Free Assembly
students pay for the university, but may not use its space
Want to have a meeting, party, or event on campus? Good luck! Unlike nearly any other university, students are not permitted to directly reserve any room on campus. One person controls all space on campus: the little-known Mary Doctor. Students — including your humble Student Government Officers, who plan more events than almost anyone else on campus — are never permitted to speak to Mary Doctor.
Meetings of “just students” are not officially permitted. If you want a meeting or event, you must fill in forms, and have a faculty or staff sponsor. The sponsor — not you — must submit forms to Ms. Doctor. She in turn eventually replies with “what rooms are available.” You never know what else is happening that day. You never know the reasons for rooms being unavailable. There is no online schedule to check rooms.
You are not able to plan the style or size of your event depending on what rooms ARE available on the date you want. It takes a day or two to get a reply, and because YOU don’t get it (you advisor does), you might take days or weeks to plan an event. If you try to get a room fast, due to rapidly changing events, you will almost certainly fail.
If you have any question at all, even after scheduling an event, you still may not commiunicate with the room scheduler. For example, USS sometimes has written to Mary Doctor to ask what time we could set up a party that was already planned. She replied that we are not allowed to speak to her even on that question and must go through our staff or faculty mouthpiece.
NYU lets any of its students reserve a room in Bobst! How convenient for them!
freedom of association denied
In February, announcing the temporary continuance of 65 Fifth Ave as student space, President Bob Kerrey wrote to Announce Announce, saying “65 Fifth Avenue space may continue to be reserved according to established reservation procedures.” Note his words — even this empty space is mired in bureaucracy.
related to lack of student center
It is bad enough that students are treated as second-class users of the university we pay for, but it is compounded by the fact that there is no student center (another part of our agenda). If there were a student center, meetings could happen there and — we sure hope — the space would be managed by the students.
current system is also inefficient
The lack of a centralized online system for any room reservations (shouldn’t the uss president be able to plan what we want? Do we trust anybody at all?) leads to other problems. USS has been scheduled for rooms that were double-booked, and even the University Diversity Committee was kicked from its meeting room.
what should be done
University Student Senate recommends at least the following:
(a) The registered leaders of major student organizations (USS, divisional governments, etc) should be able to reserve rooms directly with the room scheduler.
(b) The schedules for major university spaces (Wollman, Theresa Lang, Tishman, etc) should be on an online system, and an online system should be developed for anyone (students, faculty, staff) to propose events.
(c) An automated online system and policies should be developed to enable scheduling events and meetings, perhaps with different rules depending on who is planning the event — this is particularly important due to the current number of people who have to sign off on any event’s paperwork.
(d) Students must be allowed have many kinds of meetings of their own accord and responsibility, without requiring a staff overseer.
University Student Senate, Fall 2008
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* Note: there has been no change in the one year since this statement was written.