<w us to introduce a new feature, brought to you by the CSA Senate Publicity group. With a number of uncontested elections, it is no secret that the student body’s interest in the CSA has waned. Rather than accept that students might not care about what CSA does, we wish to engage you more deeply in some of the very relevant issues we debate on a weekly basis. What we would like to do is have this weekly column where we present some of the current initiatives and debates currently in Senate.
This week in Senate, we began the session with a discussion about Faculty End of Term Reviews, something that student ECC representatives have been pushing for. Though there is of course the caucus forum for faculty critiques, many students have felt that an additional way of evaluating courses and professors would be to offer end of term reviews. However, the Faculty has not been very receptive to the idea of mandatory reviews that would collect quantitative and qualitative data, some of which would be published for students to examine before taking classes, some of which would be sent to department chairs for review.
The debate about how to most effectively evaluate our educators is an interesting one, which we are seeing played out on the national level as well. Now, a gut reaction to the faculty’s resistance may be negative, that their rejection of the evaluation is simply an attempt to dodge accountability. But we’re not all sure that this is fair to our professors. How then can we adequately review and evaluate our courses and teachers? What are your thoughts?
Another issue we are currently looking at is divestment from Darfur. Essentially, is the college investing in or supporting companies that are profiting or taking part in this conflict region? Although there is overall support for divestment, the question of moving it forward has been more difficult that one might think. A group has assembled to write a resolution for next week, as well as to write a referendum question for the upcoming elections so that we can gauge where you stand. If you have any thoughts or questions on this subject, please let us know.
The point of this column is to better open a dialogue with the greater student body and create a broader conversation about some of the debates we have in CSA. It is true that some of what we do deals with the allocation of funds, which might seem uninteresting or boring, but the reality is that much of the time CSA is reviewing very relevant questions. We hope that by writing about them weekly, we can get you more involved, and thus do a better job of representing you. We will be talking about both of these issues next Monday at 7 (Sayles 252) again, so please do not hesitate to come by and share your thoughts.
-Isaac Hodes is a first-year student
-David Heifetz is a second-year student
