About 35 percent of undergraduate students chose "Don't Know/No Answer" when asked in a recent Herald poll if they approved of the Undergraduate Council of Students. This percentage of null responses was markedly higher than in any other question on the poll.
"Clearly there's room for improvement," said Michael Thompson '07, chair of the UCS Communications Committee.
"The fact that many don't have an opinion about UCS is unfavorable to (UCS) - (students) don't know or care enough about UCS to have an opinion," former polling consultant Rachel Braun P'06 wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. Braun, who currently teaches statistics at the Edmund Burke School in Washington, D.C., helped develop The Herald poll.
53.5 percent of respondents said they approve of the job UCS has done this year. But the poll's 4.6 percent margin of error means that it is possible less than half of undergraduates at Brown are happy with their representative governing body.
"It's not exactly resounding support for UCS," Braun wrote, though she pointed out that the 53.5 percent of students expressing approval of UCS is much larger than the 12 percent of respondents who disapproved of the job UCS has done this year.
"Students who do have an opinion about UCS seem to be more in favor of it than not," Braun wrote.
Thompson was reluctant to draw negative conclusions about the poll results.
"Ideally we'd like those people to have a positive view of UCS, but at the same time I think some people might feel like we're doing our job and we're there. Our job is to advocate, they're pretty happy with us," he said.
Thompson became chair of the UCS Communications Committee at the beginning of the spring semester, replacing Tristan Freeman '07. Under Freeman - who now chairs the council's Committee for Academic and Administrative Affairs - the Communications Committee expanded to 12 members.
Last fall, committee members completed their first dorm rounds in an attempt to communicate with as many students as possible, scheduled office hours at high-traffic locations on campus such as the Rockefeller Library and the Sharpe Refectory and began sponsoring regular WebCT polls in an attempt to tap into the various issues concerning students across campus.
"Communication strategy is far more effective when we do things on students' own terms," Freeman said. "UCS is most successful when it doesn't force people to change their habits - i.e., coming to a meeting. The most important thing in student government at a school as small as Brown is to go out there and literally meet every undergraduate at Brown," he said.
Freeman said that a major difference in strategies between the UCS of years past and today's UCS is that students are now involved with UCS in numerous ways, whereas in the past UCS acted more as a body that made decisions for students.
But when asked how UCS obtained student input before its recent reshuffling, Freeman was unsure.
"I'm not really sure, to tell you the truth," he said. "It was more informal, things people had heard from friends."
Communication mechanisms like WebCT polling were designed to give each and every undergraduate the opportunity to voice an opinion on the major things that UCS does, according to Freeman.
"It is grassroots to a certain extent ... a relatively big department for the committee," he said.
The extent to which UCS WebCT polls accurately represent the opinions of the undergraduate student body is unclear, since the WebCT polls are conducted online, entirely optional and, therefore, completed by a self-selecting pool of students.
In a fall 2005 UCS WebCT poll, almost two-thirds of the over 2,000 respondents said they were at least fairly satisfied with UCS performance so far that year, a remarkably high approval rating.
"Perhaps it's not as accurate a pool as possible, but it's a step in the right direction," Thompson said. "Having WebCT polls is better than having no polls. You can take it at face value."
"We understand that it doesn't necessarily speak for all undergraduate students," Freeman said.
A new WebCT poll will be introduced at the end of the month, and dorm rounds for this semester are scheduled to begin Feb. 23. The Communications Committee also plans to run a preliminary forum in March to educate students about the College Curriculum Council's own larger, University-wide forum on adding pluses and minuses to the grading system.
As far as new communication efforts are concerned, Thompson said that the committee is thinking of promoting services on campus that people don't know about. For example, he said, it is a little-known fact on campus that students can rent movies from the Sciences Library.
"Our job is one of the most essential in UCS: we have to make sure that UCS represents the student body effectively," Thompson said. "We have to really engage effectively with students to do our jobs well."
