A.S. Council’s Week Five meeting began with a fiery public input period, but miraculously ended after a mere two hours.
Representatives from various campus media organizations, such as California Review Editor in Chief Alec Weisman and MQ Editor in Chief Patrick Reischl, criticized council for cutting media org funding from the originally allotted $60,000 per year to $38,000.
“When you cut media funding, it’s not like cutting event funding where if you have 50 percent less funds, it’s just 50 percent less balloons,” Reischl said. “Printers have fixed costs and if the costs are too much, it’s not a matter of scaling back our printing, we can’t print at all.”
He defended the media orgs as an integral part of campus life.
“For a school that doesn’t have a journalism department, these orgs are providing more than just entertainment or commentary or news,” he said. “We educate, we teach people how to write, how to be creative, how to design, how to copy edit, how to network computers and deal with the administration.”
After public input, Mar Velez and representatives from S.P.A.C.E.S. gave a special presentation on the outreach, retention work and opportunities — such as the Academic Success Program, overnight trips and internships — that the organization offers.
Interim AVP of Academic Affairs Desiree Prevo gave a special presentation about her office and current projects. She proposed creating a grade distribution website to track the average grade distribution of professors over the years.
“With the site, students can go online and check if the grade distribution has changed over the years,” Prevo said. “It’s a way of keeping administrators and professors accountable to the grades they give.”
She is also planning Dine With the Prof and U.S. Grant revamps. For U.S. Grants, she hopes to create an end-of-year research journal for interested participants, as well as a symposium.
The council then passed an allocation of $32,153 to from mandate reserves for Triton Television.
AVP of Student Orgs Carli Thomas announced that she was continuing work on new student media guidelines, which will be finalized Friday.
Campuswide Senator Michael Raimondi thanked the council for its hard work the past week, and gave an update on the first meeting of his committee to look into on-campus Greek housing. He said that, while the committee was still in early planning stages, “[the idea] is a lot more real now than it was four hours ago.”
Interim AVP of Student Advocacy Arohi Sharma encouraged councilmembers to help her publicize her office.
Council then confirmed Leonard Bobbitt as the new AVP of College Affairs, and the meeting ended with A.S. President Wafa Ben Hassine encouraging members to attend a Graduate Student Associate meetings, which run differently from AS. Council meetings and are apparently much shorter.
