VICTORIA MARTINEZ
News Editor
Engineering students can look forward to a new and improved student society in coming months.
After several meetings, it appears that the Saskatoon Engineering Students’ Society and Engineering Students’ Association will be working together to restructure the existing student society, albeit likely under a new name and an entirely different governing structure.
A plebiscite on PAWS Feb. 3 to 4 revealed that engineering students at the University of Saskatchewan have little confidence in the Saskatoon Engineering Students’ Society in its current incarnation — with 87 per cent of respondents expressing non-confidence.
However, a second student group, calling itself the Engineering Students’ Association, challenged the SESS with its own constitution. Their movement was initially aggressive, but the tone has changed in the last week.
The chemistry discipline president, Scott Churchill, says that after the non-confidence vote came out, the SESS “agreed to a major restructuring with only minor changes that were all agreeable.”
“What the ESA has brought forward is a corporate model,” he explained.
In the new plan, the Board of Discipline Presidents — composed of the presidents of each engineering discipline, from mechanical to chemical — will form a board of directors to the new student society, and will choose councillors from submitted applications.
Those councillors will be approved in a confidence vote by the student body.
Further, each member of the BODP will have an equal vote, regardless of the size of the discipline they represent.
“The eight of us together will hopefully be representing the whole engineering student body,” said Churchill.
At this point, the SESS and ESA are moving to a secondary planning role as changes to the constitution and implementation plans are worked out.
A special general meeting has already been called for March 7, but since the new plan involves making every engineering student a member of the student society, the changes to the constitution will be very serious. A referendum on PAWS will likely be used to open the vote to all students in the college.
“We need to have a college-run referendum to make sure this change has meaning,” said ex-SESS president Roman Nahachewsky, who left his position to work with the ESA on Feb. 1.
“Otherwise, it’s still the same crappy old car with a fresh coat of paint,” he added.
As for the new incarnation of an engineering students’ society, Churchill said that the BODP would prefer that it takes on the ESA title, though that will also be put to a public vote.
“If you restructure it, you put a new engine in the old truck. It will work bettter, but it’s still a dirty old truck by the side of the road,” he said. “You want to fix how the body looks, too.”
At least the engineers appear to be united in metaphor.
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