Campus Senate has put together a comprehensive series of amendments to its constitution. The changes are now awaiting final approval by the Senate body today, and College President Julie Kornfeld is expected to confirm the document in the coming months. The amendments were scaled down to a version that is largely technical, rather than what was originally envisioned by former Senate co-Chair Aidan Cullen ’26. But Eleanor Retish ’28, the incoming Senate co-chair, plans for a “second round” of revisions over the upcoming year.

The proposed changes, expected to be approved in the fall, deal primarily with issues of transparency. “The biggest changes in this round is [that] our meeting minutes are going to be sent out and our meetings are going to be more open to the public, which is what Student Council does,” Retish told the Collegian. 

The constitution reached its final stages three weeks ago, when it was submitted for a two-week period of community feedback. Due to the Board of Trustees meeting last week, Campus Senate could not meet to vote on the changes; instead, it allowed for a third week of community feedback and elected to convene today. Campus Senate will then send the final document to Kornfeld for approval. Under the current constitution, Kornfeld has 30 days to respond, excluding days when school is not in session, so a final decision is expected near the start of the fall semester.

Campus Senate began discussions on amending its constitution last fall. A coalition of student senators sought to restore legislative authority to the Senate, reviving the body’s former powers. However, the process of discussion and review for the amendments became a more contentious issue among senators than expected. 

Campus Senate typically meets once a month for one hour. Since the amendment process began, the meetings have been entirely devoted to discussing the minutiae of the language surrounding the proposed amendments. The body began meeting weekly in March to finalize a proposal, and it has been unable to table any other issues since it began the amendment process in the fall semester.

“We started really looking at the constitution at the beginning of the [fall] semester, and we were shut down pretty much immediately by the admin [senators],” Retish told the Collegian. Likewise, Cullen said, “I think [non-student senators] see a lot of apprehension from the fear of what it would do if students had power for making their own decisions. And because Campus Senate is overwhelmingly held by students, there are six students’ voices to two from faculty, two from staff and three from the cabinet/senior staff.”

“I am very hopeful for next year,” Cullen told the Collegian, “Eleanor is very interested in doing something practical, pragmatic, concrete in a way that this was not.” The process, despite being aimed at restoring the powers of student government, appears to have incapacitated the legislative body. Students can only wait and see how the process will continue in the second round of amendments in the fall. In an interview with the Collegian, Retish stated, “It’s been frustrating, but I think this whole process has definitely shown me how slowly bureaucracy moves, even at a tiny liberal arts school.”