First-year representatives serving the Associated Students of Madison will end their terms early after the body voted to cut their terms short Tuesday night.
Instead of holding office for a full academic year — as first-year representatives usually do — the four individuals will be representing UW-Madison students for only six months.
This comes after Student Judiciary reapportioned the Student Council seats, a process that happens every four years. This is based off of the number of students in each school or college, which can fluctuate over the years. The final freshmen election was held earlier this fall.
Student Council’s ruling reapportions the four first-year seats as Business, Special, Graduate and Engineering. Because the change goes into effect with the spring election, the lowest vote-getters in Business, Special, Graduate and Engineering would’ve had the start of their term pushed back until Nov. 1, 2018 which would prevent the four new representatives from running for leadership positions.
“We are only voting to prevent further damage for the individuals elected this spring to serve with the rest of their body and I think that although some individuals will be shorted, it’s the lesser of two shortings,” Rules Committee Chair Dylan Resch said.
With the exception of appointment through Nominations Board to fill vacancies, freshmen can’t serve on the body. However, they can run in the spring of their freshman year in order to be a part of the next session as sophomores.
“If you guys are really concerned about this, I encourage you to run for your respective schools most definitely because you still have the opportunity to still be involved in Council even if your term as a freshman representative is shortened,” Nominations Board Chair Evan Pelke said.
But Mianzhi Huang, a first-year representative, told The Daily Cardinal ahead of the vote that the legislation took her a bit by surprise. While she said that freshmen students might not know enough yet about the campus to make informed decisions, she said she also sees benefit for having designated positions for freshmen on Council.
“These four seats are a treasure for freshmen because when you coming in [to the university], you might be exposed to all kinds of information and organizations, but ASM is a place where you could actually do a huge impact to change policies, to change legislation, to have a right to speak on this campus. Freshmen can really see the changes coming in from high school to university and really know what they need throughout this transition process,” Huang said. “Cutting off this position would reduce almost a quarter of the voice on this campus.”
