Still Four On The Board

Student Reps Speak Up on BoG Membership Cuts

NewsLaura Beeston — Published September 26, 2011

Student representation on the Board of Governors—the university’s highest governing body—is in the process of being slashed.

For the time being, though, Concordia’s 35,408 undergraduate students still have four student reps on the 41-person Board—and they’re not leaving without a fight.

At an informal meeting Sept. 6, Laura Beach, AJ West, Cameron Monagle and Concordia Student Union President Lex Gill spoke at length with the Board of Governors about the recommendations made to proportionally decrease student membership by 36 per cent.

“One thing that really irked me was the lack of justification in pursuing this decrease in representation,” said Beach. “We were fed, again and again, this line that when you’re going from 40 to 25, some seats have to be cut, […] but there was a real lack of any proper motivation for this recommendation, regardless of the fact that I did ask for it very specifically, and more than once.”

The Ad Hoc Governance Committee, a faction of the Board that has been reviewing Board membership since 2009, made the recommendations after reviewing the External Governance Review Committee Report, which was published last June.

The Ad Hoc Committee then endorsed cutting undergraduate student representation to one voting member, while allowing for a non-voting “Alternate Governor” who will have the right to be present, but not speak at regular meetings or in closed sessions.

“The thing about the alternative representative is that it recognizes that there is a huge problem with [cutting undergraduate membership] and that this is a huge deficiency, but absolutely fails to adequately address this problem,” Monagle explained to The Link. “[The Alternate Governor] wasn’t even in the ERGC report, and [the Ad Hoc Committee] changed it to give us this token gesture, saying, ‘That’s the best they can do.’ But it’s most certainly not. The best they can do is to maintain our proportional representation.”

Monagle also said there seems to be an inconsistency with regards to which recommendations from the ERGC the Ad Hoc Committee has chosen to keep, and which they are tweaking.

“At the meeting they kept telling us, ‘we can’t cherry-pick,’ [and were] constantly using this rhetoric to try to discount the changes we’re requesting,” added Beach. “But if some recommendations are malleable, why aren’t others? This is a major issue of contestation.”

If student representation were truly valued at the board, she argued, there would be a way to work around these issues—adding that the best solutions will come from a more meaningful dialogue on the Board and in the Senate moving forward.

“We’re looking for a bit more time for multi-stakeholder discussion on how to preserve representation of all the factions on the Board when dealing with a decrease of this magnitude. It’s not in anybody’s best interests to adopt [the recommendations] right away,” Beach said.

The student reps are also encouraging students to educate themselves on the governance issues facing Concordia, especially as decisions taken at the Board level—on rising tuition and the joint purchase of a Student Centre—directly affects them.

“We want students to come to the BoG meetings, and we will tweet from the meetings and started a Facebook page,” explained West. “We really want to get input from students about what they think, too.”

All the reps maintained they are looking forward to having a meaningful, respectful conversation when the Board meets this Wednesday, Sept. 28.
“We have to work together towards a better university,” said Beach.

You can find the Concordia University Board of Governors Student Representation page on Facebook, or follow ajwest on Twitter for updates at the meeting, which kicks off at 8:00 a.m. on Sept. 28 in EV 2.260