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Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Dhilena Wickramasinghe elected as senate pro tempore at Jan. 9 meeting

Ethnic Affairs Commission Chair Reem Suleiman also asserted her position regarding collaborations and endorsements

 

By VINCE BASADA  — campus@theaggie.org

 

ASUCD Senator Asif Ahmed called the Jan. 9 senate meeting to order at 6:16 p.m. before reading the UC Davis Land Acknowledgement.

The first matter for the table was to elect a new senate pro tempore, the presiding officer in absence of the internal vice president and a representative of the senate as a whole.

Internal Affairs Commission Chair Amanda Clark nominated Senator Dhilena Wickramasinghe for the position, noting her work as head of the Ethical Spending Committee and her record as having passed the most legislation of any student senator last quarter.

“I have the utmost faith that she would carry out the role excellently,” Clark said.

With no other nominees put forth, Wickramasinghe was appointed the role and welcomed by outgoing Pro Tempore Ahmed.

The senate then began to designate unit and committee adoptions, which is the process of assigning individual senators to overlook and work with each body within the association. Unit adoptions, however, were soon pushed to the following meeting to get more input from unit leadership. As such, only the internal committees were given adopted senators at that time.

After filling out elected officer and ex-officio reports, Lauren Gomez, a fourth-year biological psychology major, was confirmed as a member of the Sexual Assault Awareness Advocacy Committee.

Moving to legislation, the senate passed Senate Bill (SB) #26, changing the senate’s Quarterly Town Hall to a Quarterly Showcase.

SB#27, which moves the public discussion section of the senate’s weekly meetings closer to the beginning to make them more accessible to the student population, also passed unanimously after some deliberation.

SB#28, creating the ASUCD 530 Market Committee tasked with planning this year’s market — an Asian & Pacific Islander Community Health and Culture Fair held for the first time in 2023, also passed. The senate had previously set aside $9,000 in spring 2024 to host the event.

The last bill of the night was SB#30, emergency legislation to restructure the ASUCD Scholarship to improve efficiency. There have been some delays in awarding the scholarship, which is open to all undergraduate students, and SB#30 was needed to help ensure they were given in a more timely manner in the future, according to Academic Affairs Commission Chair Iris Chen. It passed unanimously.

Returning from a short break and completing the approval of past meeting minutes, Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission (ECAC) Chair Reem Suleiman addressed her stance on ECAC collaborations and endorsements during open forum.

“I’ve made it abundantly clear that this commission is a pro-Palestinian one, and it is universally anti-genocide, anti-colonial and anti-occupation,” Suleiman said. “[ECAC] and any decent and intellectual human for that matter does not believe there are two sides to the Palestinian experience. ECAC will not endorse or engage in any attempts at creating so-called dialogue. Dialogue between murderer and murdered, oppressor and oppressed is useless.”

Suleiman further expressed her thoughts on the matter.

“Palestinian students are expected to juggle unending traumas every waking moment,” Suleiman said. “When I am here and I sit on this table, I am enduring traumas. I do not wish, nor do I wish on my fellow Palestinian students, to endure a meaningless confrontation with members of the student body who wish to legitimize their support for the slaughter of my people and the theft of my homeland.”

Suleiman then shared some personal experiences she has faced as a commission chair.

“No Palestinian deserves to come face to face with people, the likes of some on this very table, who wear our keffiyeh as bikini wraps and vacation atop the graves of our families with the most brazen, disgraceful and disgusting disregard,” Suleiman said. “If me and my community’s existence makes you feel unsafe, that is nothing more than a personal problem and a grand illusion that I will not be indulging in. I’ve been too nice this past quarter, and it’s time that I actually stand my ground and back my beliefs.”

Suleiman ended by saying the ECAC will not entertain any future attempts at conversation surrounding the topic.

“If you wish to have dialogue about your feelings, support for genocide and how [that] support makes you feel unsafe, we have a saying in Arabic coming from my village that loosely translates to: ‘You can speak to the walls,’” Suleiman said. “This is the last time I will be addressing this and any attempt to create dialogue regarding this topic will be ignored.”

Following some other brief comments during open forum, the meeting was adjourned at 8:04 p.m.

 

Written by: Vince Basada campus@theaggie.org

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