Students could finally get a seat among the board of trustees this fall, effectively ending a years-long push to get a student voice on the university’s governing body.
The University Student Senate, which made representation their primary initiative this year, agreed on terms of their trustees seat during their April 10 meeting and sent it to the board for final approval.
If passed by the executive board the week of April 20 and then the full board in May, the agreement would allow two student representatives — an undergraduate and a graduate — to gain trusteeship and sit in on their meetings starting fall 2015.
USS co-chair Nico Galvan has been communicating about this issue with the board since last April and brought in other senators for the final stretch this semester for finalizing the terms.
“The development and refinement of this proposal has been remarkable,” he said. “We’ve been chipping down at it for a year on behalf of all of the students.”
If passed, the student trustees would be chosen as follows: “All students within good academic standing will be eligible to be members of the student senate and the senate will have an internal election to endorse two student trustee candidates, ” Galvan said.
The candidates would then have to receive final approval from the executive committee and the full board of trustees. The student trustees who would each serve two-year terms, according to USS co-chair Bryce Geyer.
“The USS will do it’s due diligence to have the trustees ready as soon as they can to ensure that we will have trusteeship as soon as possible,” Galvan said. “We will do our part.”
Galvan also mentioned that the USS looked at student trustee models at Cooper Union, Teacher’s College and Cornell to inform their decisions.
During the April 10 USS meeting, the senate looked over and voted on the final agreement between them and the trustees, but some butted heads about a clause saying trustees could exclude student representatives from certain meetings.
“Except in instances determined by the chair, the student trustee will be recused in executive sessions,” the agreement read.
But some senators worried the phrasing was too vague.
“They were saying, ‘even President Van Zandt is excluded from some meetings’ but he is a university employee and [students] are practically funding the university,” Lang senator Patrick Gallen said.
Legislators ultimately approved the agreement so they could push the process forward. Had the agreement not passed Senate approval the Board would not have been able to vote on whether to pass the agreement next week, further delaying the process.
Student representation on the Board has been an issue at the forefront of many New Schoolers minds since 2008 and has been the subject of many Free Press editorials.
Chris Crews, NSSR student and former USS member said that right before the protests against then-President Bob Kerrey in 2008, the senate first tried to make strides in gaining representation on the board of trustees but that after senators went “off-script” in a meeting with the trustees they were not invited back.
After the Kerrey protests, the president set up a committee to consider both investment responsibility and trusteeship. While students gained a committee for ensuring the school invested its endowment properly, the issue of student trusteeship effectively died, according to Crews.
It’s uncertain at this point what the student trustees could accomplish in their new roles.
Crews said they could either become “a powerful force for trying to open up the board and its dealings to the larger New School community” or end up serving as “token members with no real power or influence”.
“Ultimately, the real test of the new students on the board will be whether or not they help share information and hold the trustees more accountable to the larger New School community moving forward,” Crews said.
Tamar is a poet, writer, New York-lover and dweller. She studies jounalism+design at The New School.
