Last school year, SG worked to bring Plan-B to the SCC at a discounted rate. Below is a letter I got this morning from Celia Bergman about changes in how Plan-B is available on campus. It will still be available at a discounted rate of $20, but will no longer be available at the SCC, but it will be at the DCAM pharmacy in the Hospital complex.

***

Matt,

Thanks so much for soliciting feedback from SG about the latest developments in the dispensing of Plan B.

Based on this feedback, and based on budgetary considerations for students and the University, we will move the dispensing of Plan B to the DCAM pharmacy. Students will receive Plan B at a discounted rate (approximately $20), and it will be dispensed for emergency and non-emergency situations.

Students who would like a follow-up consult with SCC can certainly schedule one.

Thanks much for your help with this!

Celia

***

Open Forum on Gender Neutral Housing

Hosted by Student Government and Inter-House Council

Wednesday, May 28th

7:30 PM in McCormick Tribune

Student Government and Inter-House Council will host Vice-President/Dean of Students Kim Goff-Crews and the Director of University Housing, Katie Callow-Wright, and members of Inter-House Council’s Gender Neutral Housing Committee.

Come and show your support for Gender Neutral Housing and to learn about how the Housing Office would implement its proposal.

Come and Show you Support!

Maroon coverage about the delay here and about the likely approval here.

I’m pleased to announce the arrival of five new picnic tables, brought to you by the Executive Slate working in conjunction with College Council and Campus Services Committee. Funding was provided thanks to the Student Government Finance Committee.

These tables were secured with the help of the Facilities Department and were chosen to match the main quad’s aesthetics. The five tables will be located near Kent, Ryerson, behind the C Bench, and in the Classics and Social Sciences Quad (See the map). They will probably arrive by early June.

Along with these tables, the Facilities Department has pledged to also order eight new benches which will compliment the new benches.

Enjoy! And hopefully they’ll get here before the end of the quarter.

Graduate students will have the opportunity to meet with Vice President/Dean of Students Kim Goff Crews in the afternoon/evening of May 19th.

The first meeting will take place from 12-1:30 in Social Sciences 122.

The second meeting, from 5-6 PM, will take place in the Business School Room 010 before that night’s Graduate Council Meeting.

Open Forum on Gender Neutral Housing

Hosted by College Council and Inter-House Council

Wednesday, May 14th

6:30 PM in Stuart 102

College Council and Inter-House Council will host the Director of University Housing, Katie Callow-Wright, and members of Inter-House Council’s Gender Neutral Housing Committee. Please come out to ask questions of the committee and to show your support for this initiative on campus. There will be a second forum on May 28th, hosted by IHC and CC.

Free Food

Questions? Contact benbejamin@uchicago.edu

Maroon coverage about the delay here and about the likely approval here.

Each year, outstanding RSOs, events, and publications are recognized by the Committee on Recognized Student Organizations (CORSO) and honored for their work at the Student Leader Awards Reception. This year there will be SEVEN awards:
* Outstanding RSO Award
* Outstanding NEW RSO Award
* Best Event Award
* Best Publication Award
* Best Funding Award
* Best RSO/ Event You’ve Never Heard of Award
* The People’s Choice Award

To nominate an outstanding RSO, event or publication for an award, please submit the application by 5:00 p.m., May 12th. Completed applications should be sent to sg-corso@listhost.uchicago.edu.

To vote for the People’s Choice Award click here.

Last Thursday SG held its last Presidential Discussion. Over the last two quarters, we had around 100 people RSVP and roughly 80 were invited to attend the discussion (we don’t count who shows up, so of that I’m not sure who actually attended). That’s a pretty good record.

A quick review:

• Last Winter’s Discussion was this year’s first, with nearly 80 students RSVPing for 25 spots. We selected people based on division, year, and interests to make it as diverse of group as possible. Maroon coverage here and a blog post with comments here.
• A couple of weeks earlier we had around 40 or so people RSVP. Everyone who had tried to attend an earlier meeting, or was a Graduate Student, was able to attend. Maroon article here.
• Last Thursday we had 27 people RSVP to attend and only 18 or so show up, making it the lowest attendance of the year. Nevertheless it was a really good discussion, see the Maroon article here.

It took a while but I think we’ve finally found President Zimmer’s venue. Last Thursday’s meeting was especially nice because fewer people meant more questions per person. The only thing I would change in the future is to have people come with more prepared comments versus questions. President Zimmer enjoys hearing from students and while some questions have obvious embedded comments (”What are you going to do about do about the large college class sizes in the Physical and Biological Sciences?” was one last week), direct comments are also really nice.

Ideally we will do one of these each quarter next year, but we’ll have to see what the President’s schedule allows. There’s been some concern about the RSVPing system, but I think that this works better than the old brown bag model for a couple of reasons.

First, when people RSVP they feel bad about skipping. In the previous system, where the President sat in the McCormick Tribune Lounge with some lunch, attendance was hard to predict. By having people RSVP, it helps guarantee that they’ll show.

Second, the RSVP system means that people show up prepared with questions. This makes the discussion much more productive and usually gets us through that awkward period where attendees are warming up to the President (it lasts roughly 40 minutes, in my experience).

Finally, it keeps the discussion productive. This is my own personal opinion, and many people on SG don’t agree with me. But above ~25 people, the discussion turns into a lecture, defeating the real goal of these meetings, for the President to hear from students. By limiting the number of people, we’re able to keep the discussion productive. I’m proud to say anyone who couldn’t attend an earlier discussion and tried to attend a later discussion were able to, so its not a function of suppressing anyone’s voice. And if last Thursday’s discussion was any indication, anyone who signs up in the future will be able to come.

This format doesn’t mean Senior Administrators will never face a large, angry crowd: the Provost took questions on Grad Aid in Max Palevsky Cinema last Winter. But that’s a different type of discussion with a different purpose, and I think its important not to confuse the two. I’m sure whenever there’s again cause to protest President Zimmer, there will be ample opportunities beyond outside of these Discussions.

Thoughts on the format or my rundown? Is there something we need to change for next time? Use your fingers and let us know.

-Scott

Well its 2 AM and I’ve got my introduction written. Just need to get the conclusion done and I can put this BA Thesis (and myself) to bed. But why not unpack another aspect of tonight (or yesterday’s) election. So, fueled by old sushi from Bart Mart, here I go:

Record Setting Year

If you take a look at turnout(scroll down), you’ll see that this year, like the two years previously, set a record for most students voting at 2,755 voters.

One Campus also broke the record for most votes won by an Executive Slate (Outgoing Liaison Hollie Russon Gilman holds the record for most votes won by a Liaison at 1,097 votes). One Campus won by so much that they would’ve just barely lost to all of the other Slates combined votes (629+393+261= 1283). Brian Cody also garnered an enormous 1,728 votes, but I’m not going to really count this considering he was running unopposed.

There may have been some records set by College Council members, although I don’t have accurate records in front of me. Jarrod Wolf’s 241 votes must be getting close to an all time College Council record and Nicholas Rodman’s 191 vote victory blows away last year’s winner’s 99 vote victory by a fourth year (write-in Eve Ewing), and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the all time highest voting getting fourth year (again, pending numbers)

Who Voted?

A quick analysis shows that about 2/3rd of the voters were Undergrads and 1/3rd were Grads. While I don’t have the numbers now, I feel like this is a shift away from previous elections where it was closer to a 1/2 Grad and 1/2 Undergrad split. Of the Graduates that voted, over 1/3rd came from the Humanities and Social Sciences, which probably represents the level of mobilization among those cohorts due to Grad Aid. Support was otherwise pretty mixed, with each division contributing roughly 100-50 votes.

In this year’s College Council elections, there was a clear jump in voting participation. The Class of 2011 surpassed its record breaking Fall Election turnout numbers where over 1/3rd voted, to deliver near 50% participation. Incredible. The Class of 2010, also a high performer in terms of interest (they’ve always has a large number run for CC) had around 40% participation, which is also incredibly high.

But for me, the Cinderella story is the Class of 2009. In last year’s College Council election, only four people ran and each candidate won with around 70 or so votes (Edit from Kati). This year seven people ran and 40% of the class voted, what a shift! This performance, from the previously lackluster 2009 going into their FOURTH YEAR, is truly extraordinary. My own class of 2008 had 23% of students vote, not bad. But clearly nothing compared to the younger three classes that had active College Council races.

This data also clearly settles the question of whether we can have a successful College Council race that is concurrent to the Slate and Liaison races.

Edit:

I’m also going to go out on a limb and say we’re nearing saturation in terms of College voting patterns. I don’t think its realistic to expect more than 50% of any class to vote, and its incredibly unlikely that any outgoing class will vote higher than 25%. This would mean College votes would cap out at, roughly, 2,100 votes. That’s only 200 votes from this election, not a lot of room to grow and it wouldn’t push us over the 3,000 line.

I would say we’re not going to see growth in turnout until Graduate Students start voting in higher numbers (roughly 10% voted in this election). My guess is this wont happen till SG starts getting involved with the many Professional and Divisional Councils. Another way would be for Graduate Council to have competitive, division-wide elections which would be concurrent with these school wide elections. Until this happens, and Graduate Divisions start engaging directly with SG Elections, I doubt we will see turnout climb above 3,000.

/Edit

How They Voted

Using this sites built in hit tracking abilities, I was able to somewhat monitor voting trends. Now keep in mind, I cannot monitor the actually voting site which is hosted on ORCSA’s servers. But most candidates direct voters to sg.uchicago.edu, so I should see turnout.

As I posted via comments, we saw an influx to the website over the period when voting occurred. Traffic spiked on the main site up to nearly 5,000 hits on the 22nd, dropping to 4,000 and then 3,500 over the three days which the election was held (we get roughly 3,000-2,700 on any given weekday). The blog post telling people where to vote saw a similar pattern, spiking to 1,244 then falling to 812 and 523 over the next three days (2,588 page views all together, about 200 votes off). The statements page faired worse, accruing 1,641 page views over the course of the election (914,457, and 270).

This data tells us a couple of things:

• People tend to vote early, so campaigns should have their message well distributed by Tuesday. They also should plan to immediately start getting out the vote, lest their opponent is able to get to voters first.
• Voting drops off quickly. So if you think you can clinch the election by doing a lot on Thursday, think again. This thing was probably already over for the Slate race by then.
• A little over half of voters read the candidates statements, which means these aren’t as big of deal as one might think.
• People don’t really read All Campus emails. We sent one out on Tuesday and it arrived roughly on Wednesday (I get a lot of ‘Out of Office’ replies so this is how I’m able to time arrival). Yet despite the fact that ALL 15,000 students received the email, very few students decided to visit the SG page and vote (although we did see a spike in blog visits by about 50, which was specifically linked to from the email).

All and all it was a very record setting year.

Next: Facebook (maybe)

I’m trying to not write my political science senior thesis, which is due tomorrow. So instead I’ll digest some tidbit of tonight’s election results. I want to start with the Maroon Endorsement, which was different this year because they endorsed Liaison and College Council candidates.

Lets see if people listened to them. This year the Maroon endorsed:

• Connect Four for Executive Slate
• Louis Potok for Undergrad Liaison
• Nicholas Rodman, David Grossman, Kati Proctor, and Greg Gabrellas for CC 2009
• Aaron Goggans, Prerna Nadathur, Jarrod Wolf, and Jay Kim for CC 2010
• Frank Pucci, Julian Quintanilla, Archibald England, and Matthew Hartman for CC 2011

So how’d they do? Well, using the results we see that they were 6 for 14.

This isn’t great and would really make me question whether the Maroon’s endorsement has much of an effect at all, especially given the wide margins which their endorsed candidates were beaten by the actual winners in the Executive Slate and Liaison Categories (One Campus beat Connect Four by 600 votes and Aliza beat Louis by a little less than 500 votes).

But history tells a different story. In 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004 the Maroon was endorsed the winning Slate three out of four years. The recent changes puts them at 3 for 5 for Executive Slate, which isn’t bad.

In terms of CC and Liaison, they didn’t do as hot. With CC they did best with the class of 2010 then 2009 then 2011. Maybe first years aren’t reading the Maroon as they only elected one of the endorsed candidates. We’ll have to see whether these endorsements take on more importance over time.

Next Section: Turnout!