Student Council met Sunday night to discuss summer housing, this semester’s last Business and Finance Committee (BFC) supplemental hearing and a new antiracism bylaw.
Vice President for Student Life Bijan Khaghani ’23 announced the end of a successful campaign season for this week’s Student Council elections. Voting closes at 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, April 12, and Khaghani said that winners will be announced on Sunday.
Khaghani also shared that he has been speaking to a number of student leaders on campus about the frustrations they have experienced trying to organize and host campus events. This week he plans to meet with student leaders to better understand their concerns and later in the semester hopes to either host a town hall or compile a resource guide to help students run successful events. “Ultimately the point of all of this is to help keep Kenyon traditions alive and to help give students who want to create events on campus a road map of what is truly possible,” he wrote in an email to the Collegian.
Vice President for Business and Finance Melissa Nixon ’23 shared the BFC’s suggested allocations from the last supplemental hearing of the semester. The Students of Caribbean Ancestry club requested $1,196 for catering for a Wah Gwan Wednesday event, which the council granted in full. Delta Tau Delta requested $500 for a water activities day it plans to host sometime in the near future that would include water balloons and water slides, and was granted $200.
The Council also approved a new antiracism bylaw after conducting a second reading of the draft. The Student Council currently designates 10% of its semesterly and supplemental allocations to programs that promote anti-racist initiatives, and the new bylaw will eliminate this fixed percentage. Requests for anti-racist initiatives will be heard by the BFC and will also be separately evaluated by the Committee for Diversity and Inclusion. The bylaw also provides more specific descriptions of what counts as an anti-racist initiative.
Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion Khue Tran ’25 shared updates about summer housing. She noted that several students who plan to stay on campus have reached out to the committee with concerns about housing accommodations. Some students were concerned about the absence of kitchen utilities in the Meadow Lane residences (Mods). The Committee for Diversity and Inclusion reached out to the Office of Residential Life to suggest adding portable stoves to the Mods. The office is currently looking into this option.