Student Judiciary considers new categories for Student Council representation

The Student Judiciary considered recognizing new academic groups when reapportioning student council seats in a Monday meeting.

While the judiciary cannot change the number of seats, they can change the categories given representation. During this apportionment process, Student Council Rep. Brooke Evans and others have suggested a variety of new representative seats including transfer, veteran, McBurney, first-generation and Greek-life.

Associated Students of Madison bylaws provides 33 student council seats that are divided into 11 categories including university colleges, graduate students, freshmen, law, medical and special students.

During debate on what categories to add, justices questioned how students would be counted towards category totals if they fit into more than one category. Adding a non-academic seat identities like veterans would mean a veteran student would be counted towards totals of this identity and not towards totals of their academic college.

Justices questioned if a student’s identity as a veteran, greek-life member or other would trump their identity as a student of the College of Engineering or College of Letters and Science. Additionally, they questioned how to obtain data on identities when data is not collected by the office of the Registrar.

Ultimately, the justices decided to further consider changing the freshmen seats to “First-year representatives” and include first-year transfer students in the fall elections. They will also consider combining all graduate and professional programs into one slate of candidates, representation for short-course students and adding a seat for McBurney students.

Once the judiciary has received data from the Office of the Registrar, it will move to make a final decision on what categories of Student Council members will represent.