Last Thursday, the Student Senate released an agenda that contained a blacked-out portion, and when they reached discussion on that point, they closed the meeting. While this is the first time that the Senate has closed its meeting this year, closed meetings and secrecy have been characteristic of student government at RPI for years, and it needs to stop.
The senate is the student body’s chief legislative assembly, and students deserve to know as much as possible about how their representatives are acting on their behalf. Most of our elected representatives ran on a platform of openness, and need to uphold this pledge.
In the past, meetings of both the Executive Board and the senate have closed for frivolous reasons. Most trivial among these, and something that has been heard this year, is that people should not hear their representatives’ “unfinished thoughts.” As this line of thinking goes, meetings should not be monitored because those being recorded might be quoted in the heat of debate or say something that they should not, and those watching would get the wrong impression.
Proponents of this view feel that they should not have to be responsible for what they say or do, and this is wrong. Student government should try as hard as they can to keep their constituents updated.
Minutes should be posted in a timely fashion to websites; currently the Student Senate only has one set of minutes from this year available. Frequent updates should be made to all government web pages to keep all constituents updated of the various bodies’ progress on promises; the Class of 2006 web page, for instance, has not been updated in more than a year. Above all, agendas and minutes should not be released with large blacked-out sections.
Openness is not that difficult a task to maintain, but it is important to ensure that students care more about their government. With so many projects in the works right now in an effort to help students think better of their government, the only way to ensure that prevailing views change is to make sure students know what is going on.
