Following a contentious Senate meeting last week, Associated Student Government settled into its routine Wednesday with discussion of goals for the year and plans to fill the cabinet.
“This week was all about showing exactly what ASG is going to look like,” ASG president Ani Ajith told The Daily after the meeting. “We had a lot of productive discussion.”
Early in the evening Ajith, a Weinberg junior and former Daily staffer, and executive vice president Alex Van Atta presented the procedure to choose cabinet members for the seats left empty last week when three nominees were rejected by Senate.
Ajith told Senate that ASG will hold a full-scale publicity campaign to recruit applicants for chief of staff, public relations vice president and associate vice president for diversity and inclusion. He will chair the selection committee to oversee and interview applicants.
“We want to see a broad variety of applicants,” he said.
Confirmations will be presented May 29.
Ajith and Van Atta filled in for the three empty positions when members of the executive board presented ongoing projects and priorities for the coming year, which comprised the bulk of the meeting.
Van Atta, speaking for the diversity and inclusion committee, mentioned the ongoing push for gender-open housing and gender-neutral bathrooms.
“That’s just a continual push that we need to do,” the McCormick junior said. “We just need to make sure that doesn’t fall off into oblivion.”
He added that he hopes to see a report on gender-neutral bathrooms by the end of the quarter.
The entire executive board, with the exception of technology vice president Sheng Wu, emphasized the need for recruitment of committee members and asked Senate to reach out to the student body.
The meeting also featured a visit from Dean of Students Todd Adams and men’s basketball coach Chris Collins.
Adams thanked ASG for its community support as the campus grieved for student Dmitri Teplov, who died May 5, and introduced Collins.
The coach emphasized his goal of raising student enthusiasm for NU basketball.
“You know how much the applicants for this place would go up if people turn on basketball games all winter and saw 8,000 people going nuts in Welsh-Ryan?” he said.
Later in the night, Ethan Romba, outgoing technology vice president, and Ian Coley, off-campus caucus whip, presented legislation to reform the ASG election process.
They proposed shortening the non-verbal campaign period from two weeks to one and preventing current and outgoing executive board members from endorsing candidates. The amendments will be voted on next week.
Senate also voted to fund the upcoming ASG Community Garage Sale, a project proposed by Chris Harlow, a senator and SESP freshman. The event will allow students to sell their old or unused items to each other at the end of the year.
