By Ken Fasciano
The smell of roasted chicken hung heavily in the air as the RSU Board of Directors met last Thursday.
Among the issues discussed was a proposal by Course Union Director Dana Shaw to double the Board of Directors in size, claiming it is ineffective at its current number.
“The current Board suffers from a lack of hands,” Shaw wrote in her proposal. “This leaves very few people to do the actual work of the board.”
Shaw’s proposal would see all 33 course unions presidents added to the Board of Directors. The current board positions of Faculty Director and Student Faculty Director would be dropped from the Board, raising the number of members from 24 to 26. Shaw believes the addition of course union presidents will do more than just increase the number of board members.
“It’s not the bodies themselves, it’s who they are. As elected representatives of their faculties and their programs, these are supposedly people who have a certain amount of integrity, responsibility, and who want to do some good for the school,” she said. “Right now we have a problem of not enough people to do all the work, too many people leading, not enough people to do the things that need to be done,” Shaw said.
“With more people, you can spread the work around a little bit more because then you don’t feel like ‘well, if I don’t volunteer, there is no one else.’ Right now, there are very few people left to volunteer once all the commissionerships are done,” Shaw said.
RSU President-elect Paul Cheevers agrees that the Board could stand some improvement, but doesn’t feel that increasing the number of members is the answer.
“It would throw everything off. Number one, we wouldn’t always reach quorum,” Cheevers said. “We’d have too many people here. We’d have budget concerns because we’d have to have more food at the meetings,” he said referring to the complimentary dinners board members wolf down. “A lot of the presidents wouldn’t even show up. It would get really messy.”
Increasing the size of the board would create more problems than it would solve and make the entire process of decision-making more cumbersome, according to Cheevers.
“The current system we have isn’t as effective as it could be. I think what the intent of the motion is to get those people more involved and to get better representation. But I don’t think that bringing the president of each student union here is the right way to do it, and I think most people on the board recognize that.”
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