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Culture not a Costume
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Before last weekend’s Halloween festivities (and transports) got underway, the ASPC Senate had a conversation about the “Culture not a Costume” movement that aimed to bring awareness of stereotyping in Halloween costumes to the Claremont Colleges. As many of you probably noticed, flyers were posted around campus encouraging people to be respectful with their costume decisions and during the meeting, senators agreed to spread the word via Facebook and Twitter along with the flyers. Overall, the movement seemed to work pretty well. However, given the popularity of the costume, a few groups representing “Binders full of Women” expressed that they felt pretty marginalized.
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Big Brother is Watching (your unlocked bikes)
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President Sarah Appelbaum announced to the senate last Friday that Campus Safety will be visiting in the near future to discuss new campus security measures including potentially installing security cameras in areas where there are bike racks. Due to the heightened number of bike thefts this year, Campus Safety has sent numerous emails to the student body, encouraging students to not only purchase U-locks instead of cable locks but also to actually use said U-locks on their bicycles (tricky concept, eh?). Although nothing is definitively confirmed as of yet, rest assured at least 3 dozen unlocked bikes will probably be stolen by the time anything actually happens.
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Broken Van Blues
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The Senate then moved on to discuss the request from the Draper Center for funds to purchase a new van, since the old one was a Chrysler (and consequently broke down after a few uses). The Draper Center presented ASPC with some price quotes on used vans ranging from $19,000-23,000 and the decision was then presented to the Senate to either deny all funding, partially fund the van, or to fund the van completely. A quick straw poll showed the majority of senators were in favor of partially funding the van (around $10,000), but after a lengthy conversation senators decided to use ASPC reserve funds to purchase a new van. In recent years, reserve funds had really only been used for the Coop Store renovation and to cover the $60,000 deficit (or roughly 3 Draper Center vans worth of losses1) the Coop Fountain experienced last year.
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Get @Me
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The Senate Briefs™ are still on Twitter (despite the obvious appeal of moving to Google+) so grab your smart-phones/laptops/dial-up modems and follow @NotASPCSenate for live-tweeting during all senate meetings and occasional fun updates about all Pomona-related news2.
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1Math is fun!
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2Pomona-related news is usually not that fun
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Associated Students of Pomona College posted flyers around the Pomona campus in support of the “Culture not a Costume” campaign. ASPC was not involved in posting the flyers. We regret this error.