UMD students serving on the University Senate seek to improve communication, effectiveness

Facing internal concerns that they are not effectively representing the University of Maryland’s student body, undergraduates serving on the University Senate are taking measures to communicate more efficiently with their constituents and each other.

A group of about eight student senators held a meeting earlier this month to discuss better coordination and additional measures of outreach, said Kevin LaFrancis, a senior government and politics and journalism major, who serves on the Senate Executive Committee.

“We’re starting to reach out to each other and get the ideas out in the open and be able to comment on other people’s ideas,” LaFrancis said. “We’re taking the steps to get to a better place.”

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The students plan to create Facebook pages to reach out to students and Google Docs to share ideas with each other, LaFrancis said.

Under current methods of communication, student senators are unsure of how to make their constituents’ voices heard, said Erica Wang, an undergraduate senator. Though they are able to write bills and introduce speakers to the senate at large, they lack the ability to otherwise speak their mind, she said.

“People who just want to voice their opinions aren’t going to be heard,” Wang said. “You can suggest topics, but yours aren’t going to be discussed if they aren’t pressing.”

In fact, most student senators have relatively less impact than their faculty and staff counterparts, said Adam Berger, an undergraduate senator.

“In general, the ideas of students are not heard as well,” Berger said.

Increasing Maryland’s proportion of student senators could improve the elected officials’ ability to best represent their constituency, said J.T. Stanley, an undergraduate representative.

“The amount of influence staff and faculty have is disproportionate to students,” the senior sociology major said.

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With 37 undergraduate and graduate senators, student representatives make up about 20 percent of the university’s 195-member senate — a ratio typical of other mixed student-faculty university senates at Big Ten institutions.

Of Rutgers University’s 249 senators, 23 percent are students. Similarly, at the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota, 19 percent and 22 percent of senators are students, respectively.

Ohio State University’s legislature has 41 students in a body of 137, making up about 30 percent of all senators.

Still, Stanley said the ratio doesn’t accurately represent the university — home to nearly 40,000 undergraduates and graduate students, with about 9,000 faculty and staff.

“Students are the majority stakeholders on this campus,” said Stanley, one of two undergraduates serving on this university’s Senate Executive Committee. “I’d like to see reduction across the board in faculty and staff senators.”

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Still, LaFrancis said, the undergraduate senators’ priority is making avenues of communication more open.

“More representation — although it’s good — is irrelevant if the undergraduate students aren’t unified,” he said.