The Board of Trustees — the council of Stevens administration, friends, and alumni is the highest level of management of the University — has recently been investigating ways to improve itself. One of the items they identified was transparency, since most of the student body is ignorant of the Board’s activities. Another item that they identified was student accessibility. A few members of the Board are working with the Student Government Association to provide students with a better line of communication so that the Board is more immediately aware of issues that the student body is having.
Stevens has changed immensely in just a handful of years, with more changes on the way. Since 2011, various initiatives have skyrocketed the demand for a Stevens education; undergraduate applications more than doubled by 2017, for example. We are continuing to grow and expand, which will no doubt lead to some unforeseen circumstances that may require the Board’s attention. Should that be the case, a more direct line of communication with the Board will provide a faster turnaround on these issues.
Last semester, the Board began to investigate ways to improve its transparency. This semester, it delegated the process to the Young Alumni, two recent graduates of Stevens who are elected to the Board with the intention of being the student body’s voice, while still maintaining a degree of separation due to confidentiality issues. Olivia Schreiber ’18 and Matthew Hunt ’17, the two Young Alumni, met to brainstorm ideas on how to increase transparency from the Board. One of the earliest problems they identified was that there are still a handful of unknowns about the nature of the issue. They reached out to the SGA and proposed a survey to be distributed to the student body.
Rami Kammourh and Lucas Gallo, the Vice President of Operations and the President of the SGA, respectively, saw this survey as an opportunity to push for increased communication between students and the Board. “One of our goals as a ticket when we ran for President and Vice President of Operations was to improve the relationship the SGA has with upper administration,” says Gallo. “We just wanted a way to provide student input/feedback to higher ups in the school. That was the overall goal.”
The survey, sent out in September, provides unsurprising results. Of the 455 responses, over 98% either had no or some idea of what the Board of Trustees does, yet 93% also claimed that it is important or somewhat important for students to be aware of what the Board of Trustees is doing.
Kammourh, Gallo, and Schreiber met and discussed a variety of methods by which to increase both transparency and student representation on the Board of Trustees. “My position is, by its very nature, a step removed from the current student body,” stated Schreiber, who graduated last semester. They agreed to establish regular meetings between the Cabinet and the Young Alumni. As a measure to prevent turnover in the SGA Cabinet from being a potential issue in the future, they decided to make these meetings officially written into the bylaws of the SGA.
The bill, approved on Monday, October 8, reads as follows: “The Cabinet shall offer to meet with the trustees defined in Section 2.4.4. of the Amended and Restated Bylaws of the Trustees of the Stevens Institute of Technology, either electronically or in-person, within ten days of each regularly scheduled or special meeting of the Board of Trustees. The Secretary shall prepare an agenda for these meetings. At the meeting, the Secretary must record minutes. The Secretary must make these minutes available to the Student Body within seventy-two hours.”
Kammourh and Gallo are hopeful that more change is on the way. When asked about student presentations to the Board, Gallo replied, “For the first time last semester, the SGA presented to President Farvardin’s cabinet. I can totally see, if it’s not in the near future, then definitely sometime soon… There was no reason in the past for the administration to trust our mechanisms of government.” Kammourh added, “That was what Matt Hunt spent his entire presidency fighting, was proving to the administration that we are a legitimate governing body for the students. It’s hard to convince them of that when we accomplished very little and we were just budgeting back then.”
Schreiber echoes this hopeful note. She believes that one possibility is to have smaller meetings between students and Trustees to have the most direct line of communication possible. For example, she was instrumental in arranging the interview between The Stute and Virginia Ruesterholz, former Chair of the Board. She strongly agrees with the Board’s move to increase transparency and supports the distribution of regular bulletins with information from the Board meetings, like the one sent out on October 10.
As for next steps, Kammourh and Gallo believe that they can draft a proposal to the Board for permission to have student representation on Board committees. They agree that an undergraduate student representative on the Board itself is unnecessary and, in fact, presents a problem due to conflict of interest, a sentiment Schreiber also, independently, voiced. The representation could either be a student member of the committee or presentations by students to specific committees for certain issues. The more immediate steps, according to Schreiber, are to have a meeting between the Young Alumni and the SGA Cabinet to discuss the Board’s reception of the survey results and to brainstorm other ideas for providing student feedback.
Note: Olivia Schreiber is not allowed to speak for the Board of Trustees and offers only her own perspectives and goals. However, the credit for the Board’s transparency initiative is attributed to the Board as a whole, since it is a collective effort.
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