Administrative documentation is a dangerous combination of deeply important and fundamentally unexciting. Systems of official record-keeping are vital for any accountable institution, but they can easily fall out of use without anyone noticing. Small oversights can build up, eroding community trust over time. This procedural backsliding is an issue at Carleton.
Multiple school governance bodies have stopped publishing their meeting minutes despite their mandates explicitly requiring them to do so. Although recording boring meeting details might seem unimportant, community trust relies on this sort of routine transparency and consistent follow-through.
Campus groups that are not fulfilling their stated responsibilities need to immediately address that disconnect by publishing what they’re supposed to. If the official mandate of a group is not reasonable, the group needs to revise its official language, but basic routine transparency is reasonable and should be expected.
Carleton’s Community, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (CEDI) website states that CEDI board meetings are to be held “bi-weekly during the academic year” and that “[m]inutes are taken at each meeting.” Underneath this assurance, there is an “Archives of Meeting Minutes” section; however, the section only provides linked minutes up through the 2022–2023 school year.
Furthermore, the Carleton Responsible Investment Committee (CRIC) charter listed on their website reads, “CRIC will also maintain a website to be updated regularly. It will include the committee minutes.” However, the meeting minutes section of the website only has links through the 2023–2024 school year.
Another example is the Environmental Advisory Committee (EAC), which on its website states that “[m]inutes are published online after being approved by the committee members,” but no minutes have been posted since the 2021–2022 school year. The EAC charter also says that the committee “will prepare an annual report of its activities during each academic year, which will be made available on the EAC website,” but no report has been published since 2011.
Finally, the Carleton Student Association (CSA) bylaws require that meeting minutes be published on their website and sent out in weekly newsletters. Two CSA newsletters have been sent out this school year, and both have included a large yellow button labeled “Read last week’s minutes.” However, this button links to a list of CSA meeting minutes from the 2024–2025 school year. There are no published CSA meeting minutes from this year. Additionally, several meetings from last year are listed without any linked meeting minutes.
This issue is more understandable for CSA. There appears to be a flaw in the annual structure of CSA, causing several meetings to take place before a freshman is chosen to serve as secretary. Presumably, no one else wants to take on the responsibilities of secretary in this interim period, so these meetings aren’t recorded. CSA also seems to struggle with regular procedural issues caused by a constantly shifting membership made up of busy young adults. Still, CSA should be accountable to its constitution. After all, the highest-ranking members of the CSA are now paid a salary for their work. I don’t think note-taking is too high a hurdle to clear.
Instances of groups not delivering on their stated responsibilities are the most pressing concerns, but even without a stated responsibility to keep regular records, the degradation of accountability procedures is worth discussing. The Safety Committee stopped publishing minutes in 2023, the Technology Planning & Priorities Committee stopped in 2017 and the Library and Information Technology Committee stopped in 2014. These three committees are not neglecting any written directive, but it is worth asking why these groups decided to record and publish meeting minutes in the first place and what we have lost now that they do not.
The specific issues listed in this article bring up a larger question about transparency from decision-makers and the vigilance of community members. An accountable school community requires follow-through from decision-makers, but student attention is also important.
When CSA sent an email to the whole student body with a button that linked to last year’s meeting minutes, did people actually press that button? I doubt many people did, considering they made the same mistake a week later. The College Council, the Budget Committee and the Education and Curriculum Committee all publish detailed meeting minutes. The Board of Trustees publishes summaries of its meetings. Have you ever looked through any of these documents? I hadn’t before starting this article. When I did read through a few pages of meeting minutes, I saw several recent decisions that would directly impact my time at Carleton. It’s hard to find time to pay attention, but I’m going to try. Every time someone clicks through meeting minutes or reads a report, they contribute to a much larger structure of accountability and community participation. Everyone can and should be a small part of that process.
The greater responsibility lies within the members of these committees, councils, boards and associations. There are undoubtedly accountability concerns and procedural degradation that I did not find while writing this article. There are pages and reports that students can’t access. There are committees impacting campus policy that have never published meeting records. Because the narrow view I do have shows spotty transparency and ignored responsibilities, I have less faith in the rest of the system. No one can check over everything, but trust is built on a pattern of transparency and accountability from the ground up. I don’t see that pattern at Carleton. That needs to change.