SLC drafts planning goals

Committee looks at next semester

Members of the Student Life Committee (SLC) met for the last time this semester to draft goals and guidelines for their involvement in next semester's Long Range Planning effort.

The Committee briefly discussed the search for a new dean of students with Diana Roose, assistant to President of the College Nancy Dye.

"The search committee for a dean has yet to be formed," Roose said. "It will probably be formed by the end of the semester. We'd like nominations from Senate and anywhere else we can get them."

Senator senior Joshua Kaye agreed to further communicate with Roose on the matter.

Committee members then divided themselves into three groups to discuss Governance and Organizations, Pluralism and Faculty/Student Interaction. Within their groups, members raised issues which Chair of the General Faculty Planning Committee (GFPC) David Boe, professor of organ, asked the Committee to address throughout the school year.

"One thing we can do within the groups, besides organizing issues to be worked on, is find out who else on the campus might be able to help us. What we're doing is saying, 'We aren't the only group that has to generate this.' We're going to look at a list of people who could be resources," SLC Chair Jane Armitage, associate professor of theater, said.

Armitage asked each group to draft a few sentences to put in the timetable of priorities the GFPC requested the Committee submit by the end of this semester.

"I'm going to include in the timetable that we can meet the April 15 deadline that was set for us," Armitage told Committee members, reminding them to start looking seriously at the issues they plan to address beginning in February.

Armitage is a member of the Governance and Organizations subcommittee. Under the October letter the GFPC sent to the Committee, members of SLC need to work on "understanding and supporting the distinctive ways in which Oberlin student associational life and leadership center around student-initiated and student-run organizations, and the ways in which student organizations can help build community," as well as "strengthening the role of students in Oberlin's residential and academic governance systems."

"I think we need to talk to the faculty and administration and ask them about the opportunities they see for the student government and more organizations' involvement. I think that's an untapped resource. We also need the input of the organizations themselves," Kaye, also a member of the subcommittee, said.

Armitage added that she doesn't see Student Senate as being wholly representative of the entire campus, an issue she would like to see addressed next semester.

"Senate is pretty intense about abstracting information from different groups, because we recognize it's impossible to be totally representative," Kaye said.

Members of the Pluralism subcommittee declined to comment on their goals for next semester, saying they were only in the preliminary stages of organizing an agenda of issues to examine.

Associate Dean of Student Life and Services Bill Stackman, a member of the Faculty/Student Interaction subcommittee, said his group has many different ideas. "Our primary goal is to look at ways we can improve student and faculty relations through examination of different aspects of the community," he said.

Group members agreed to formulate specific agendas of goals, individually and as subcommittees, for the next meeting of the Committee Feb. 9.