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IN FOCUS Wednesday, DECEMBER 8, 2021 | ndsmcobserver.com
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE KLAERS | AND COURTESY OF Ian Baker, adriana salgado and eleanor hanson
executive leaders
NjomoBisner
HansonSalgado
SkidgelCole
By BELLA LAUFENBERG
By CRYSTAL RAMIREZ and GENEVIEVE COLEMAN
By LIAM PRICE
News Writer
Associate News Editor, Saint Mary’s News Editor
News Writer
Notre Dame’s student body leaders for the 20212022 term have focused their time and energy on ensuring student needs are not only heard but fulfilled. Student body president, Allan Njomo, a senior from Stanford Hall, said that the focal point of everything he has done so far in his term is about bringing marginalized students into important conversations — something he learned how to do during his time as Stanford Hall’s president. “At the core of [leadership] is inclusion and being able to serve as hall president and as a senator, I worked to find how to bring people who are usually at the margins in on conversations that they needed to be a part of,” he said. Student body vice president, Matthew Bisner, a senior studying political science, peace studies and gender studies, echoed Njomo’s statements saying their work with PRISM before being elected has
When Eleanor Hanson and Adriana Salgado ran for their respective roles, their platform included a focus on gaining an understanding of what the women of Saint Mary’s want to see on campus. Their platform also emphasized the need to integrate all voices in order to create change on campus. In an email from Hanson discussing the progress she and Salgado have accomplished thus far this semester, Hanson noted the benefit of many lifted COVID-19 restrictions from last year. “We are incredibly thankful for this as it has given us the opportunity to work closely with our fellow big board members, host large-scale events and meet more of our fellow smicks,” Hanson said. As for programming held this semester, Hanson mentioned that most of the events were held at the beginning of the semester and were centered around welcoming in the first-year class and returning students. She continued by recognizing all the work and support from the SGA
Emilee Skidgel and Katherine Cole, president and vice-president, respectively, of the Holy Cross Student Government Association (SGA), are proud of their work re-establishing former activities post-COVID and introducing their own new ideas to the Holy Cross community. “Especially coming from the COVID year, I think everyone’s been a little more aware of what we do around campus,” Cole said. Cole and Skidgel spoke of the Thanksgiving Basket Food Drive as a big success of SGA, in which Thanksgiving dinner was provided to 50 families in need. “We got to bring in the men’s basketball team, the men’s and women’s soccer teams, social concerns and SGA to the Food Drive,” Skidgel said. The president and vice-president campaigned on a message to “be the change” and to build community within Holy Cross. Part of this goal meant uniting the
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The observer | Wednesday, DECEMBER 8, 2021 | ndsmcobserver.com
NOTRE DAME STUDENT SENATE
Senate talks to administrators By HEAVEN CARTER News Writer
Every Wednesday evening on the second floor of LaFortune Center, student government vice president Matthew Bisner chairs the student senates weekly meetings. Bisner shared an overview of how the student senate went this past semester with The Observer: explaining some of the senate’s goals, areas they excelled, areas they struggled in and future plans. Bisner said that while six resolutions have been passed, an additional eight orders have also been passed, mostly constitutional amendments. In total, 14 pieces of legislation have been passed this semester. Although the student senate did not pass as many resolutions as previous years, their focus this semester was different. There has not been one particular agenda of the senate this year — its main concern has been responding to the needs of the individual student. “What we’ve been able to do this year is really remain flexible to the needs of the student body as they arise,” Bisner said. In terms of meeting their goals and agenda, Bisner shared, “We’ve been able to bring in administrators when things are getting tense around certain areas. So early on, there was a lot of tension and anxiety in the student body around COVID and COVID policy on-campus testing, getting access to tests and understanding quarantine procedures.” In particular, the senate was able to host Dr. Ed Junkins and Dr. Christine Caron Gebhardt, who respectively run UHS and all student services. “Those two together were able to answer a lot of our student leader concerns, who were then able to go out to the residence halls, and go out to their classes and talk to the students about their concerns,” Bisner said. Additionally, Dr. Christine Conway, was able to
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committees and co-chairs. “We wanted the students who attended our events to leave feeling appreciated while understanding what the event’s message was,” Hanson said. Hanson spoke of some of the events and programming that the committees have hosted, such as BelleFest — held right before DomerFest to get the first-year class and transfer students excited for the night — and Belles Being Holiday Cheer — where students will
inform the student senate about mental health on campus. Guest speakers such as Dr. Jenkins, Dr. Gebhardt and Dr. Conwaywereabletoinformthesenate about their work and answer any questions and concerns students may have. Some of the most influential work the student senate has done during this semester has been taking bites out of the bigger problems. “Senatemeetingsareneverwhere the problem is solved, it’s always where we’re making plans,” Bisner said. “There’s been a challenge of discerning goals for the Student Union itself. It’s hard to build the Student Union into an institution when we all turn over every single year when you know, anyone who has institutional knowledge is gone in four years. And so what we’ve seen this year is a lot of things being brought forward around constitutional amendments, which have unclear focuses.” Another issue the student senate faced this semester was attendance. Bisner said the attendance doesn’t seem out of the norm, but there have been a few people who have reached their absence limit and ultimately resigned. According to Bisner, there is a need for senate to engage the campus in the role they do and credited David Haungs and the judicial council for doing just that. Bisner stated that the overarching goal of the student senate is to educate senators on policymaking and effective campus politics. “So going forward, before you bring a resolution, make sure that you’re talking to the administrator,” Bisner said. Review: This past term Notre Dame’s student senate has done a good job at educating students and getting administrators involved. One thing the senate could improve on for this next semester is using what they have learned to enact explicit change in Notre Dame’s community. Contact Heaven Carter at hcarter2@nd.edu
have a chance to write letters to adopted families. Another initiative Hanson was excited to start this semester was big board collaboration. Saint Mary’s has four major boards that all serve different missions, including SGA, Residence Hall Association (RHA), Student Diversity Board (SDB) and Student Activities Board (SAB). “This has been incredibly successful in developing relationships that promote leadership in all aspects on campus,” Hanson said. In discussion of tri-campus relations, Hanson brought up
Student union board
Students flock to SUB events By MAGGIE EASTLAND Associate News Editor
Demand for live and in person Student Union Board (SUB) events has surged this semester, and SUB adopted a new efficiency strategy and increased social media presence to streamline the event planning process. The Student Union Board was founded in 1967 to enhance the undergraduate student body experience through programs including movies, concerts, giveaways, festivals and similar events throughout the school year. Program directors Matt Hall and Lily Condodina both said SUB aims to foster connections between undergraduate students from all corners of campus with a focus on helping underclassmen meet new people. They also said SUB seeks to offer a diversity of events. “We’re trying to program to get everyone in the community involved and excited to be at Notre Dame, especially for the freshmen and sophomores,” Hall said. “A goal was just to bring different speakers and have different events that will keep students on campus engaged.” This semester, SUB has brought several big names to campus, including the indie band COIN, comedian Noel Miller and hypnotist Chris Jones. SUB also organized a spirit week, several giveaways, stress relievers, an outdoor trampoline event, a fall festival, six movies accompanied by conversations on representation and related topics and weekly Acousticafe concerts. Given high demand for the COIN concert and Noel Miller event, many students wanted to attend the events but were unable to get a ticket. Hall said tickets for Noel Miller sold out in just six minutes. Senior Kacie Shannon said she wanted to go to the COIN concert but missed the opportunity because she wasn’t
the controversy surrounding negative comments made against Saint Mary’s students on the social media platform YikYak in September and the community’s response. “We were all able to come together and stand up against sexual violence in our tricampus community — while raising money for the Family Justice Center and suicide awareness,” Hanson said. Vice president Salgado said it took time to get fully operational, but she is proud of all of SGA. “None of this would’ve been possible without the incredible
paying close attention to her Instagram feed. Compared to past years, Shannon said the window between the concert announcement and the opportunity to buy a ticket was shorter than usual. She believes the online format is not as fair and convenient as prior years when students would get in line to secure a ticket in person. “I remember in the past, it would be the first 200 people to get to the front of the line. I thought that was easier because it gave me a free chance ahead of time,” Shannon said. Even though COIN is a bigger name than SUB usually brings to campus for the fall concert, Condodina said she was happy with the concert. “One of our biggest events of the semester was bringing COIN, which was so much fun, a super long planning process, but it was an amazing experience to bring that band in and see so many students really, really excited about it,” Condodina said. Program directors say they are aware of the high demand, especially with the return of larger events this year but remain limited due to venue availability. “We knew of the demand, but it’s really hard with a lot of factors that are out of our control. We reached out to bigger venues to see if they were available back in September, and they weren’t,” Hall said. “We’re definitely aware of that and taking this as a learning lesson.” Before this semester, Hall and Condodina said SUB underwent a bit of reorganization that they hope will help them gather and understand information about past events to apply to future planning. Hall said that in the past, SUB did not keep careful track of numbers and statistics for events, but with their new strategy analyst in the finance committee, SUB will be able to better plan and predict demand. “One of the goals was just
executive and committee members that have been a part of SGA this year,” she said. Salgado noted a big part of program was the student-led events for the inauguration of College President Katie Conboy. “I think we pulled off the Inauguration extremely well with the collaboration of other big boards,” Salgado said. Review: During their term, the Hanson-Salgado administration has focused on building tri-campus relations and uplifting the voices of Saint Mary’s students, which is a crucial part of creating a more inclusive and welcoming campus community.
trying to consolidate and make sure that SUB was being as efficient as possible,” Matt said. “We’ve done a really good job at compiling all the information from previous events to help us for programming in the future.” When planniwng events, SUB seeks to put students first. This year, that means adding emphasis on the role of residence hall SUB representatives who have direct communication with students in their dorms. “We want to hear everyone’s input, especially hearing input from the dorm reps and have them talk to their dorm at their weekly hall councils,” Hall said. In an effort to hear from students, Hall said SUB has also been employing more Instagram polls to gauge student interest via social media. Their Instagram following recently grew to over 2,000 followers, largely boosted by buzz surrounding the COIN concert. Looking to the future, Hall and Condodina said SUB’s goal is to give as many students as possible the opportunity to attend SUB events, continue keeping up the new database that records various statistics like attendance numbers and cost per student for each event and responding to student feedback. “We’d like to show our appreciation to the student body for really showing up to events and joining in and giving us all the feedback they have,” Condodina said. Review: Following a year of strained student interactions, SUB’s events have fostered student connections and experiences as evidenced by the popularity of their events. While some students may have been left feeling excluded because of high demand, SUB’s new focus on qualitative event analysis has the potential to solve this problem in the future. Contact Maggie Eastland at meastlan@nd.edu
Hanson and Salgado have made progress in promoting student voices through collaboration among student leadership organizations. However they could benefit from increased engagement directly with the student body. While the administration has shown their commitment to the student body through large scale events, they would benefit from assessing the needs of students as they continue their term. Contact Crystal Ramirez at cramirez01@saintmarys.edu and Genevieve Coleman at gcoleman01@saintmarys.edu
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ndsmcobserver.com | Wednesday, DECEMBER 8, 2021 | The Observer
3
HALL PRESIDENTs council
HPC rebuilds community in residence halls By RYAN PETERS Associate News Editor
When seniors Caroline Cameron and Mabry Webb were presidents of Breen-Phillips and Cavanaugh Halls, respectively, during the 2020-21 school year, they were tasked with trying to foster community within their dorms while maintaining strict COVID-19 protocols. After hall presidencies filled with missed traditions and unforeseen circumstances, Cameron and Webb have focused their terms as Hall Presidents Council (HPC) cochairs on assisting each dorm’s executive boards in rebuilding their communities following the tumultuous 2020-21 year. To help accomplish this, Cameron and Webb have tried to create a fun and collaborative environment during weekly HPC meetings to encourage members to brainstorm creative initiatives and events and to work together. One of their primary means of doing so was by implementing “HPChat,” which starts with a question posed by Webb and Cameron aimed at provoking conversation to facilitate thought about diverse and different initiatives. “I think we’ve done a really
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taught them valuable skills about working with marginalized groups on campus. Also working with Bisner and Njomo is their chief of staff, senior Alix Basden. She has worked in student government all of her undergraduate years, starting with serving on FUEL (first undergraduate experience in leadership) her first year. She said her experience helps her when it comes to knowing the right people to talk to within the administration. The Njomo-Bisner administration has implemented many strategies in effort to ensure all student voices and needs are being amplified. One of those ways is through platforms that they call student
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many subgroups of Holy Cross students. Commuter students, Skidgel mentioned, face especially difficult challenges when trying to fit into the Holy Cross community. “A way to bridge that gap was we created commuter senators for Senate,” Skidgel said. These “commuter senators” now serve in the SGA Senate along with three senators per class. “Some of our events are really late in the day and that can
good job of allowing a fun space for the presidents to talk to each other and build relationships so that they can do events with different dorms,” Cameron said. Cameron said they have seen this collaboration result in several inter-dorm events that have already been hosted this year. Another priority during Webb and Cameron’s terms as HPC cochairs has been to update, clarify and improve the HPC by-laws and procedures. For instance, Webb said they have been working to make the scoring for hall of the year more clear and more objective. As currently constructed, 50% of the hall of the year scoring comes from the hall of the year presentation, 40% comes from monthly Rockne presentations from each hall that recap all of the events put on since the previous Rockne, 5% is discretionary points based on criteria decided upon at the beginning of the year by the co-chairs and the final 5% is determined by hall council visits. Cameron and Webb are working to update the scoring to make 2.5% of the scoring based on GreeNDot training, which was typically included in the discretionary scoring in previous years.
The two co-chairs decided they want to permanently incentivize GreeNDot and allow the discretionary scoring to be devoted to other initiatives. This year, the discretionary scoring is based on Cameron and Webb’s diversity and inclusion initiative. The initiative requires each dorm to have two “substantive” diversity and inclusion events each semester. Webb said a common example of a diversity and inclusion event is MiNDfulness training and that they created a rubric to clearly define what a substantive event looks like. They also are clarifying how hall council visits are scored. Cameron and Webb are specifying that the scoring is determined by 10% of the dorm attending the hall council in which the cochairs visit, for which they have two tries each semester. “[It’s a] very doable threshold, but the incentive that we’re trying to relay was we want you guys to have hall council and hall gov,” Cameron said. In another effort to make hall of the year scoring as objective as possible, Webb and Cameron started reviewing each of the Rockne scores themselves. The two social chairs of the HPC
grade each of the Rocknes, but the co-chairs decided they want to review the scores to ensure they are consistent and fair. “So we will go through every single Rockne at once and then make sure that the scores between the two social chairs are comparable,” Cameron said. “That’s why we review every single one of the Rocknes because we want everyone to have a fair chance. And even if it’s just changing your score by a point, like that matters to us.” Both Webb and Cameron said their biggest challenge has been rebuilding dorm culture back to pre-COVID levels and helping the hall executive boards get everyone involved, especially for sophomore presidents and vice presidents. Webb said there are basically two classes of first-years, in terms of dorm culture, because the restrictions on hall events last year prevented the current sophomore class from experiencing the full Notre Dame dorm culture. Although it has been difficult having only one full class of students on campus who know what Notre Dame dorm communities can be like in a more normal year, Webb said the HPC members are doing a good job of engaging their
communities with a variety of creative events. “I think that they’ve done a really good job of engaging their communities with a variety of programming,” Webb said, “which is what our biggest ask from them is — that they don’t just cater to the kids who are super social and go to the more social events, but also catering to the kids who have like a more spiritual interest or who are a little more introverted.” Review: Co-chairs Mabry Webb and Caroline Cameron have made strong efforts to offer each HPC member individual attention and provide insights into typical dorm culture following the unusual 2020-21 school year. They have done an excellent job of trying to make the hall of the year scoring as fair and transparent as possible. Overall, Webb and Cameron have reenergized HPC and appear to have facilitated a collaborative and fun environment, but need to continue to work on ensuring that every residence hall has hall council, as they said a small number of dorms currently do not hold hall council regularly.
voice summits. Basden explained that the summits are between students and faculty and cover several different topics. “We’ve partnered with the Office of the Provost and all of the deans to organize these large-scale meetings of a lot of different students and faculty members to talk about the ways that students and faculty view their educations,” she said. Basden said they have put on summits covering COVID-19 education policies and academic testing, and they hope to soon host one about campus policies. She said the summits are done in a collaboration with a student group called Design for America, which helps to “harness the power of students who are really motivated.” Bisner said that a huge part of
the successes of the fall semester was simply bringing students directly into conversations with administrators. For Bisner, one huge priority and accomplishment was improving accessibility issues, specifically the lack of braille on signs around campus, with the help of students from ND Access-ABLE. “[Njomo, Basden and I] presented to the Board of Trustees on accessibility issues, on issues affecting racially diverse students and LGBTQ students to ensure those student voices aren’t swept out of those big decisionmaking rooms but are brought into the center of those rooms,” Bisner said. Njomo highlighted the studentdriven initiative of bringing a service called Callisto to be available on campus. He and Basden explained that the service is meant
to be an anonymous sexual assault reporting system. “[Callisto] hinges on the assumption that most people offend in college, who commit sexual violence in college, will re-offend or are more likely to re-offend,” Basden said. “It takes unique identifiers of the person, the offender, and if another person reports the same offender, it matches the two of you, and then you get a legal options counselor that tells you all of the options that you have going forward.” Basden also said she is excited about the cooperation between the tri-campus student body leaders and how valuable it has been to Notre Dame’s leaders to get to know the others. Heading into the spring 2022 semester, the Njomo-Bisner cabinet will continue their focus on integrating marginalized voices into
important conversations as well as putting on campus-wide events to foster community, such as Back the Bend, a Taste of South Bend and a PRISM-sponsored pride celebration. Review: The Njomo-Bisner administration is focused on transparency and inclusion, especially for marginalized groups on campus, which is extremely important in the f ight to upgrade Notre Dame’s campus. Although the administration has done a phenomenal job at including more students in important conversations, they could further open the conversation to reduce stigma around standing up to Notre Dame’s potentially discriminatory policies.
be really hard for commuters,” Cole said. “So, we want to be able to accommodate them and find good times for events which more people from off campus can attend.” Cole was also proud of the work being done to connect Holy Cross students with administration and faculty. “I think that we really started to be able to do that in the past couple weeks”, she said. In the second half of their term, they aim to bring foundational change to the school. “We hope to accomplish something long-lasting to Holy
Cross,” Skidgel said. “We’re trying to raise the expectations of what it means to be a part of student government for years down the line.” Skidgel and Cole ran for president and vice-president to aid in the mission of Holy Cross. “I wanted to be as involved as I could at Holy Cross and make a difference in a way that was tangible and practical,” Cole said. Skidgel mentioned her own experience in adapting to college as inspiration to run for president. “I just remember being a freshman and it kind of being
difficult to figure out where you fit in and if you didn’t fit into any groups, what areas you could reach out to or be a part of,” Skidgel said. “I just wanted to be that senior to those freshmen, those incoming newbies, that were navigating their way through a new environment.” Review: Skidgel and Cole’s campaign platform took a traditional approach for Holy Cross SGA campaigns in aiming to build community but differed from many past campaigns in emphasizing community within Holy Cross rather than greater involvement in the tri-campus.
This vision is important, and especially admirable is an emphasis on involving commuter students more. It allows for Holy Cross students to feel at home within their own school, and one can sense a rising sense of belonging within the campus community. The team, however, would serve students well by making themselves more available to the student body and hosting more events in the second semester for Holy Cross students to participate in.
Contact Ryan Peters at rpeters5@nd.edu
Contact Bella Laufenberg at ilaufenb@nd.edu
Contact Liam Price at lprice3@nd.edu
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The observer | Wednesday, DECEMBER 8, 2021 | ndsmcobserver.com
InSports FOCUS
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE KLAERS | PHOTOS BY ANNA MASON