Minutes 05/21/96

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Present:				

Cynthia Chuang	Sarita Kaza		Alan Liu		Jonathan Weinsaft

Demetre Daskalakis	Roland Knoblauch	Joe Quaranta		Rich Westreich

Steve Dickstein	Jason Kornberg	Nayan Sivamurthy	Patrick Ying

Craig Gordon		Edie Lederman	Yolanda Troublefield	Diana Yoon

		

Not Present:		 (* = excused)				

Yince Loh	John-Paul Mead	Eric Kim 	

New Items:

  1. Third Year Final Switch Party Third Years are going to have a boat cruise on June 21 for 150 people, again all classes are invited. Event will be subsidized $18/ per person from the Student Council general budget. Pre-event barbecue.

    Nayan will work with all new reps to establish a better method of sharing cost for school-wide parties.

  2. End of the year Barbecue Rich set the date for Fri Jun 7th, in the afternoon in Kaufman Courtyard. Everyone is OK with this. The event should remain closed to students.

  3. Grad Student/ Med Student Mixer Roland is planning a summer barbecue with Sackler students to work with their happy hour, 5:00 pm July 12th.

  4. After hours copy machine Because of vendor situation etc, it is not possible to put two access cards on the machine outside the Dean's office. Nayan suggested that a copy machine from the library be kept in the fishbowl area since it is secure and is already designated as a study space.

  5. Gym Committee Roland is working on

    1. opening up more space in Rubin basement, exploxing possibilities of movingout laundry machines and working around boiler room space. The problems with this were pointed out (new piping, space, safety hazards, etc)
    2. Obtaining a survey to gauge student usage preferences and needs
    3. Looking into the construction of a new building over kaufman Courtyard. It was pointed out that zoning and cost would likely be prohibitive to this plan.

    Diana suggested to keep the focus more general and look at:

    1. space needs for personal workouts
    2. gym space for team sports
    3. maintaining a pool

    She also suggested that someone from the current gym committee work with Roland and Edie will direct someone (either Mike Pollack or Andy Miller) to him.

  6. Housing

    1. The Contract Several points were made. Roland pointed out that people that are remaining in their apartments were sent letters saying they failed to sign a contract when it wasn't ever made clear that you needed to sign one. Yolanda and Demetre said that you can write "Under protest" on your contract, as Yolanda with her legal expertise has highlighted key problems in the contract. Sarita pointed out that you do not receive a copy of the contract for your own records that lists the agreements you signed. Joe also explained and incident involving a second year student, who was asked to move while studying for the boards despite the fact that his housing contract said he could stay til the end of June. He was threatened by Laurie Ann who wanted to accommodate a summer student and use a loophole in the said contract, but these cases will be dealt with by Dean Scotch and Dean Lesser. The summer student will have to move into temporary housing until the regular student is prepared to move out, and then they can switch..
    2. The Greenberg Mail Situation A Greenberg Council is being established to deal with housing issues that have developed in Greenberg. Sean Gunning, a 1st year student, has being obtaining documentation on the mail fraud in Greenberg so the employee can be dealt with. This is also being dealt with through housing, both from the perspective of the postal service (why does it take forever to get here) and from the inside perspective (when it does get here why don't students get their stuff). Demetre will direct Sean to Yolanda, who will be keeping documentation on behalf of Student Council.
    3. Subletters, Visitors, and General Housing Security Currently, students who want to sublet their rooms must sublet to medical center related persons and report it to the housing office. There was an incident recently where a student in Rubin was "leered at" in the shower by another person, a subletter. It is unclear what kind of identification, if any, these persons show to security to be allowed access.

      Further, Sarita reported that for at least 3 weeks now, the Rubin guards desk has failed to make more copies of the vistor log book, and so have told students that they don't have to sign up visitors. The responsibility of making more copies is theirs, not a Student Council's.

  7. CORE Met this week, and will be on hiatus for the summer while we regroup and develop the key issues for the fall. With the absence of Joe Miniaci, CORE lacks a chair and has proven to be ineffective. The last big projects brought to CORE included Greenberg study space and the lounge. The issue of installing cameras in the lounge was brought up at the last meeting. Terry Bischoff arrived after the meeting and gave us a brief on the talks with Mt. Sinai (they are still going on) and agreed to meet and discuss student issues in the near future before another CORE meeting. She may arrange a few summer meetings and temporarily chair the committee until a replacement is found for Joe Miniaci. And Joe Quaranta wanted it noted that while CORE approved the bike rack, it had nothing to do with students, talk to Phillipson.

  8. Dental Students and Medical Center Access A letter to Dean Scotch was sent out and cc-ed to other Deans regarding non-medical center personnel access to the medical center. We are approaching this as a crisis situation and take a hard stance on behalf of the students. There have been threats made to Medical students, graffitti, and general harrasment by Dental students. While everyone agrees that access should be restricted, there are two approaches:

    1. Address the fact that the medical center library is the only place in the medical center that is open to outsiders, which generates a problem for security enforcement. Access to all parts of the medical center should be restricted to personnel. This may require the stepping down of Karen Brewer from one of her two library appointments.
    2. Security enforcement of a general access restricitoin should be revisited.

    Roland pointed out that non-medical center personnel using the library create problems for the graduate students who use the library research space, and will try and recruit the support of Sackler Student Council on this issue as well.

  9. Email Please paste in email, do not just send an attachment because not everyone will be able to read your document.

  10. Summer Quorum There are 16 summer members. Quorum will requirea minimum of 8 members, two from each class. The MD/PhD representative will count as either a 3rd of 4th yr if needed to have quorum. Passed 10:0:1

    Addendum: No discussion of issues unique to MD/PhD students will occur in the absence of a MD/PhD representative, and what is deemed a unique issue will be at the discretion of the Council President. Passed 4:0:4

  11. New meeting schedule Next meeting will be June 25th, and every other week thereafter. Additional meetings will be scheduled if needed.

  12. Reallocation of funds The soccer team has an additional $300 they did not need to use for league fees and wanted to re-allocate to use for uniforms. The precedent is that uniforms are considered individual equipment, which does not necessarily get passed down, so council will not fund a club for it, individuals must fund their own uniforms.

  13. Lounge Issues It was suggested by Rich that the Lounge rules set down by the reps are not being used in the spirit they were intended. Specifically, the requirement for class reps to get pre-approval before holding an event, particularly involving food, in the lounge. The time lag between a meeting and the planning of the event is problematic.

    The counter arguments were that

    1. Council should follow the same rules it sets up for clubs,
    2. someone always needsd to be responsible for events held there and
    3. there should be some limitation on club usage of that space, otherwise it is no longer a leisure space.

    The issue of cleaning supplies and cleaning maintenance was to be discussed with York at this last CORE meeting but they failed to come. The issue of cleaning supplies may need follow-up with Paul in Housing.

  14. Sweatshirts and Shorts Yolanda, Edie, Roland, Steve and Demetre signed up to sit in office for an hour each week and sell sweatshirts, etc.

  15. Copy Cards Class Presidents, Secretary, Treasurer, and one per pair of class reps, MD/PhD rep, all need copy cards. If peole know which ones need to be cancelled or need to pick one up, see Demetre and then Jack in the Dean's Office.

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