Students Jerry Price and a meal with President Daniele Struppa. SGA also met with Chapman faculty members, who allotted a few minutes during their classes to allow students to vote.
“If you’ve felt frustrations with SGA before or you haven’t felt the presence of SGA before, the first step to fixing that and making it better is making sure that our operating documents are conducive to success, which right now, they’re not as much as they could be,” Berns told The Panther. “So really, communicating that is what needs to happen in order to set us on a good trajectory to fix those problems.”
