From the Editors:
Each week, The Bi-College News will be publishing the Students’ Council meeting minutes released in the Students’ Council Newsletter. These meeting minutes come directly to the inboxes of all Haverford students; in the interests of making the minutes and the activities of the College’s student government as accessible and transparent as possible, they are likewise published here, where the Bryn Mawr community, along with Bi-Co faculty, staff, alumni, and others can see the Council‘s discourse. The Haverford Clerk has been publishing these minutes in a series since 2019; head to their website to read past releases.
Due to Plenary on 11/9, no General Body Meeting took place this week.
Friday, November 7, 2025; 4:15 – 5:15 p.m., – GEST 102
Members Present: Ben Fligelman, Sarah Weill-Jones, Oliver Wilson, Grant DeVries, Ben Perez-Flesler, Sophia Goss, Victoria Haber, Caroline Yao
Members Absent: N/A
Guests: N/A
Next Meeting: Friday, November 14; 4:15 – 5:15 p.m., – GEST 102
“I want to use Grant’s gavel.” – Oliver Wilson
- Call to order
- Roll Call
- Adoption of Agenda
- Fords Form
- Old Business:
- PLENARY CHECK IN
- How are we in terms of merch + snacks? + IKEA furniture?
- Facilities Fund Updates from the Co-Secretaries
- Update on Club Sports conversations with Danielle Lynch
- PLENARY CHECK IN
- New Business 1: Updates from Member Check-Ins
New Business 2:Updates from meeting with Wendy- New Business 3: Updates from Respective Committees
- Issues involved with the Students’ Event Accessibility Committee
- Adjournment
Call to Order
Sarah: I call this meeting to order at 4:17pm.
Victoria: More than half of Exec board is in attendance. Quorum has been met.
Sarah: I move to adopt the agenda. I also move to approve the minutes. Any concerns? The agenda is adopted and the minutes are approved.
Community Comment & Fords Form
Victoria: There are no guests today. The Fords Form are as follows:
“I think there should be a words/length cap on Weekly Consensus submissions. The emails have been clipped for length the last few weeks, which makes the last few submissions much less likely to be read. Even if the email doesn’t automatically shorten, people are less likely to read about all the great events and information if they have to scroll through half a page for each one.”
Victoria: I get it and I completely agree. Recently it’s been really long. Staff often have really long messages for students. If people feel this way, I’m down to enforce a word limit. I just didn’t want to if others didn’t think it was a problem.
Oliver: How are you collecting them right now?
Victoria: On Google Docs. We’ll put a word or character limitation on the form.
Old Business
Sarah: How are we in terms of merch and snacks? We went to IKEA and purchased copious amounts of snacks. We tested one of the couches we wanted to buy and Chris, our Officer of Athletics, assembled a team of athletes to help us transport. We appreciate his efforts in this ordeal!
We love Chris!
I believed Julie picked up the merch. I have a big box of old Haverfest shirts that I will bring too, first come first serve at Plenary.
Sophia: We have pretty much everything now in terms of snacks. We’ll be going Sunday morning or Saturday to get veggies, fruit, maybe cheesesticks.
Sarah: When is the furniture being picked up?
Sophia: Saturday.
Sarah: Great, on to the next agenda item.
Sophia: I had a quick conversation with Chris and he was talking to Danielle about a program to help athletes come to Plenary. The team with the highest number of attendees will get catered food. He wanted to check if there were any policy issues around this.
Oliver: I think on paper it is inequitable to have athletes get access to catered food, but it’s not coming out of our budget, it’s coming out of athletics’. Additionally, if it gets more athletes to come then I am in favor.
Ben Flig: To me, it doesn’t seem that inequitable because technically organizations can use their own budget to sponsor something like this.
Sophia: Most other organizations don’t have their own budget though.
Ben Flig: Yes, but if Student Life wanted to do that then they could as well, in addition to individual departments or something. I think it’s a great idea and I hope it goes forward.
Sophia: I agree.
Sarah: We would hope that this acts as a domino effect that incentives other departments to do this.
Ben Flig: In terms of actual Plenary logistics, how are we feeling?
Sophai: I feel good!
Grant: I’ll remember to bring it. I’ll print out name tags for everyone up at the table.
Sarah: Can we hear about the Facilities Fund?
Caroline: I met with Don on Wednesday to chat about the potential ideas students had. We already addressed that the Union Crypt renovation was not going to be possible in a General Body meeting. Instead, he brought forth the idea he and Scott had to renovate where the Old Lunt Cafe used to be. We thought to make more dance/performance practice spaces for students. The old Lunt Cafe is a space behind where the typical Lunt basement party space is. He mentioned that Victoria and I could follow up with him to do a walk-through of the space.
Zoe: Will people just have access to Lunt then?
Caroline: We’re going to follow up on the logistics of that with Scott Wojciechowski. The best thing about this is that it’ll fall within our $35,000 budget, meaning that we’ll have some money left over for a mural — another idea that students had and we also agree! We’ll get to do these two ideas once we confirm logistics with Scott.
Victoria: In the Facilities Fund submissions page, some students left specific mural ideas, but instead of just going with those ideas, we want to open up submissions again to get all student input.
Sarah: Great! Moving on. Grant can you enlighten us on your conversation with Danielle Lynch?
Grant: That meeting is next week. Next week, I will have more information. It should be exciting, and the plan is to come up with a document that will be helpful for both athletes and club athletes.
Sarah: Okay! We’ll move on to new business.
New Business: Updates from Member Check-Ins
Ben Flig: Sarah and I have been meeting with everyone on Students’ Council throughout this past week. It’s been going really well. We’ve been hearing a lot of positive things. We’ve emphasized the importance of institutional memory passing down information from old to new members in the same position. For example Julie and Grant have been on Students’ Council for a long time.
Sarah: Overall, most people have a good work life balance this year! I’m happy we’re doing this.
New Business: Updates from Respective Committees
Sarah: I would like to hear updates from people who are serving on committees to open this discussion. I can start. I’m on the Student Event Accessibility Committee (SEAC). This year has been difficult and has felt disorganized. There’s been a divide between faculty and student goals. We’ve only now started to get a footing on the frequency of when we are meeting. We have some staff members on this committee as well. We came to the conclusion that we’ll meet once a month, which students are not satisfied with. I wish we could meet more. The faculty and staff have decided that some of those monthly meetings will be for them only to do logistics around accessibility on the backend, which we appreciate in their commitment to access but wish there was more student input on.The second meeting will then be about student event accessibility. That puts us in a difficult position. It feels like this was a decision made on our behalf. But the students are meeting weekly regardless to ensure the creation of accessible versions of policies and training. For example, so students t know how to abide by the posting policy. It’s been challenging to figure out how to reach an improved system of communication for this committee. I don’t think meeting once a month is sufficient to create progress. While I appreciate their closed faculty and staff meeting, I think that should be outside of our SEAC committee so it doesn’t eat into our time.
Oliver: Student Employment Task Force has only met once. It was productive. There’s a lot of moving pieces that happened outside of that too. We’ll chat more about that soon.
Grant: The Dining Advisory Committee (DAC) is doing fine. For us, it’s better to have student only meetings and then liaison meetings with the DC staff, so that we can talk about ideas and then circle back to pitching them to DC. That’s why we meet with Tom every other week. The Nest Task Force is also going well.
The other thing is that there are committees being formed above us, but the Dean knows we want to be a part of that. The committee that’s being formed above us will be addressing issues that the Nest has been trying to address since its creation. The DAC is addressing both the Nest, DC Hours, food quality, etc. They’re trying to centralize everything. Also we will appoint a student to the Board of Managers Appointment Committee.
Oliver: We’re gonna ramp up another stage of our work in managing committees by sending out a survey to get reports on committees. In response to that, we’ll see if we need to make any changes.
Caroline: I’m on the Existing Curriculum Committee (ECC). It’s been going well. I’m on that with Jack. We’ve been sitting in as student voices to offer input regarding courses and curriculums. I talked about this last week in the general body, but I’m also an Alumni Association Executive Committee (AAEC) representative and that was great. I’m also on Faculty Affairs and Planning Committee (FAPC). We meet bi-weekly with Maud and it’s also going well.
Sophia: I’m on the Administrative Advisory Committee (AAC). We have another meeting next week. We haven’t gotten deep into the meat of things yet. Based on the packet I’ve looked at for next week’s meeting, that one might be more intense in terms of budgeting. We’ve had some preliminary thoughts and it’s been well.
Ben PF: I co-chair the Committee for Student Community, Agency, and Responsibility (CSCAR). It’s going great. We’re bringing our six plenary resolutions this Sunday! We’re very excited for that. After that, more generally we’re looking at ways to reinvigorate the attitude on the Code and further build student agency and community.
Ben Flig: I go to the Campus Advisory Committee (CAC) as an informal member. Most meetings are about answering people’s questions about what has happened on campus. For instance, when there was the big power outage last spring, there were a lot of questions about that. Typically people from Campus Safety answer those questions. There’s been discussion on how to make party spaces safer. The CAC is really good at keeping students engaged with what’s been happening, but there is more of a weak point on discussion of action points on how to increase safety for students when things arise.
Otherwise, any other updates? Great, I adjourn this meeting at 4:54pm.
