The Pomona College Board of Trustees approved a motion March 5 to add four students to various board committees. The motion began as a recommendation made by the
Student-Trustee Task Force on Campus Community
Communication, which was formed in December.
The task force, which includes five trustees, eight students and Dean of Students Miriam Feldblum, released a report March 1 that included this recommendation.
“Adding students to
the Board of Trustees committees will enable student voices to be heard
more fully,” said Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) President Nate Brown PO ’12, a member of the task force.
“I think long term planning decisions of the college will have a little more student input.”
“The charge of the
task force is to increase communication between trustees and students,”
Feldblum said. “One of the motivations for these additional students was
to increase the variety or diversity of student
voices on board issues.”
One additional student
will be added to the board’s Student Affairs Committee, one additional
student to the board’s Academic Affairs Committee and two students to
the board’s Finance Committee, which currently
has no student members.
“The increased number
of students can, in practical ways, make sure that there’s always
students around the table in these sorts of conversations,” Feldblum
said.
The students will be
voting members of the committees, but not of the Board of Trustees as a
whole. However, the committees tend to work by consensus, and the board
tends to approve, with minimal changes, anything
that makes it out of committee, Brown said.
Three of the
additional positions will be at-large positions, elected by the student
body as a whole. The ASPC vice president of finance will hold one of the two
new positions on the board’s Finance Committee.
All students sitting
on board committees will also be members of the board’s Student Affairs
Committee, which is separate from the faculty’s Student Affairs
Committee. Previously, only the ASPC president sat
on the board’s Student Affairs Committee.
Currently, many ASPC
senators sit on board committees that correspond to their positions. Both Brown and Feldblum said that they hope the addition of at-large representatives will help increase the
diversity of voices heard.