Student Senators unanimously passed a bill re-allocating college and school Senate seats for Spring 2013 elections. The Senate also passed a bill to keep the district seats for the Fall 2013 elections the same.
Students in the College of Journalism and Communications will be represented by two senators instead of one. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Pharmacy will each lose one senator, making their total numbers six and one, respectively. The undergraduate freshman class will add another senator for a total of four.
After the meeting, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Cayman Weimer, said the numbers he used for both bills were based on data from Fall 2011.
Weimer said evaluating the seats happens annually, and the numbers are always old.
“There’s no efficient way except for doing it all at once,” he said.
A representative from the Gator Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People spoke to the Senate in support of a referendum asking students if they want to rename the Reitz Union after Virgil Hawkins. Hawkins was an African-American who was denied entrance into UF in 1949 due to his race.
Student Nailah Summers said that “as a black, Latina and queer woman,” she could not turn a blind eye to J. Wayne Reitz’s history of racism and homophobia described in the referendum.
“[It was] not OK 50 years ago, and it’s not OK today,” she said.
Contact Samantha Shavell at sshavell@alligator.org.
Student Senate President Logan Harrison presides over the Student Senate meeting Tuesday night in the Reitz Union.
