Committee surveys student input

The ASSU Nominations Commission (NomCom) recently released the results of a survey of 81 student members of University committees to gauge their contributions and learn about committee issues during winter quarter.

The survey was an attempt to address prior complaints of poor communication and to set a precedent for future years and is the first of its kind to gather this level of data, according to NomCom Chair Jonathan Bakke, a graduate student in chemical engineering. The plans for the survey had been in place since last spring.

NomCom worked out the logistics early fall quarter and sent surveys out in December and February. Bakke then sent the results to the Undergraduate Senate and the Graduate Student Council (GSC), a response to past complaints of inadequate transparency.

“They specifically asked for reports this year and last year, so we wanted to put something together that they could look at,” Bakke said. “For important issues, they can specifically ask to bring in those committee members.”

The GSC and the Vaden Advisory Board have already brought in committee members because of recent controversies surrounding insurance, according to Bakke.

“Generally, every committee operates very differently,” he said. “A lot of them are run individually. They’re in different departments, there are different committee chairs and there are different people in the committee who are all talking about different issues.”

Much of the committees’ activities depend on year-to-year issues. The survey results indicated that the Committee on Graduate Housing dealt with issues pertaining to Munger’s opening; the Alcohol Advisory Committee discussed new alcohol policies and renewal of the AlcoholEDU program.

Bakke explained that the administration does not provide oversight in monitoring committees.

“NomCom is pretty much the only thing that keeps track of University committees,” Bakke said. “There are no written definitions about how the committees run, and most of them run on a need-to basis.”

“It’s hard to predict from year to year how active a committee is going to be,” Bakke said, though he emphasized that many committees were quite consistent.

Danny Crichton ’11 is a member of the Registrar’s Student Advisory Board, which he said has been highly active during the past two quarters. Crichton is a columnist for The Daily.

“The Registrar’s Student Advisory Board has met monthly to find new solutions to student problems, among them the need to expand the number of features of the iPhone application and re-examination of end-of-quarter course evaluations,” Crichton said. “All of these initiatives will be seen by students over the course of the next year.”

Crichton was pleased with the implementation of the survey this year.

“I thought the survey was good. It provided a lot of great feedback to the Nominations Commission,” Crichton said.

Students on other committees, however, indicated frustration with the year so far. An anonymous Dining Committee member responding to the survey said the committee had yet to meet and that, after one student member left campus, Eric Montell, the executive director of Stanford Dining, made the remaining committee members “dining ambassadors” instead.

Montell said the committee had too difficult a time finding a time to meet, given the students’ class schedules, and believes their time is better spent as ambassadors. He described that program as “part of our strategic initiative to actively engage students in the dining community building experience.”

Carole Pertofksy, director of Vaden Health Promotion Services, heads the Sexual Violence Advisory Board (SVAB).

“Student involvement is crucial to the SVAB mission,” Pertofsky said. “We have six NomCom members, a PHE and grad students.”

Bakke predicted the results of the survey would be most applicable to future years’ commissions in relaying an accurate portrayal of meeting frequency and detailed operations to future applicants.

“We didn’t have any information when we were interviewing last spring quarter about what committees had talked about the previous year,” Bakke said. “We wanted to create some sort of legacy that future NomComs could use.”

Elizabeth Titus contributed to this report