Monday’s election of Dillon Smith as Student Association senate chairperson seemingly brought a close to the controversy that shook up the body for two weeks.
It’s been a rough start to the year for senate – between an initial invalid chair election, senators revealing to The Spectrum they felt unprepared for their jobs and a delay in clubs presenting to the body for extra money.
The senate’s main function is to grant club’s extra money from a $13,000 line. That process didn’t start until Monday night, as the senate has had to deal with the fallout from SA President Minahil Khan mishandling the chair election.
But now, with Smith in place as chair, Yaser Soliman resigned and the senate beginning to grant clubs money, the senate must continue to move forward to fulfill its obligations to clubs.
Helping clubs is what the senate is there for and why the senators should have ran for their positions. We urge the senate to put the controversy and drama behind them to service clubs – while also acknowledging and working on the mistakes in the past to ensure they don’t happen again.
Because there are obviously still issues to sort out.
Khan’s, as well as SA professional staff who advised her, misunderstanding of the constitution and bylaws are alarming. The SA constitution and bylaws are not as clear as they could be. Senate and Assembly need to work together to make more clear rules and procedures – ones that don’t leave much grey area.
But if this is done, it must be done with the entire constitution and bylaws in mind. Mark RP Sorel, SA admin director, said that when amendments were made to make the rules clearer in the past, it often ended up making everything more complicated. A new amendment would conflict an old one, leading to confusion like in the chair election.
A complete overhaul may be necessary.
The other issue is senators being unsure of their job. Some senators explicitly stated that they were unprepared.
If this is how the senate was initially trained – a half an hour of being told to read the constitution. The executive broad and professional staff went over senate’s functions with senators further at a forum last week, but without our reporting, we’re not sure these issues would have been addressed. Senate and SA as a whole must make sure senators have more training in the future. It’s only fair to the clubs.
Soliman, who lost the invalid election and resigned, is now advocating for more university oversight of SA. Soliman wants more professional oversight, so the mishap that cost him the chair position won’t happen to someone else.
We’re not necessarily saying this is the best step, but we do think the senate and Assembly should both consider this call for more oversight. It’s worth a look.
We liked what we saw out of the senators on Monday – they were productive, listened to clubs and made decisions on spending.
Now the senate must continue this while working on the issues that got it in this predicament in the first place.
It’s a tall task, but it’s what must be done under the current circumstances.
The editorial board can be reached at editorial@ubspectrum.com.
