Council reviews its constitution, bylaws

On Saturday, Feb. 4, several members of the Vassar Student Association (VSA) Operations Committee held this semester's second "Constitutia-thon" (named for the first meeting's six-hour duration) to revise the VSA Constitution and bylaws for consistency, clarity and simplicity. Although the group has made substantial progress in the last two weeks, all of their efforts are preliminary and will not come into effect until they are approved by the VSA Council.

Constitutia-thoners hope that their work will make the directives of the VSA's governing documents clearer. "When I was campaigning for this position, I was reading through the governing documents and realized that they're just not correct in so many ways. There are a lot of inconsistencies," recalled VSA Vice President for Operations Jenna Konstantine '13.

One of the most glaring contradictions rests, in part, within the current VSA Constitution. Article V, section 10 states, "should the VSA President be absent, incapacitated or leave office, all of his/her duties, responsibilities and powers shall be temporarily assumed by the VSA Vice President for Student Life." However, the VSA bylaws provide for a different chain of succession. They state, "the VSA President shall chair all VSA Council meetings. In the case of his/her absence, this duty shall fall to the VSA Vice President for Operations." According to Jewett President and review committee member Clayton Masterman '13, the error was probably caused by an incomplete amendment written when the Student Life position was added to the VSA Executive Board and a revision was made to the Constitution, but not the bylaws.

Another inconsistency, which was only fixed recently after the creation of a new capital loans system, has to do with the capital items inventory. Capital items, which are defined in the VSA bylaws as "any item that is anticipated to last no less than three years," are technically supposed to be placed on a list maintained by the Vice President for Operations. Capital items are typically very expensive, and an accurate inventory is important to prevent redundancy. "The bylaws talk about Operations Committee keeping a full inventory of capital items, a practice that has never happened because it has no relation to Operations," wrote Masterman in an emailed statement, highlighting the disparity between the VSA's governing documents and reality. Discrepancies like these have been some of the review committee's greatest motivators.

The review committee has also made dozens of small changes to the syntax and style of the VSA governing documents. Grammatical and spelling errors have been almost completely eliminated, and gender pronouns such as "he" and "she" have been removed in an effort to avoid conforming to the gender binary. Konstanine hopes that changes like these will make the documents easier to read and more inclusive. "If our documents aren't smooth and concise, nobody is going to look at them," explained Konstantine.

Improving the organization of the VSA governing documents has also been a priority. For example, the responsibilities of each member of the Executive Board are scattered throughout the Constitution and bylaws. "A lot of people who run for VSA positions start off by looking at the documents. And then they run into a constitution that nobody knows how to navigate," said Masterman. The review committee plans to create a set of new sections and subsections to make the bylaws' layout more logical. For example, the Constitution will only include an overview of each Executive Board position, and the bylaws will describe each position's year-to-year duties.

Although many changes have been made, review committee members stress that the directives of the VSA's governing documents remains unaltered. "From the get-go, we tried very explicitly to make sure that the intent of the entire process was not to change the content of the Constitution in any way," assured Masterman. In the case of inconsistencies like the ones mentioned above, changes will be made to reflect current practice. The provision in the bylaws regarding presidential succession, for example, will be stricken so that the Vice President for Student Life will succeed the President; and bylaws will also be amended to reflect the shift of responsibility over the capital items inventory from Vice President for Operations to Vice President for Finance made by the new capital loans system.

Both he and Konstantine hope to present the improved documents to the VSA Council for adoption sometime before Spring Break.