USG approves communication, advocacy plans

At Tuesday night’s Undergraduate Student Government Senate meeting, representatives of the USG communications and advocacy branches discussed the projects their teams will be working on this year. The senators also passed revisions to the elections code and debated allowing the student body to vote on referendums.

Senior Director of Communications Luke Southwell-Chan announced the projects the communications branch is currently working on, including a Pac-12-wide weeklong sexual assault awareness campaign. The communications branch will also work to form relationships with local vendors and increase USG’s social media presence.

USG Vice President Austin Dunn and Advocacy Branch Senior Advisor Morgan Monahan introduced the advocacy branch’s goals for the semester, including improving the WiFi and expanding food options in libraries. The projects Dunn will manage personally are active shooter training for students, vaccinations funding, implementing a fall break and working with the Title IX coordinator. In addition to developing new sexual assault prevention initiatives, Dunn said that he would like to refine the role of the Title IX coordinator to maximize her effectiveness.

“The director of Title IX also serves as the director of equity, diversity and inclusion. At every other university, those are separate roles,” Dunn said. “We’re looking into how we can separate those two, because I don’t see how that can be fulfilled by one individual.”

Regarding Senator Sabrina Enriquez’s proposal to allow the general student body to vote on referendums, the Senators suggested several amendments to her proposal but ultimately decided to postpone the vote on the referendum until next week. Senator Daniel Newman proposed limiting the scope of referendums to exclude political issues, and requiring that a majority of the student body pass the referendum. However, Senator Paul Samaha said that it would be difficult to distinguish between issues pertaining to student welfare and to politics, the difference itself being a political question. Matheson also pointed out that requiring a majority vote would be too high of a bar, considering that USC voter turnout has never exceeded 50 percent.

As the debate continued and Lurie moved to postpone the vote until next week, several senators expressed frustration at the delay.

“Sabrina has been talking about this since retreat, and we have had five weeks now where she mentions it every single week,” Samaha said. “We can talk about the specifics of an amendment in the coming weeks, but I don’t think it’s acceptable that some people still don’t know whether they want a referendum at our University or not, because we have had five weeks to talk about this.”

The vote on the referendum proposal was ultimately postponed to next week, with Lurie and Newman stressing that the idea of a referendum was serious and should not be voted upon without refining the specifics of the proposal’s language.