Student Government President J Hudson signed an executive order last week to form a committee that will appraise SG’s internal operations and structure.
After nearly one year of revising multiple SG governing documents, the committee will “step out of the documents and look at the organization itself,” Hudson said.
The committee was inspired by the changes Hudson and the other Southeastern Conference exchange participants hope to implement. Hudson will serve on the committee, along with SG Senate Speaker Brooksie Bonvillain, University Court Chief Justice Danielle Rushing and some junior and senior staff members.
Hudson, Bonvillain and Rushing agreed they would like to add a “student hearing panel” dimension to the judicial branch.
Hudson said he would like to see the panel used for election violation purposes, with students uninvolved in SG and faculty sitting on it.
“We have a very strong judicial branch right now, but can you truly have a judicial branch involved in Student Government that’s unbiased?” Hudson asked about having University Court justices deliberating on election transgressions.
Bonvillain and Rushing said they want to establish an academic hearing panel.
“The idea Brooksie and I had of doing the academic hearing panel would be for students to appeal their grades,” Rushing said. “They could come to us as an appellate court. Sometimes administrators and instructors don’t see the full side from a student’s perspective.”
Bonvillain said “it’s been a goal” of hers to create an academic hearing panel, and Rushing said she thinks it could promote judicial branch visibility.
Hudson said he hopes to reform the other branches of SG as well.
“A lot of times the legislative branch spends time trying to plan events, and they don’t go well or they don’t happen,” he said. “This is because our senators don’t have office hours. They need to spend more time talking to students and in office hours.”
Bonvillain disagreed.
“Since I’ve been in the Senate in the fall of 2007, there’s been a bill to abolish office hours,” she said. “The bill finally passed. There was no way to enforce office hours. There was just no method of keeping track, and it was always going to be an honor system. That’s why we adopted student outreach policy, where we need to go to two student outreach events.”
Hudson said he also hopes to change executive branch account stipulations to unlock money that could be spent on students.
“There’s a lot within the [executive] branch that I would go back and change after looking at the SEC schools,” he said.
 
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Contact Andrea Gallo at [email protected]