The ASUW Senate held its first meeting of 2023 on Jan. 17. Despite numerous resignations and various vacant positions in the legislative and executive branch, the body remains optimistic about the upcoming semester, and already passed 2 bills unanimously.
ASUW took time in their first meeting of the year to welcome back all senators and express their commitment to making inevitable transitions of power as smooth as possible, especially in the wake of multiple and recent resignations from the previous year.
Assistant Director Hanson called for the creation of a working document of expectations moving forward for each new administration, to address recurrent problems he described coming from structural and training issues. Hanson asked senators to consider what their vision of ASUW in Five Years might be.
Senate bills #2845 Authorizing Expenditures from the ASUW Student Services Endowment for the Creation of an Arabic & Middle East Studies Center and #2846 A Restructuring of the First-Year Senate Working Documents were put to vote and passed with unanimous support.
Bill #2845 approves additional funding from the Facilities and Endowments fund for a proposed Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies Center to be placed in the Arts & Sciences Building. Construction on the cultural education facility has yet to begin.
Bill #2846 solidified the implementation of a completely restructured First Year Senate working document, now documents. The first year senate will now be governed by a constitution and separate bylaws which may be amended without the rewriting of their entire constitution.
The passage of this bill was applauded in the room with many senators expressing their support and congratulations to the First Year Senate for this accomplishment.
One concern was raised during the meeting by International Student Service’s Director of Legislative Affairs Audrey Earnest. She brought awareness to a continued, unresolved barriers for international students to serve on the senate body.
“ASUW’s current payment policy makes it virtually impossible for international graduate students, which are a large population of our international students, to serve on ASUW.” Earnest said when addressing the senate.
“I have full confidence that ASUW can [solve the issue]. Just to highlight how serious of an issue this is, ASUW’s current policy could be legally classified as discrimination based on national origin. We need to fix this.”
Federal Law currently prohibits those holding student visas to work more than 20 hours, a limitation which makes serving on ASUW while in paid graduate research positions incompatible.
After adjournment, Audrey Earnest, the only American citizen currently serving on ISS leadership, spoke to the importance of the issue.
“I think all students deserve to have their voices heard. And that includes international students.,” she said. “They come from different cultural backgrounds and often have different experiences and perspectives from a majority of domestic students.”
“Having those people be able to share their voices enables that those issues [specific to the international community] are also addressed and that ASUW is able to serve all the students, not just the American ones.”
No further updates were given to special projects. The Senate moves forward, tasked with committee assignments and filling their vacant seats from an 8 person applicant pool.
