NC State’s Student Government (SG) recently concluded its spring elections, which included votes for student body leadership, the Student Senate and a referendum on the Student Body Constitution. These subdued elections rarely trigger alarm bells and, in general, barely register on most students’ radars at all.
While this election was not particularly different in these respects, I was still unpleasantly surprised by the full scope of the referendum. Despite the unassuming language used for the ballot item, this referendum on “modernization” has successfully made substantial changes to the structure of SG — particularly as it concerns the primary purpose of disbursing funds to student organizations — by completely eliminating the college councils which previously gave funding to major-related student organizations.
While I happen to disagree with this outcome, I have more concerns with the way it was proposed in this election and the relative lack of transparency for a fairly substantial rewrite of the Student Body Constitution. This holds particularly true as, according to the legislation, “the Student Body Constitution of North Carolina State University has not been comprehensively revised or updated in living memory,” meaning that these changes are likely to stay indefinitely. Future amendments of this magnitude and durability should be far more clearly explained within the text of the ballot item itself and the surrounding documentation.
Many students may be unfamiliar with their college councils, as in my experience with the College of Sciences council, it predominantly interacts with the leadership of major-related clubs, like the Society of Physics Students or American Meteorological Society at NC State, which send representatives to obtain their yearly allowance. That funding is then spent on events for those clubs, which students can benefit from. In addition, councils provide a space for collaboration between clubs and to facilitate extra funding requests by handling them locally, without the need for a full vote of the Student Senate on every major club initiative.
It remains to be seen how the Senate aims to replace these bodies, and there may end up being minimal disruption to club activities, but this remains a major change to be proposed in the way that it was. It is unclear from documentation about this legislation, SR 115, why it was deemed necessary, and it passed from committee and the Senate as a whole almost unanimously, seeing mostly “favorable” debate within the rules committee. In fairness, the majority of the changes seem to simply codify existing legislation on the role of the Senate president and other roles within the Constitution and so warrant little disagreement. However, the college councils remain entirely functional at present, so it’s hard to see how their removal is a simple “modernization.”
This leads to the actual text of the referendum proposed in SR 115, which gave no indication that multiple government bodies would be disbanded as part of “revisions to modernize [the Constitution] and reflect the current interests of the Student Body.” While the full legislation was linked within the ballot description, expecting students to click through and read the entire document is a bit unreasonable when a one or two sentence summary would have been more than adequate to explain the alterations.
Even presuming that students were fully aware of the changes, the singular referendum forced students to choose between college councils and urgently needed and widely accepted revisions. Compare this to last year’s spring elections, where the minor change of making all pronouns in the Constitution gender-neutral was separated from a structural change replacing references to the Student Conduct Board with a new student Justice Department. Two changes of such widely different scope should be proposed separately, not bundled together and pushed through on misleading grounds.
Having obtained the required vote totals to amend the Constitution, these changes will probably stick for some time. Hopefully, the Student Senate incorporates the business of the college councils seamlessly, and students will see no alterations to the initiatives they’re accustomed to. However, in the future, the Senate should raise its standards of transparency for changes to the Constitution and ensure the student body has a reasonable opportunity to express their full opinion on any proposed amendments.
