Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
Student Council has two upcoming fireside chats. The first will be on March 20th and will be about appointments, and the second will be on March 27th at 7:30 and will be about students’ experience with bureaucracy at Swarthmore.
SBC came to ask Student Council’s approval for two decisions. First, SBC recently funded Worthstock for $16,200. As this is over 1% of their budget, they need to ask Student Council for approval. Council approved the funding. Student Council also approved a change to SBC bylaws which would increase the maximum amount of funding available under subcode 22, which is for closed-group events, from one hundred to two-hundred-and-fifty dollars.
SBC also plans to create a closer relationship between SAC and SBC by having one of the SAC managers attend SBC meetings as a non-voting member and serve as a liaison between the two groups.
“Thanksgiving in the Spring” is also proceeding apace. The program created by Chase DuBois ’07 to schedule finals has been completed and works well to schedule finals in a compressed period. Using DuBois’ algorithms, ITS will be writing a similar program in their own computer language so that it will mesh with other campus software.
This program also makes two schedule options available: we can either take two days off of finals or one day off of finals and one day off of reading week. The question of which would be better will be raised if the initiative overcomes the next hurdle of Curriculum Committee.
Finally, members of Council met with ITS in order to discuss a variety of issues. Council has had problems getting a voting program together in the past, and ITS has agreed to commit resources to getting a permanent voting program set up by the next election cycle.
The plan to create a new calendar space and a “dashboard on steroids” is also coming along, and ITS will be holding its first focus groups with students soon. Considering that almost fifty percent of students currently forward to Gmail, ITS is researching moving to a beta program offered by Google called “Gmail for your domain.” This would allow the college to keep the [at] swarthmore [dot] edu domain for e-mail addresses, but would give our mail a Gmail-based interface with integrated calendaring and all the other things you love about your Gmail.
ITS also wanted students to know that if they notice a dead spot of wireless where there is supposed to be wireless, they should let ResTech know, and ResTech will come and fix it. As printers in dorms are scheduled for replacement, ITS has also made a commitment to replacing them with double-sided printers.