4
NEWS
0VOTING FROM PAGE 1 “This happened [as] a result of the detailed nature and length of our constitution and the parliamentary code the Senate adopted,” Thomas said. “It is difficult for us to abide by these hundreds of pages of codes in usual circumstances.” At the SA meeting this week, Thomas said all proceeding votes will occur via roll call . “I wanted to be transparent about [this error],” Thomas said. “That was a mix-up on [SA Parliamentarian] Annabelle [McIntire-Gavlick’s] and my behalf.” Martel College senior AJ Barnes said he was concerned by the lack of voting records. “Students have a right to know how their representative voted, since they are selected through an election and should be held accountable,” Barnes said. “Furthermore, it is concerning that the student governing body is in violation of the very constitution which they are charged with upholding and amending.” Thomas said students with questions on voting records should ask their representatives directly. This is not the first time the SA has conducted procedures unconstitutionally this year. Last month, Thomas announced a closed session at the end of a Senate meeting without first conducting a two-thirds vote in apparent violation of the SA Constitution. When the Thresher notified Thomas of the procedural error after that meeting, he again pointed to the length of the constitution as the reason for the mistake. “The SA Constitution is 111 pages long and it is sometime difficult for us to make necessary immediate judgments,” Thomas said at the time. “This is of course not to make an excuse for the oversight, but to say we understand the mistake and are making strides to correct it.” McIntre-Gavlick, who chairs the Committee of Constitutional Revisions, said she plans to work on rewriting the Constitution with a few other people during winter break. The committee was formed in April and charged with reviewing and updating the constitution. Voting record Although roll call voting is constitutionally mandated, SA voting records showed incomplete information on how representatives have voted persists over the past three years, especially for the 2015-16 administration of former SA President
0DACA FROM PAGE 1 parents will be forced to leave this country. I have told a few people like my [Orientation Week] group that I’m undocumented. In Rice I can put all that behind me and just be a normal student.” Since coming to Rice, Garcia has also had access to health insurance for the first time, so he feels more comfortable participating in sports such as freshman flag football. Previously, his family had been unable to pay for health insurance. “I’m very much more open to doing things that are risky, because if I had ever gotten hurt before this, I would have destroyed my family’s income,” Garcia said. Election aftermath In the days following Donald Trump’s election victory, over 90 university presidents, including Rice President David Leebron, signed a letter addressed “to our country’s leaders” calling on the continuation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. DACA is an immigration policy instituted by the Obama administration in 2012 through an executive order, and it provides undocumented immigrants who entered the country as minors to apply for a renewable two-year period of deferred deportation and a work permit. Trump has called for ending DACA. “America needs talent — and these students, who have been raised and educated in the United States, are already part of our national community,” the letter stated. “They represent what is best about America, and as scholars and leaders they are essential to the future.”
the Rice Thresher Jazz Silva (Sid Rich ’16). The investigation also found over the past three years, under Thomas, Silva and former SA President Ravi Sheth (Martel ’15), all legislation introduced in the SA had a 96 percent passing rate. Among the legislation for which specific voting records by representative exist, 84 percent of legislation was passed unanimously. Two pieces of legislation, out of 54 introduced, have not passed. The first, requiring residential colleges to guarantee on-campus housing for Rice Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps members, failed by majority vote in spring 2014. The second bill, censuring the Faculty Senate following their approval of the Committee on Undergraduate Curriculum credit cap, was tabled indefinitely this year after SA members decided it could hinder a working relationship with administration. During Silva’s term, all legislation passed, although the bill endorsing a mandatory Critical Thinking in Sexuality class elicited contentious debate and passed only narrowly. Thomas said there may have been a shortage of debate on legislation in past years due to the short length of the meetings, typically ranging from 15 to 20 minutes. Former Jones College Senator Jovany Franco said he agreed with that sentiment. “A lot of people just wanted to leave and they were like, ‘OK, let’s vote, let’s keep it short, like 20 minutes,’” Franco, a junior, said. “[Silva] definitely contributed to that by saying, ‘OK, it’s going to be a short meeting,’ so there’s debate but it wasn’t good, definitely not, except for [with CTIS].” Silva said she disagreed with the idea that meeting length influences quality of debate. “If students felt like there wasn’t enough time to deliberate during a single Senate meeting, they would continue to table the bill until they felt more comfortable voting,” Silva said of the legislation under her term as SA president. Under his term, Thomas said he has been trying to have meetings last at least an hour in an effort to expand debate. “By setting the expectation that meetings are gonna be an hour, we can sit here for an hour and stare at the ceiling or we can actually talk about issues,” Thomas said. “We’ve talked about issues more substantively but there is still a ways to go.” Martel President Ly Nguyen said debate often occurs more within the college instead of at Senate, especially for controversial topics such as the approval of installing security cameras at residential colleges, which passed earlier this year. “Inherently the discussion at the college level will be more robust than that which occurs at SA
meetings, and that’s okay as long as the opinions, comments and questions from those discussions are effectively communicated at SA meetings by college representatives,” Nguyen, a senior, said. SA External Vice President Hannah Todd, a junior who formerly served as the SA senator for Wiess College, voted ‘yes’ on every bill last year. Todd said she based her vote entirely on surveys she sent to the college regarding legislation. However, Franco said basing voting off of constituents’ opinions on legislation can be problematic if constituents aren’t properly informed. He said he faced this issue with Jones when voting on CTIS last year, despite providing students with the text of the legislation. “[Jones students] were agreeing and disagreeing with things that weren’t true because they hadn’t read the legislation,” Franco said. “They kind of just went with what they’d heard from other people. We thought since there was so much confusion and a lot of people were in support of the bill because of reasons that were not legitimate, we decided to vote against it.” Franco said he also felt almost all SA bills passed primarily because students who propose legislation are often colleagues and friends. “You knew a lot of the people and you understood the effort they put into the bill, and typically it’s very reasonable things they would ask for,” Franco said. “The choice was up to Jones, but deep inside, it’s difficult to shoot down somebody else’s work since we’re on the same level.” McMurtry College President Madhuri Venkateswar said it tends to be hard to convince her to vote against legislation because she typically agrees with propsals’ intentions. “I usually give legislation the benefit of the doubt,” Venkateswar said. “However, I have become more critical of university efforts through my time at Rice.” However, Jones President Chris Sabbagh said bill passing requires people to agree to change the status quo, which is difficult without good reason. Silva said she felt it is easier for a bill to pass than to fail, but valued having healthy debate. “As a president, it was extremely hard to moderate the level of debate,” Silva said. “You can only moderate the quality of debates.” Thomas said he recognized the importance of maintaining a robust discussion. “We have to be very careful because if we’re known as an organization that just passes anything anyone introduces to us then our opinion and the opinion of the student body weighs less for the administration,” he said.
Garcia though, has tried to look past the uncertainty that a Trump presidency may hold for his DACA status. “We can’t really let ourselves fear a lot, or spend time worrying about all this stuff because we still have to work, we still have to push through,” Garcia said. “All I can do for now on is to put some false hope into Donald Trump that maybe he was just jacking around most of the time and he’s not going to do exactly what he said he would do.” By the night of the election, Garcia said he had “made peace” with the possibility of the outcome either way. “When it happened, it happened,” Garcia said. “They were having a huge election watch [party] and I was just doing my homework. And it happened and I just kept on doing my homework.” Despite his determination to move forward regardless of the election results, Garcia takes issue with rhetoric that paints undocumented immigrants as freeloaders taking advantage of the system. After all, Garcia said, his family faces daily hardships and pays taxes and he has to register for the draft, like all male American citizens. “The majority of people who come here [as undocumented immigrants], they’re not having fun,” Garcia said. “If they could do it any other way they would. And people think that we come here, we live on welfare or something or are having the times of our lives. My dad is working 10 hours a day. They don’t come here to take advantage of anything.” However, according to Garcia, the outpouring of support for undocumented immigrants was an unexpected result of the election. “It surprised me because I thought the majority of people hated immigrants,” Garcia said. “Because that’s what I had seen from a lot
of the events that had happened. I had never heard these voices before, and the fact that they’re all coming out now with this support, that could definitely spark an actual movement.” Updates to Rice’s DACA policy Two years ago, Garcia applied for DACA status, which allowed him to obtain a Social Security number, a state-issued photo ID and a driver’s permit. Nonetheless, Garcia applied to 21 universities his senior year of high school out of fear that he wouldn’t be accepted due to his undocumented status. According to Leebron, an applicant’s undocumented status has no bearing on their admission to Rice. “For us it does not affect their chances of admission, one way or another,” Leebron said. In August, Rice announced that its admission and financial aid policy toward undocumented students would be expanded, effective next fall. Leebron said Rice has moved to more explicitly affirm its treatment of DACA students equally as other students in the application process, as well as taking into account that DACA students don’t qualify for federal loans or grants by replacing those with Rice scholarships. According to Leebron, these changes were made in part due to discussions with the Students of Color Collective last spring. “We all came to a common conclusion that we should move beyond that case-by-case and ad hoc policy [toward undocumented student applicants],” Leebron said. “We decided that we would treat them the same as American students who might be immigrant or nonimmigrant.” Furthermore, Rice’s policy will now no longer be limited to those with DACA status: Any undocumented student who has been in the U.S.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
NEWS IN BRIEF National university association elects President Leebron as chair Hannah Todd, Thresher Staff Rice University President David Leebron was elected by the Association of American Universities to serve as chair of its board of directors at their semiannual membership meeting last month. AAU, made up of 60 American and two Canadian universities, aims to advance university research and to maintain effective collaboration between research universities and the U.S. government. Leebron will serve a one-year term as chair. “Rice’s membership reflects our recognition as one of the leading research universities in the United States,” Leebron said. He said he would work with the AAU president, Mary Sue Coleman, the former president at the University of Michigan. “[We will] advocate for support of research universities and for recognition of what they have collectively contributed to the success of the American economy,” Leebron said. Leebron said he sees this role as illustrative of both Rice’s performance as a research university and its reputation among other AAU members. “Rice’s membership, and my election as chair, reflect both the very high achievement of Rice as a research university, and the high esteem in which it is held by other members of the AAU,” Leebron said. “Despite our small size — Rice is the third-smallest member of the AAU — we have achieved research prominence and excellence well beyond that size.” Rice’s place in AAU and Leebron’s new position as chair benefit Rice in multiple ways, Leebron said. “It will be of benefit to Rice both in terms of the additional recognition and visibility Rice receives as a result of its president being chair of the AAU,” Leebron said. “I will be able to utilize all that I learn as chair in working to further enhance Rice’s success as a pre-eminent research university.” for extended periods of time and graduated from a U.S. high school will be eligible. A sanctuary campus? Recently, a petition has circulated within the Rice community that calls for the university to declare itself a sanctuary campus. The petition, which was spearheaded by several faculty members from the English and anthropology departments, follows the heels of other universities nationwide calling for a sanctuary space designation as means to protect undocumented students. The petition calls for a variety of measures directed at improving the livelihood of undocumented students at Rice, such as financial support, on-campus housing, mental health services, staff hires and academic freedom. While Leebron reaffirmed his support for undocumented students at Rice in an email to the student body, he expressed some concerns with declaring Rice a sanctuary campus. “First, Rice is subject to the law … and we should not suggest in any way that we are determined to violate applicable law,” Leebron wrote. “Second, such a designation could put our students at greater risk in two ways. It might suggest that the risks they face are reduced because of such a designation, when in fact ‘sanctuary’ status has virtually no effect on enforcement of the law. Moreover, it might make our students more of a target of enforcement efforts.” While Garcia said he was unsure whether the petition would actually come to fruition, he appreciated the gesture. “The most important part is the fact that they’re saying these things,” Garcia said. “They’re saying that we stand with y’all.”