ASUCD Vice President Bradley Bottoms presided over the first senate meeting of Winter Quarter on Jan. 9. The meeting was called to order at 6:17 p.m.
Senator Miles Thomas was elected as the new President Pro Tempore of the senate.
Ben Marchman was confirmed as the new Student-Police Relations Committee Chair. New members of the Internal Affairs Commission, Academic Affairs Commission, Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission, Outreach Assembly and Environmental Policy and Planning Commission were also confirmed.
A large focus of the meeting was on the temporary closure of the ASUCD Experimental College (EC) due to a budget deficit. Jonathan Goh, an instructor for the Experimental College, gave a presentation on the suspension of the EC due to a struggling market for its classes, which he faulted to a lack of awareness by the students of the EC’s existence.
“I was blown away to learn that the EC was such a secret,” Goh said.
The meeting then entered a public discussion in which Rick Schubert, chairman of the EC Instructors Advisory Board, shared similar opinions on the obscurity of the EC by the students. Schubert attributed this fault to poor marketing of not switching from print to online advertising quick enough.
Senator Mariah Watson claimed the decision to suspend the EC was done on poor timing as six of the 12 senators had just been sworn in that night. Senator Amrit Sahota claimed that the senate started drafting a plan to restart the EC by Fall Quarter 2014 as soon as the EC was suspended. During the meeting, Sahota suggested using Winter Quarter to find the bare minimum needed to restart the EC and raise that money during Spring Quarter.
A bill was introduced to create the special committee on restoring services for the Experimental College to be known as the Experimental College Task Force (ECTF). The bill was authored by Senator Shehzad Lokhandwallah.
No new legislation was passed.
— Jason Pham
