From the Editors:
Each week, The Bi-College News publishes 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.
Executive Board Meeting 12/12
Friday, December 12, 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:
Guests: Anjali Agarwal, Zoe Hartmann
Next Meeting: TBD – Next Semester!
Put a fun quote here!
- Call to Order
- Roll Call
- Adoption of Agenda
- Fords Form
- Old Business:
- Is there PANA housing update?
- New Business 1: New Elections Coordinator & Committee Appointments Schedule
- New Business 2: Discussing the Latest from Bryn Mawr
- New Business 3: Feedback on Draft Recognized Student Organization Recognition, Review, and Removal Policy
- New Business 4: We love you so much, happy end of year!!
- Adjournment
Call to Order
Sarah: I call this meeting to order at 4:15pm.
Victoria: More than half of Executive 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
Victoria: Guests, please say your names for the minutes.
Zoe: I’m Zoe, I’m the Treasurer Librarian and usually here.
Anjali: I’m Anjali, Junior Rep to the Board of Managers.
Old Business
Ben Flig: Do we have any updates on PANA House Proposal?
Anjali: All signs point to probably. There seems to be not a lot of concern. Notably though, representatives from the Provost’s Office believe that it is a little problematic to remove faculty accommodation from the housing stock, so they’re asking for a new one to be added if going through with this. They’re floating the idea of 19 Railroad being faculty housing. That was the only comment, but it wasn’t contingent on that. CSPC will make its recommendation to Senior Staff on January 8th.
Caroline: Echoing Anjali, Scott had also shared with Jonathan, Julia, and I, that he Diamond and Amy presented and felt that it was well-received. He thought that the student statement and petition letter was really helpful, and yeah, that they’ll continue to revisit the topic at the next meeting and advance a recommendation to Senior Staff.
Sarah: We’re very excited for this. We want to thank everyone who put the work into the letter and advocacy.
New Business 1
Oliver: We’ll send an email later tonight calling for nominations. The most important is the Dean of College Search Committee, which will have to be run over Winter Break, so we’ll make it due two days after finals. They have to be appointed Jan 10. The rest are the Committee of Admissions, which is new, the Existing Curriculum Committee and the remaining officer roles.
Ben Flig: And we need to elect a new Officer of Student Life since the election failed.
New Business 2
Sarah: There was an event at BMC called the Big Cheese, which some of you could attend. It was an interesting event. It highlighted the tension at BMCs campus between the Dean, Presidents Office, and the student body. It seems there is a lot of concern regarding different issues like security on campus. It seems that there’s also difficulty meeting between Senior Staff and student government bodies. It also seems that BMC is not happy with recent student journalism. There’s disagreement between what counts as facts pertaining to PIs and campus security and the experiences of many students are being disregarded, to put it plainly.
Esenia recently had a meeting with Lillian Burroughs where they agreed to mark the unmarked security vehicles that have been monitoring their campus, which they said they would not do at the Big Cheese event, but after the SGA President had conversations, they will now do that. Students still feel afraid since there are still private security vehicles on campus with people they do not know. Not to mention there are cameras. There was a comparison made at BMC that they are trying to play catch up with their peer institutions by installing cameras. This is concerning since from my knowledge there are not as many cameras here, compared to at BMC. The security here is much different from BMC, so it’s not fair to compare it as catching up. I encourage you to check in on your BMC friends in supporting student goals to meet student safety needs and protect journalism on BMC campus.
Ben Flig: Additionally, as we know, Nikki Young is moving to a faculty role as a tenured professor. In that sense we’ll be having a lot of new Senior Staff. As we move forward as students committed to our rights to govern ourselves, we should remember the things admin can do when they believe students cannot govern themselves.
New Business 3
Sophia: This is a policy that Student Life has been working on for recognized student organizations, and describes the process through which suspensions, reprimands, and removals can occur for repeated policy violations. . This includes basic information of what a club needs to have to be called a student organization, but it also talks about how adjudications would be run for repeated breaks from policy. This is something that would be beneficial to have in place since having a process to deal with moments when policy is broken doesn’t currently exist and would be great. We want to present this to General Student Body at the start of the next semester so that it has all of Students’ Council’s seal of approval, but we wanted to give Executive Board a chance to look over it first.
Ben PF: It’s not finalized yet.
Grant: Some thoughts. First on the people on the off-cycle review committee. We should be more specific about those bodies.
Oliver: If it’s any three members, it should be clear how that’s formed and made up.
Grant: Can you explain more in regards to what suspension is and who would be making that decision?
Ben PF: It would be the review committee.
Sophia: If it’s severe enough, it would be done by that committee.
Zoe: Who would the interim suspension be implemented by?
Sophia: That offcycle committee.
Anjali: Should there be a duration for the suspension?
Sophia: It would be until full review. It would be useful to put a full timeline for full review, but it can be circumstantial so that can be difficult.
Sarah: When do you want us to give you thorough feedback by?
Sophia: Some point over break would be great.
Ben PF: We wanted to approve it in the first General Body meeting after break.
Sophia: We’ll share it with everyone else in General Body soon.
Ben Flig: We know that as things stand right now, many administrative people are great. What if down the line we have staff who decide to suspend activist groups?
Sophia: That’s part of the reason why the review board is mostly made up of Students’ Council, so as to prevent that. That section also needs to be added to.
Ben Flig: Would it be possible for administrators to temporarily suspend and then jump around with scheduling meetings, and there wouldn’t be anything we could say about that?
Sophia: We will put in a timeline for that, so that doesn’t happen.
Grant: The decisions should be made in consensus too.
Sophia: We agree with putting in that decisions need to be made by consensus and will write that in.
Ben Flig: My whole thought on this, the most important thing is that this is narrowly constructed so that a club that violates budgeting policies in certain ways would be suspended but that clubs who engage in activities that are deemed odious by Student Life would not be suspended.
Sarah: I also want to be careful about the timing this is released. I don’t want students to be concerned over student activists getting shut down. We don’t want that at all.
Sophia: I think we could release a statement along with that. After it’s voted on I want to send it to the student body in an email. In that email we could emphasize that there have been past issues and detail that typically the violations are regarding budgeting not really student activity or activism.
Zoe: We can emphasize this has been a policy that has been in the works for a while.
Ben Flig: You can also say that we’ve had problems with violations broadly of timeline and food policy, and explain that those violations are not harms to the community but things done odiously with money.
Ben PF: We should just make very clear that instituting this policy is to regulate issues with budgeting policy, not anything else.
Sarah: We could tie this into our goal with fiscal transparency.
Anjali: I’m worried about releasing this before there is a food policy by catering.
Sophia: There is to be no food policy from catering …. ever….because….Dining Center…
Anjali: How will clubs know if they are violating policy, if there is no continuous policy?
Sophia: I think we could specify that it’s for policy that is explicitly written.
Ben Flig: They need to assume best intent.
New Business 4
Ben Flig: Good luck with finals!
Sarah: Everyone will be hearing from us about their projects soon for General Body. With that this meeting is adjourned at 4:57pm. This is the last Executive Board of the year.
