Current Student Voice on the Board of Trustees
BY EMILY ALVES, JOSH SOLLER & CAITLIN LEE
This Thursday morning, on May 1st, two student representatives presented to the Board of Trustees’ Undergraduate Experience Committee on expanding Wash U’s sexual violence support and response team. Student Representatives apply for this position, which includes the chance to present to those who make many decisions that influence daily student experience, and the administration picks two representatives from those applicants.
Every year the representatives are able to give a 15-minute presentation on a campus issue of their choosing. This year, Taylor Docking and Tiffini Hyatt gave a presentation asking for the expansion of the Student Health Services sexual assault response and support team. Currently, the team is severely understaffed, with Kim Webb being the only person who is trained to support the hundreds of people who are assaulted every year on our campus.
The representatives specifically asked for more funds to be allocated to Student Health Services, hopefully to be used to expand the sexual violence prevention and response team. Docking and Hyatt envision a full time staff member dedicated to sexual assault prevention and education. Student groups like SARAH and CORE do much of this work currently, but survivors of sexual violence need professional help that other students, no matter how dedicated, often cannot give. Their presentation proposed a long-term goal of the creation of an office for community health. Tiffany and Taylor started preparing their presentation at the beginning of the spring semester. The representatives developed their proposal with Webb in order to develop a well-informed and applicable plan for support.
During their one-year term, the representatives only get one opportunity to present. They get 15 minutes to speak in front of the Undergraduate Experience Committee, comprised of about 30 people, and a 3-5 minute summary and Q&A in front of the full Board of Trustees, comprised of 55 voting members. Student representatives are allowed to speak during discussions, but throughout the entire year, they have no voting power, are unable to present formally, and can only add comments to the already existing conversations. As of just a few weeks ago following Students Against Peabody negotiations with administration, the undergraduate representatives are also allowed to present briefly about Student Union recommendations if SU specifically requests a resolution be included on the agenda.
Unfortunately, there is no formal system of response to the student presentation. The students must hope that a single board member finds the topic important enough to individually reach out, and possibly fund. Last year’s presentation by Josh Aiken and Mamatha Challa was about increasing the amount of psychiatrists at SHS. There has been no clear response except a personal letter of thanks from a board member. Herein lies a problem: if the board is not required to act openly, there is no guarantee that the needs of students will ever be considered seriously. Additionally, most students are seniors during their year as representatives, so they quickly graduate and have no way of holding the university responsible for honoring requests made on behalf of the student body.
There is a distinct lack of transparency in the way that the Board of Trustees functions. In the past month, we researched the Board of Trustees heavily but kept running into barriers to information. We were able to find out about a few of the committees’ purposes, like Educational Policy which decides what professors get tenure, Buildings and Grounds which makes decisions about where to tear down and build new facilities, Honorary Degree which decides who should be nominated for honorary degrees and commencement speakers, and University Finance which determines future tuition rates. However, there is no way to find out who is on which committee. There is no way to find out if the leaders of Peabody, Ameren, Bank of America, Monsanto, Arch Coal, Boeing and other corporate powers are making decisions about who receives tenure or how much support survivors of sexual violence should have available.
This is unacceptable.
As students, we have every right to know and understand exactly how the board functions and what decisions are made. The agendas of each meeting are kept confidential, and student representatives are bound to confidentiality. The barriers to transparency are very carefully constructed to keep students from finding out the inner workings of our school. What is the university so afraid of?
The Board of Trustees is completely closed off to the student body, yet every single student is influenced by the decisions made behind closed doors. Voices are eliminated. The right to contribute to university decisions is taken away from those directly affected and is given to an elite system. This is indicative of which voices the university actually values.
Students, take ownership and responsibility for how the University operates. We must question all the decisions the board makes, and acknowledge that these barriers to transparency are in direct opposition to the stated purpose of the university. The decisions made by our University Board of Trustees affect St. Louis, your friends and yourself.
Our voices are meant to be heard.