The Undergraduate Council of Students will fill four student positions in the coming weeks for the newly created Brown University Community Council, which will begin meeting in March. The group is meant to serve as a University-wide forum for discussing the social and academic climate on campus and making policy recommendations to the administration.
The council will be chaired by President Ruth Simmons and will be comprised of members of the president's Cabinet, tenured and non-tenured faculty, undergraduate students, graduate students, medical students, staff and alums of the University.
Simmons circulated a draft of the council's charge to the leaders of the governance organizations of these groups last spring to gauge their interest. "I would say that she was and is the driving force behind it," said Vice President and Secretary of the University Russell Carey '91. "She felt (a council of this sort) was missing from the governance structure of the University - as she spent more time at the University, she felt there was a need for (one)."
Responses from the various constituencies on campus were positive, and in October, Simmons made a slightly revised version of the council's charge available to the public. In a letter addressed to the entire Brown community and delivered through Morning Mail, Simmons wrote that the council would serve as a further alignment of the University's governance structures with its mission. "A governance body with a University-wide perspective is especially important in times of difficulty on the campus to provide a means through which we can all come together ... to raise and discuss issues of mutual and institutional concern," she wrote.
Issues of mutual and institutional concern vary widely - hence the necessity of a university-wide council to discuss them - but the topics covered by Simmons in her Second Semester Address Tuesday night will probably be some of the first tackled by the council, including the state of intellectual diversity on campus and tolerance and support for different kinds of views, Carey said.
The council's six annual meetings will be open to the public, and members of the Brown community will have opportunities to have items placed on the agenda, according to the charge. "I think in a lot of ways it'll be a work in progress as it unfolds," Carey said.
Although after this year undergraduate students will serve staggered terms of two years, written applications are being accepted through Monday for both one- and two-year terms. Members of the UCS Executive Board will conduct interviews with the students whose applications they think are strongest during the week of Feb. 14, and the appointed students will be announced by Feb. 23. "We've been receiving applications since Sunday - a week early, that was pretty good," said UCS Appointments Chair Ben Creo '07, who said he expects at least thirty students to apply. Unlike other committees to which UCS is responsible for appointing students, the Community Council will be comprised of four strictly non-UCS members, in addition to UCS President Joel Payne '05, whose position on the council is a provision of the charge. "Since it is going to be such a prominent committee and given how many students expressed interest (in the council) ... it's a little different," Creo said.
Creo hypothesized that future issues addressed by the council might include abolishing the University's SAT requirement for applicants, arming University police or the conduct of the University Steering Committee for Slavery and Justice. "It's a phenomenal opportunity for students," he said. "You're getting to know University administrators. Ruth Simmons is going to know you by name, and inherently respect your opinion."
