ASCMC President Discusses Structural Reforms

Tess Hubbeling, Shannon Miller, and Hannah Bottum contributed reporting.

After ASCMC passed reforms that will restructure the Executive Board to change the social chair positions, The Forum spoke with ASCMC President Ben Tillotson ’15 to clarify the process by which the amendment came about. In an email to the student body regarding 2015 ASCMC elections, President Pro-Tempore Michael Irvine ’16 explained the new positions that need to be filled:

“As you may have heard, Senate and Exec Board recently passed a constitutional amendment changing the structure of the ASCMC Exec Board. Due to this reform, we will be electing the following positions:

• President
• Executive Vice President (similar to current VP; runs Senate)
• Vice President of Student Activities (new position; leads council of four appointed Event Commissioners to plan and run wet and dry events)
• Dormitory Affairs Chair (DAC; now focuses [solely] on dorm life)
• Class Presidents”

Some students were surprised to see the amendment pass relatively early in the semester, especially since many students were unaware of it. “This reform package has been in the works since the beginning of the semester. [Prior to the meeting when the amendment was approved,] it had been discussed at Board and Senate before.” Responding to reports that Board ‘did not read the amendment before voting, he said “Everyone on Board had been shared on a Google document that had the text of the amendment a week prior.” While Board members didn’t have a hard copy of the amendment at the vote, Tillotson said, “I’m positive that everyone in the room, every voting member, completely understood what they were voting on.”

Regarding the timing of the vote, Tillotson explained that “it was our last opportunity to pass something to have it go into effect before the election cycle.” Prospective candidates will have a mandatory informational meeting on February 22, and the elections will take place March 3. “It needed to happen for this upcoming term,” which meant fewer students may have heard about it, since the timeline “definitely put more time constraints on the amount of outreach we did and could have done.” He added, “I’m open to criticism that we could have been more proactive about soliciting feedback, but this was discussed in open senate and board meetings in advance of the vote, so saying the process wasn’t transparent is just factually inaccurate.”

He added that the Board had “complete consensus that we needed to reform the social chairs and this proposal was the best we could come up with. The only controversy,” he continued, “was over whether to elect or appoint the four Event Commissioners (ECs).”

“The major pros for electing them was that it’s good to have more members directly elected, for more direct accountability,” Tillotson continued. “Ultimately, the reason we went with appointed is that the VP [of Student Activities] is directly elected and gives the opportunity for that accountability. We were afraid of the situation where you have a year where four SAC-type people get elected in these positions, and there needs to be not just one group of SAC or SLC types; we need variety.”

Tillotson elaborated, “We could control that in the past with having both positions [SAC and SLC], but since we want EC to be more general, we felt like by having them be elected you would lose that control to make sure there is diversity.”

“The other reason we decided to go with an appointment process is that people might be great event planners that don’t necessarily want to run in an election and don’t want to go through that process. There are a lot of people who would be great but who just don’t or didn’t want to campaign and deal with the attendant stuff there.”

As for the fact that Board Members did not have a hard copy of the amendment at the vote, Tillotson commented, “Everyone who was there was completely clear on where we were at with the proposal. We could have had everyone get their laptops out and pull up the document and put the new language in to reflect what we had just decided, but we just voted on it verbally based on our understanding and prior discussions. It’s not unconstitutional; [granted] it’s not how we normally do it, but it was because of the time sensitivity of this. Everyone who was at the Exec Board meeting knew exactly who they were voting for even though the formal constitutional language wasn’t directly in front of them.”

Tillotson noted that the amendment arose out of the recognition that a number of changes needed to be made to these positions. Among these issues is the fact that SAC and DAC candidates are often uncontested in elections. “Since my freshman year there has been one completely uncontested SAC election and two completely uncontested DAC elections,” Tillotson said.

The changes to DAC are also intended to help with logistics for TNC: “the DAC used to run dorm life, and TNCs used to be thrown by dorm presidents, but there was a rotation through all dorms. The DAC was there to help,” Tillotson commented, but more to organize the presidents in their rotation. As a result, the DAC “didn’t have to plan, set up, and run point on an event every Thursday night. The major responsibility would rotate on a weekly basis. And when the fencing policies changed and TNC needed to be a fenced event, and [the Dean of Students Office] would no longer let us register events at the Apartments, we just lost a ton of TNC venues. Theoretically, we could still register a TNC in Beckett lounge, but the way we would have to set up the fencing for it would make it completely undesirable. The venues we would rotate between shrunk down to basically Crown, Green beach, Marks (not this year), and Fawcett as the go-to ones.”

This decrease in access to the dorms meant they had to “rely on spaces like [the Kravis Center lower court] and the party zone and off-campus things, so we just couldn’t do the dorm president rotation anymore.”

Before serving as President, Tillotson was DAC for the 2013–14 term; he explained that the disintegration of the rotation system meant that “it essentially became the DAC entirely taking responsibility for all of the events, which was a lot of work when I [was DAC] and there were some dorm presidents who were awesome and helped a ton, but you can’t rely on that or expect that every semester. They run to throw dorm events; the DAC doesn’t have a reliable source of help to throw this event every week.”

Tillotson commented that both the DAC and the SAC have had trouble finding help for events. “I know Elaine [Sohng ‘17, current DAC] has had a good group [of dorm presidents], but the other big change is that the SAC used to have this huge group of people who weren’t officially elected but just wanted to help out, and Jessie [Thomas ‘16, current SAC] sent out this email to build the SAC council and people just didn’t step up to help like they used to in previous years, so much more of the work ended up falling on her. Maybe once in a couple years you’ll get someone who has the time, energy, creativity, and desire needed to put on an incredible event every Saturday, but with a full course-load and all the other responsibilities that you have as a student and a normal person, you can’t count on having that every year. Too much of the burden was falling on one person”

Thus, the changes to these positions will account for the lack of extra student help in event planning, as Tillotson noted, “another really big change is that fewer people have stepped up in the student body to contribute to CMC’s social scene. I hope this changes, but we had to structure these positions to meet the reality we’re currently facing.”

Ultimately, Tillotson hopes this amendment can account for these changes. “With this reform, by expanding the positions and making it a bigger group of event planners in official roles, by virtue of having more people, they will be more engaged in different areas of campus. We’re hoping that it will be automatically more engaging to different areas of campus and to different people.”

“So the positions had to be restructured, and this proposal that we had, I’m really optimistic that it’s going to be a positive change for CMC’s social scene,” he concluded. “It’s an adjustment, but it’s not written in stone. If for some unanticipated reason this restructure does not work as planned, there will be opportunities for future boards to make changes.”