GSSC undergoes constitutional makeover

The General Studies Student Council is starting the year with a serious streamlining.

The council has a newly revised constitution, new bylaws, and a new set of parliamentary procedures to govern its meetings—changes that members say have been a year in the making.

GSSC’s constitution was shortened from 24 to eight pages, after a committee spent last year reviewing the document and stripping it down to a few essential principles.

Benjamin Paladino, GS and the council’s vice president for policy, said that a fresh start was necessary since ten years of constant changes had rendered the previous constitution ineffective.

“Each year, they had changed the constitution to deal with the situations that arose that particular year and we had this very confusing document,” he said. “It was just a bunch of individual things all mashed up.”

The new constitution is founded on eight core principles that are meant to be unchangeable, including procedures for elections, meetings, and the executive board. The constitution now also only defines eight officer positions—down from 26—with the rest of the positions outlined in the bylaws, which is a working document that is more easily changed.

Paladino said that flexibility will be helpful. This school year, for example, there is a large number of veteran-students, and he said that the bylaws would enable the council to define a veteran-students representative.

But the changes are more reorganization of the council’s rules and decision-making process than a revamping of them, he stressed.

“We didn’t take out anything that would change the way we operate, we just defined the things that are fundamental and unchanging in one document and the things that are fluid and dependent on the situation of that year and put that in another document, and that’s the bylaws,” he said.

At GSSC’s first meeting of the school year, Paladino also announced that GSSC would adopt the time-honored set of parliamentary procedures known as Robert’s Rules of Order.

“It’s a very open form of governance because the entire book, the entire reference, is dedicated to being fair and equal,” Paladino said. “So we basically adopted it to be more effective, to ensure impartiality in all of our deliberations, and to tie up any loopholes that used to exist in our rules.”

The Rules of Order are meant to spur faster and more efficient debate and decision-making, he said.

“Our council meetings go smoother, our debate will go smoother, and we’ll be able to get out of meetings at just the right time because sometimes they could go over,” said Jennifer Wisdom, GS and the council’s social chair. Wisdom added that this is part of a larger effort to “streamline our presence, making it completely solid across the board.”

Michael Oakley, GS and chief finance representative, said that the Rules of Order helped shorten meetings at his community college in Philadelphia from two hours to roughly 45 minutes—though there was a learning curve.

“Just knowing, ‘Well, if I close discussion then do I open to vote or close the meeting or take a break,’ which supersedes the other,” he said. “Once you get that down, it’s fairly intuitive after that.”
Students agreed that more efficiency was key for a successful student council.

“If they can make decisions faster, then the student body can get the benefits sooner,” Andrew Bundziak, GS, said.

madina.toure@columbiaspectator.com