While the Campus Student Election Commission already resigned prior to the Illinois Student Senate’s Wednesday hearing to remove members, Vice President-External Carey Ash said that the senate still needed to follow through with the charges against the commission.

“If someone doesn’t do their job, you ought to fire them,” Senator Calvin Lear, graduate student, said. 

The senate was in favor of passing each charge against the commission, which ranged from failing to properly hear a formal complaint on the validity of the election to the commission not submitting a budget to Shao Guo, Student Organization Resource Fee Board chairman. 

“The behavior and the whispers that we’re all hearing about what they may have done or may not have done just shows how tragic it is that they handled it this way,” Joseph Moseley, senator and junior in ACES, said.

The organizational meeting, which elects officers for the senate, is now in limbo as the CSEC previously hosted this meeting. The vice chancellor for Student Affairs and ISS is working to reconstruct a new group. 

President’s Search Committee Nominations

The senate reviewed four student-submitted applications to serve on the search committee for the next University president. The senate forwarded three candidates to the vice chancellor for Student Affairs: Jaylin McClinton, sophomore in LAS; Mitch Dickey, sophomore in LAS; and Xavier Ramirez, a senior who plans to attend graduate school. 

“I saw this as a very rare opportunity for students to decide a very important member of the University,” Dickey said. “We are choosing someone who will be the leader … who will outlast us.”

Support for Open Textbooks and the Affordable College Textbooks Act

The Illinois Student Senate’s Committee on Internal Affairs will appoint one individual to coordinate with the Office of the Provost and the Urbana-Champaign Senate Committee on Educational Policy to explore methods for adoption of open textbooks. 

Additionally, the Affordable College Textbooks Act, which currently sits in the House of Representatives, will create a competitive grant program allowing institutions to adopt pilot programs utilizing open educational resources, available online. 

The senate would like to explore methods to incentivize and encourage faculty members to adopt open textbooks at an appropriate time.

Senator Matt Hill, sophomore in LAS, hopes that general education courses, such as Physics 101, adopt these textbooks to help students save money. 

Megan can be reached at [email protected] and @MeganAsh_Jones.