SG Update 02/08

Academic Calendars

Associate Vice President and Registrar Joe Loffredo presented the newly made 2024–2025 academic calendar to Student Government (SG). According to administrative policy that guides the development, maintenance and publication of academic calendars, calendars must be planned six years ahead.

Loffredo reviewed the six upcoming academic calendars to reveal an issue: the first day of classes continuously moves earlier by one or two days. If the problem were to go unsolved, classes would eventually move from the fourth Monday of August to the third Monday, and graduation would move up to April instead of May.

As a means to fix this issue, Loffredo proposed doing a “reset” every six years. This “reset,” he argued, should be applied to the 2023–2024 academic calendar because classes will start a week early that year. SG approved the 2024–2025 calendar, along with the 2023–2024 calendar reset.

SG Election Bylaws

SG President and fourth year Environmental Science major Bobby Moakley presented a change to the bylaws addressing SG election candidates.

In previous years, if a student wanted to run for SG candidacy, they had to pick up a packet from the SG office and get signatures from their constituents in person. Now, candidates will be given a unique CampusGroups code that constituents can use to add their signatures and show their approval of a candidate. Moakley stated that this prevents candidates from walking around campus with personal student information. This also makes it easier for student signatures to be verified by SG.

Another change to the bylaws states that candidates must get student signatures face-to-face. They are not allowed to use any social media or flyers to collect signatures from constituents. Rather, they are expected to meet with students in person and have students sign in with CampusGroups to add signatures.

Charges

A response was given to the PawPrints petition asking to “remove the ableist/audist mural from GCCIS.” The quote has been removed in an attempt to make the space more inclusive.

The petition asking to “mandate timely use of MyCourses by professors” now has an investigation underway. SG plans to gather student and faculty feedback, review how our faculty is trained to use MyCourses, investigate if Blackboard is a better option and discuss possible solutions with Academic Senate. In accordance with the first step to address this issue, a survey is now available to be answered by students. Students are also invited to the Academic Senate meetings to discuss their personal experiences with MyCourses.

Another petition has asked that exams past 9 p.m. be prohibited. SG is currently in the process of trying to address this. They will be examining if this is a common issue, then discuss with the Provost’s office about possible solutions. If the policy allowing late exams cannot be changed, SG will still support students through the issue.

Cleverly named “Gracie’s seven sins,” this petition has bemoaned the lackluster services and disappointing eating experiences at our largest dining hall. SG is planning to investigate the criticisms made in the petition by having discussions with students and Dining Services.

As RIT pushes to increase the usage of multi-factor authentication (MFA), students have shared their very polarized thoughts. A petition has asked for MFA to be added to more services at the same time that another petition has asked to see the riddance of MFA everywhere. In response to this, SG has stated that ITS is rolling out MFA for eservices, Pyramid and StarRes websites. SG also wants to clarify that MFA is an important security element for the university. However, there are a few ways to make MFA easier, including using the “remember for 24 hours” feature. RIT has also commented on MFA in a Reporter article, here.

Announcements

TEDxRIT is offering a workshop on Feb. 23, 2019 that will work in partnership with SOIS Senator Anika Aftab, a fourth year SOIS student with concentrations in Organizational Strategy and Healthcare Administration. The theme will be “how to create your own opportunities.”

The annual Valentine’s Day GCCIS event will be hosted by GCCIS Senator and fifth year Software Engineering major Melissa Laskowski. There will be cupcakes and mini-cupcakes.

Moakley is currently working on creating bylaws or a process to prevent joke petitions and offensive material from being posted onto PawPrints while still maintaining free speech. New features will soon be added to ensure that PawPrints is used professionally and ethically.