ASG Wants a Say in Presidential Search
Senate talks Search Committee, storing senate recordings
Sasha Todd
The Santa Clara
October 25, 2018
Associated Student Government (ASG) President Sam Perez updated students on the search for a new president at the week five ASG meeting.
University President, Michael Engh, S.J., announced last spring that he would be retiring at the end of this academic year.
Perez explained how ASG needed to request a meeting with the Presidential Search Committee since, originally, Santa Clara students weren’t going to have a say in the selection process.
Perez shared her impressions of a meeting between students and members of the Board of Trustees that took place on Oct. 19 regarding the Presidential Search Committee.
Members of ASG asked for the meeting because they wanted student representation on the Presidential Search Committee since there is currently none.
“I didn’t think it went really well,” Perez said about the meeting during senate. “This does serve as an example of why I don’t feel comfortable with these individuals serving as my representatives and my voice in the selection process for the new university president.”
The Presidential Search Committee consists of 16 professionals, most of them employed by the school. Their jobs range from Board of Trustees, associate professors at Santa Clara, to the president of Fordham University.
The committee consists of mainly white males with six women and one person of color.
In addition to the updates on the Presidential Search Committee, Jack Larkin, ASG chief justice, announced a brief change to the bylaws regarding where senate meeting recordings would be stored online in the future.
He explained there isn’t enough space to store the recordings on the Google Drive and that a separate website would be created as a place to store the most recent ASG meeting recordings.
Recordings of older ASG meetings, dating as far back as Spring 2017, would be placed on a Santa Clara-hosted website and would be available to anyone who went to the ASG section of the Santa Clara website.
Also at Thursday’s meeting was the induction of junior Shivani Gohil, who applied for a conduct position on ASG.
When asked what kind of actions she would take if given the opportunity to serve on ASG, Gohil said she would want to make the campus a more inclusive space for first-years.
“I really want to get first-years more involved with each other and for firstyears to make friends,” Gohil said. “[Host] Freshmen Fridays once a month—to have like-minded people come together.”
Gohil was approved by the committee and sworn in for the conduct position.
Additionally, first-years Rob Zintl and Maya Kuchan presented their ideas to the senate and were subsequently approved and sworn into judicial positions.
These positions are responsible for handling the bylaws, and making sure business is conducted according to ASG rules.
Julia Green, ASG’s public relations vice president, also noted at last Thursday’s meeting that the PR committee was working on assisting the Judicial branch with their duties.
The next student govern meeting will be held on Thursday, Oct. 25 at 7 p.m. in the Williman Room in Benson Memorial Center.
Contact Sasha Todd at artodd@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4852.