Student Life Committee End of Year Report 2007-2008
This is a copy of the Student Life Committee's End of Year Report for 2007-2008. It was prepared by Tim Kasser and approved by the full committee.
The Report[edit]
The Student Life Committee (SLC) met every week during this academic year, typically in the presence of at least two members of the student press and several non-member students.
A portent of the contentiousness that would characterize our year came in the first issue that we discussed: Student anger and angst over the President's proposal to change the status of some members of Campus Safety to be "sworn officers." We worked with Senate leadership to craft a compromise that we hoped would maximize safety on campus while also addressing student concerns.
Next we were charged by the Executive committee to investigate the expansion of Knox's Greek system in response to questions raised by some faculty. We struggled for some time to understand the exact nature of our charge, seeking counsel from Executive Committee and asking for further input from the faculty. Ultimately, we compiled a report presenting objective data that tracked the historical size of Greek life at Knox, compared it to peer schools, examined the racial and socio-economic composition of Knox's sororities and fraternities, and reviewed their academic and disciplinary behavior. After submitting our report to the faculty, we spent time discussing two particular features of the faculty's response to our report: a) that some believed we had not investigated the topics they wanted us to; and b) that we had not included enough anecdotal information.
We met a few times with the young women and men from two sorority groups and one fraternity group who hoped to affiliate with national organizations. We received updates on their progress and answered questions that they had about Knox's stated process for becoming national sororities or fraternities. Ultimately, we informed the groups that their candidacy for affiliating with a national organization would be delayed because of a faculty vote that suspended expansion of the Greek system until at least the fall of 2008.
We also discussed issues regarding TKS, the student newspaper. First, we met with the Editor and the advisor of TKS to understand how an article widely and rightly perceived as racist could have been published; we were told that the editorial process had broken down and that no editor had actually read and approved the article before it was published. We later met with the Board of Publications (a subcommittee of SLC) to hear their actions regarding this article; we also asked the Board to consider whether a pattern of problems regarding editorial decisions at TKS was in evidence, given that the previous year the newspaper had published a religiously offensive article in their Flunk Day issue. Later in the term, we had what we believed was an "off the record" conversation with the editor of TKS about whether the presence of the press at SLC meetings was interfering with the functioning of the committee, given that TKS had published a column implying (incorrectly) that SLC would soon be proposing to ban anonymous posters on campus; this column resulted in forty-some students attending our next meeting. The editor of TKS later published an editorial reporting about our "off the record" conversation, a matter which we again discussed. Other issues with TKS that we discussed included comments from some implying that SLC had threatened to cut TKS's funding if TKS published articles critical of SLC. In fact, we are unaware of any time this year that SLC made such threats or discussed funding of TKS prior to these accusations.
We also had some discussions regarding FASCOM's proposal to change the composition of SLC and talked among ourselves about whether we agreed with this proposal, given that FASCOM had not consulted us about it.
Finally, we discussed what we came to call "mutually-respectful discourse" on campus, given a year of nasty anonymous posters, less than collegial statements made at some faculty meetings and in some e-mails, the protests against John Ashcroft and the later alleged harassment of Republican students, and our own feelings that individual members of SLC, as well as the committee as a whole, had not been treated in optimally respectful ways throughout the year.
All in all, it was a trying year and we now breathe a collective sigh of relief that it is over.
Prepared by Tim Kasser, Psychology, and approved by the Student Life Committee on 5/13/08
