Members of the University Senate’s Student Affairs Committee met with representatives from five student governments on Friday, marking the first formal meeting of the Morningside Student Space Initiative.
The new initiative is geared toward surveying student space needs on campus, and determining how student space issues might be addressed when the University starts expanding to Manhattanville.
“The goal is to generate a comprehensive report of needs of space for students,” said Engineering Student Council President Nate Levick, SEAS ’12, who was at the meeting. “We want to identify needs and make recommendations together as to what space is needed, so that the needs can be communicated to administrators in the future.”
SAC will work with ESC, Columbia College Student Council, Engineering Graduate Student Council, Graduate Student Advisory Council, and General Studies Student Council. The councils will create and administer space surveys to send to their respective student bodies by the end of April.
After the surveys are completed, SAC will compile the data and write a public report to present to senior administrators.
Several schools are slated to begin moving to Manhattanville by the end of the decade—including the Business School, the School of the Arts, and the School of International and Public Affairs—and administrators will have to decide what happens to the space that these schools vacate.
“Our goal is not necessarily a prioritization of spaces, but rather an attempt to find out what kinds of spaces are important to students and how these needs fit with both current and future allocations,” CCSC president Aki Terasaki, CC ’12, said in an email. Terasaki was also at the meeting on Friday.
The surveys will include questions about the need for specific types of spaces, such as dance performance spaces, group study areas, and cafés. GSAC Budget and Finance Chair Ahmet-Hamdi Cavusoglu, who also attended the Friday meeting, said that because GSAC conducted a quality-of-life survey in the spring of 2009, some of its work is already complete.
“We already have a list of grievances, so GSAC is considering having a more quantitative aspect by offering more specific questions,” he said.
In an interview last week, University Senator Eduardo Santana, CC ’13, stressed the importance of the councils’ reaching out to the student body, a point echoed by Terasaki.
“The entire body of CCSC will be instrumental in distributing the survey and working on turning the results into a useful document that can be utilized, along with the information from the other schools,” he said. “When the results come in, we will work within the council to interpret them and define how CC students feel space would be best allocated for them.”
In a statement released after Friday’s meeting, SAC co-chair Adeel Ahamed, Business ’12, said that the Morningside Student Space Initiative is a valuable project.
“We believe this initiative is an important step towards the achievement of a shared vision of improving the overall student experience at Columbia,” he said.
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