Student Senate is considering a bill which will change the way in which students are represented by reapportioning the number of seats each college receives.
Reapportionment generally occurs every three years in order to maintain a balance in student representation according to the size of each college, with the First Year College and graduate program awarded their own set of seats.
The previous method was purely proportional, with solely the size of the college dictating the number of seats the college received in Senate.
The new method is designed so each senator represents a relatively identical population of the student body.
Previously, smaller colleges would be awarded very few senators while larger colleges were given more. The result was an individual Senator from the smaller college would be carrying a larger population.
The new method awards each Senate seat a mean number of students relative to the entire population and distributes seats to colleges based this mean and the population of the individual college. This makes the number of students represented per senator more equal.
The bill also calls for the First Year College and graduate college seats to be relegated to the general population seats.
Sen. Stephen Kouba said he saw this new approach as inventive and innovative.
“In the past it was done solely by numbers with the intent to provide proportional representation to the student population,” he said. “Now we are making Senate more accessible.”
According to Kouba, because each senator will be representing a smaller fraction of the population in certain colleges, it makes the overall representation more equal.
“I see a need to look into apportionment,” Kouba said. “Previously smaller colleges were underrepresented, but now representing the smaller colleges will be at the expense of larger ones.”
Some of the larger colleges will lose seats in order to distribute the representation more evenly among students.
Sen. Bethany Hrischuk said the bill takes representation away from the larger colleges who otherwise represent a larger part of the student body.
“I feel this would take away from the larger colleges like the College of Engineering,” she said. “I don’t want to see students from a larger college not have the proper representation.”
According to Hrischuk, the new bill would give the COE and the College of Agricultural and Live Sciences the same number of seats despite COE having 1,000 more students.
“I think the student body should have a voice in this,” she said. Sen. Madison Green, however, said she thought it gave smaller colleges much needed representation.
Previously, it became such that a single senator from a smaller college would be representing more than 1,000 students while a larger college would have more senators with each representing marginally less students.
“I don’t like feeling like I’m not in Senate,” Green, a senator for the College of Natural Resources, said. “I want support representing my college and to feel like I have some other people to lean on within Senate.”
