Georgetown University Student Association senators and Student Activities Commission chair Sophia Behnia (COL `09) agreed to revise the SAC chair selection process to make it more accountable to students at a meeting on Wednesday morning.
The informal agreement reached between GUSA and SAC comes one week after the Senate unanimously passed a resolution emphasizing the need for accountability in SAC.
“It’s blatantly wrong that the money for SAC comes from students and is intended to go back to students, but the [student body], which is the source and the intended beneficiary of the money, has no say in how it’s spent,” GUSA Senator Matt Wagner (SFS `11) said.
The outgoing SAC chair has chosen the new chair without input from GUSA or the student body since Vice President of Student Affairs Todd Olson declared SAC independent from GUSA in a 2003 memo. However, SAC’s constitution officially states that GUSA appoints and approves the SAC chair.
“We’re talking about replacing the current system with a committee that includes student clubs and that would select the chair,” GUSA Senator Tyler Stone (COL `09) said. “At the moment, we’ve designed [a committee] that’s a combination of the GUSA president, the GUSA speaker, the SAC chair, a second SAC commissioner, and two rotating student club heads.”
The new selection process will not affect this year’s SAC chair selection, and Behnia will announce next year’s SAC chair on Friday. The change will also require the approval of Olson, who could not be reached for comment.
In an effort to gather student input on the proposed selection process, GUSA plans to host a meeting of club heads in November.
“It will be for all the major student organizations that receive SAC funding,” Stone said. “We’d discuss what they like about SAC and what they want to change, and we’d propose the committee selection idea.”
According to Behnia, the change in SAC’s chair selection process represents a “good faith agreement” between SAC and GUSA, and is part of a larger effort to make SAC more accountable.
“We definitely do agree that we should be more transparent,” Behnia said. “We want to post our minutes online and let students know that our meetings are public. We also hope to be able to be more public with our budget.”
However, Behnia emphasized that the agreement is “dependent on GUSA at least reaching out to the other funding boards.”
Georgetown’s five other funding boards-the Georgetown Program Board, the Media Advisory Board, the Performing Arts Advisory Council, the Center for Social Justice Advisory Board, and the Advisory Board for Club Sports-may all feel the new selection system’s effects. Each has a student chair, according to Senator Johnny Solis (SFS `11), none of whom is currently appointed by GUSA.
“We don’t want to make it seem like we’re just targeting one funding board, because SAC doesn’t control every student club’s funding,” GUSA speaker Reggie Greer (COL `09) said. “We’ve talked about using this as a launching pad to develop an overall system for how we choose the chairs of all the funding boards.”
