SALP Advisory Board holds first meeting since Dec. 11

While the SALP Advisory Board met Wednesday to review its bylaws and discuss how it should handle complaints from a few student groups, it was one of only a few times the board had congregated since September.

Charged with advising Student Activities and Leadership Programs (SALP), overseeing its operation and providing it with guidance, the advisory board was re-established in July 2007, but the last few months have been tumultuous.

The advisory board has had trouble meeting its quorum of five voting members—the minimum number of members that must be present to hold a meeting—and former chair Emma Duncan said many members were unresponsive to e-mails.

Aside from failing to meet quorum several other times, the advisory board failed to meet from October to December 2008.

“This is actually how a lot of committees function, especially when you’re talking about student committees,” Duncan said. “Here the small number of students that actually care are stretched so thin.”

Duncan, who also works for the Rearguard, chaired the advisory board since its inception in July 2007, but resigned in October 2008 because “the return wasn’t worth the effort at the time.”

After the advisory board’s first stint during the 2007–08 academic year, which Duncan said was pretty productive in laying the groundwork, Duncan and two other members of the eight-person board stayed around for a second term in 2008¬–09.

The board’s first meeting with its new members was in July 2007, and Duncan chaired again. Duncan said the summer months went well, however, member commitment began to wane as September approached.

Duncan said that the clearest indication that the group was in trouble came when no members showed up to represent the board at Portland State’s annual Party in the Park in early October. She said that a major factor in the disinterest stemmed from dissention among members concerning the group’s primary function.

Those members serving a second term—Duncan, Nick Walden Poublon and Dalton Higgenbottom—felt the advisory board should focus on fielding student groups’ complaints and then relaying them to SALP, Duncan said, while some of the new members thought the board should seek more enforcement power over SALP.

“If you can’t communicate and compromise then you are never going to get anything done,” Duncan said.

Student body president Hannah Fisher assumed the role of chair in December, and said that while the disagreement about what the group’s chief purpose is has played some role in the board’s inability to meet regularly, she believes the more significant issue is members are too busy with other obligations.

“The reason why is that we are dealing with students that are really, really busy,” Fisher said.

Fisher called the disagreements “healthy,” and said that while the appearance may be that the board has endured a hectic year, it has been more effective than ever before.

On the advisory board’s Dec. 11 meeting, a portion of the Multicultural Cluster, which contained 10 student groups, came to the board to express their concerns that SALP was not effectively working for them.

Fisher said this was the first time a student grous had approached the board, as they stated that their primary concerns regarded how SALP’s overall structure was too bureaucratic and the advising that they were receiving was unsatisfactory.

While Fisher admitted that the advisory board has a long road ahead of it, she is optimistic about how effective it will be in the end.

“The reason I’m walking away from these meetings OK,” Fisher said, “is that I literally see SALP changing before my eyes.”