Dormcon General Body Meeting Minutes

Date & time: October 28, 2021 @ 7:00 PM ET
Location: Next House TFL
Food: Indian food!

note

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caragay: updates! zawad and/or jordan

zawad: any questions? [insert silence]

someone: no questions but cool to see that hrs is having office hours now.

• jordan: we will make sure to send communication over to dorm presidents so that you can forward that to your dorm residents

zawad: the one big thing is murals, real fake walls. hrs is interested in starting soon. they were very excited. one important thing. hrs has designated locations for murals right now. new house has some, bc will have some. they are very open to expanding which spaces have murals but they just want to know. don’t feel constrained. ideally dorm should be able to point to a wall and say they want a mural there. we will talk to next house and new house.

• meghana: i don’t know how this was implemented. because this started in 2018 or something. there are also ones that never got put up.
• zawad: there will be mechanisms to put up a mural. those boards will be put up preemptively in the spaces hrs has designated.
• meghana: we never had any murals pre put up for us. wings decide everything with gra in getting the mural up.
• zawad: we will talk to you all

zawad: we will have a renovation lounge in the basement of the stud

zawad: storage inside of dorms. currently ec, simmons, random. this is going to phased out by mit. mit does not want to be in the storage business anymore. they don’t want to be liable for people’s belongings

• ashley: but they already say they’re not
• zawad: we only got to talk to them about this for 2 minutes. so we will talk to them about this so that the people who have been using this that really needed it can be able to use this
• shruti: we used to have in house storage but two months before move out they told us it was not happening anymore so would appreciate advance notice. also we tried to ask if people who really need storage could get it and they said no.

jordan: music building construction may have gotten slightly delayed by weather. may go on for some extra days.

adina: free breakfast in consolation for maybe half the dorm. it came an hour late.

caragay: who are you talking to in housing about this??

• adina: sent suzy and david an email several weeks ago. got a reply and working on my response.
• caragay: people lower than suzy probably can’t make that decision so it’s good to relatively keep her in the loop

cameron: shrugs

meghana: any q’s about dining? [insert silence]

ashley: if not...put my mask on!

• tim’s mart hours have been changed as of this sunday. having it open when dining’s open easier for staffing.
• dining survey up and running. will have posters soon. pls encourage residents to fill it out. we will start sending that feedback straight to chefs.
• jordan: is dunkin actually gonna take feedback?
  • ashley: idk. we’ll find out. they’ll probably be like we’re a chain. but other places will take feedback yes.
• we are working on a food cost analysis of nearby grocery stores and such. snap guidelines. figuring out how much things cost. we will put together results and send that out to students in the next few weeks. this is to help people because underclassmen are sometimes like idk how much things cost.
• meghana: can we get contacts of dining chairs so that we can talk to them about feedback.
• q about tim’s mart: morning hours same as pick 6? [yes] just pick 6? [no]

alan: a lot of constitutions are outdated. if you could send me updated constitutions and/or how you think about the constitution. will also send an email out.

mohan: i made a budget it’s in the google doc. we’re doing alright. we lost 15k but that was intended. you know, we’re all right. in general, we planned to spend more money in some areas. overall, it’s not really 15k. we have enough to sustain an extra rex budget for a lil while, maybe 5 years.

caragay: p/vp updates that i want to draw attention to.

• brought up informal pods to suzy. current policy. can’t be maskless with anyone else indoors unless you’re eating. to allow people to follow the rules and still socialize, we propose informal pod where it’s like a group of people you declare and you can do this. suzy seemed on board with this. will run it by everyone who regulates covid policies (medical and such). if you have thoughts on whether this is good or bad, let us know. thinking of number 9. suzy said we can use whatever the maximum number of suitemates we have which we think is 9. we will do the biggest that we can.
  • adina: instead of choosing 9 people, people on your floor or something?
    • caragay: people who make the mask policies are unwilling to budge in terms of masklessness in common areas.
    • meghana: students don’t want to hang out in common spaces because people are unmasked in them.
    • caragay: yes this is one of the concerns. HoH has these concerns in terms of unmasking in common spaces but also medical.
  • zawad: who’s gonna run the program?
    • caragay: not exactly a program. but we haven’t really decided. if you have any ideas
    • adina: google form for dorm presidents?
    • meghana: would like this to not be an exec responsibility because if we have compliance issues we don’t know what to say
  • other question about enforcement. honor system
  • caragay: when we write out stuff we can send the proposal out to dorm presidents before we give it to suzy.
  • alexandria: if it lives with exec. can we have something in place that says if you have issues go to your ad. process handled by exec, concerns go to ad?
  • caragay: one could argue that pods don’t necessarily have to be in one dorm anymore. if it’s interdorm it doesn’t make sense to have ads involved in this.
  • zawad: can we make the policy vague? like suitemates?
    • caragay: we can try.
  • someone: clarify. this is in people’s rooms? [yes]
    • personally would like to have more than 9 because random floors are like 11 people and it would suck to exclude like 2 people.
  • shruti: can entire dorms opt out of this? we are already allowed to unmask with suitemates in macgregor
    • yes good point
• jordan: q about suzy pulse survey?
  • caragay: we said we wanted a covid survey. get questions added to existing survey instead of new survey? that might happen but the pulse survey is DSL, they wanted to have questions similar to previous pulse survey. shuli and i gave feedback that was somewhat taken into consideration.
• caragay: related to house team. house survey. last run in 2017. was going to run in 2020 but didn’t. allow people to give feedback on how house team was going. 2017 one was very specific by each house team member. 2020 was much more broad. we are making it like the 2017 one so that we can have specific feedback. long process of making sure everyone buys in, that HoH wants this to be helpful to them. HR thing. this will probably be a spring survey.
  • survey schedules are weird.

jordan: post rex survey eventually. i’m emailing her right now to say hey. person that was supposed to do the survey quit rip.

ec proxy [caragay]: ec is meeting with 70 amherst exec tomorrow, discussing to use that as a renovation space. talking with them to see if that is an option.

• keith moser of security is meeting with ec next week. there are tap pads but people are not individually tapping in. they are just having a community conversation to talk about this behavior. not supposed to be scary.

simmons [mohan]: we don’t have any updates. so that’s my update. simmons is. we are.

shruti: we have a new ad! that’s exciting. we went to apple picking. can we retroactively ask for dormcon funding? because we planned and organized this in the span of 4 days.

• mohan: open to discuss.

random: we are getting a new ad at some point. old ad just left for a different job. still working on yellow light system. we found out that we don’t actually need house team to be on board for that to happen? we brought it up in house team meeting, it got tense apparently. other than that, don’t have anything.

meghana [next]: what to do about people not being masked? felt less productive than baker’s conversation. felt like a space to vent. the students there were being told “put on your masks” and we were like “we already do.” who is going to be the one to submit a report or establish a three strikes system.

• baker: heads of house sent out an email to residents that was saying that gras can take action. next tell committee on discipline. so there is action being made.
• meghana: we were bringing up these mask issues. but house team basically said ok that sounds good. but no point people. we said students are like this because there are like 2 undergrad cases. exec feels tired of feeling like we need to be responsible for enforcement. we were frustrated.

alan [next]: starting committee to talk about DEI initiatives.

meghana: we know that people in next trend toward being math majors and being men. does this feel exclusive?

alan: putting together a committee that will ask other dorm residents about their perspective of next house in picking housing and how they feel in interaction with nexties.

meghana: culture has shifted from when i was a freshman, want to make sure that’s not being exclusive.

caragay: great that you guys are taking initiative on making this happen.

meghana: we asked before whether gras can warn people that are not following mask policies in the spring and we got an empty room response. these conversations don’t feel productive.

new vassar: bathrooms. the new vassar bathrooms were originally male and female. but with pods we just assigned pods to bathrooms so we got rid of signs and made them all gender. we don’t know how to do the bathrooms because people still think of bathrooms as in the spring semester. the bathroom signs are changeable so people have been stealing them and people are confused. want to know about how bathroom policies are decided in dorms.

• macgregor: we have all gender except 6 single gender suites.
• mccormick: each floor has 2 bathrooms. each semester the floor will vote to decide how they want the bathrooms to be.
• ec: all bathrooms are gender neutral all the time
• next: same in next
• new vassar: is that in the constitution? [no it’s just always been that way]
• random: all gender neutral even on single gender floors
• caragay: is mccormick vote majority or unanimous or what?
  • adina: was unanimous but recently it’s been majority. it’s important to have all gender bathrooms sometimes for students with hijabs
• shruti: you can have a conversation with your residents and see what they are comfortable with.

someone: housing asked if you were comfortable with gender neutral bathrooms on the housing application which is very unclear?

• caragay: please send that to us in an email

q about what we look at for genders

• dorms brought up how they have a separate internal system where people can put whatever they want. macgregor has this for single gender suites, random also has this.

baker: also got a new ad. we got our card set up so if any of you need help let us know.

mccormick: no updates

maseeh: dishwasher broke some time ago, still broken. dining said supply side reasons said we can’t fix until a week into spring semester.

• ashley: did they talk to mark? [no i don’t think so] ok we can talk to mark

maseeh: this is really upsetting yeah. someone reached out about how dining decorations are too gruesome. internal elections for fresh reps

mohan: i think simmons dishwasher is also broken? maybe all of these dishwashers have single supplier. this is problem

bc: gave us furniture options. it was fine. kinda similar to new vassar furniture. a lot of them are connected together. they have random things. some of them have attachments. very office-y. they are gonna give us options on colors tho. they said they need to use this for fire safety and durability. all of the furniture is in the macgregor dining room so all bc people can go in and check it out.

• shruti: we’re cool with it but this was not communicated to us. they just told us a day 4-6pm.
• jordan: didn’t housing say this was gonna be in there for a whole week.

bc: we also have a bc reopening team which is established but has not met yet. lot more sophomores on there. we are going to draft housing proposal for how priorities are going to work.

• some people on burton 1 are writing a letter on leaves of absences. housing policy on leave of absence says you are not guaranteed to have placement in bc when you come back. but we are sorting out the difference if you lived off campus while enrolled because you were kicked out of bc
• sarah is interviewing ads
• zawad: timeline on gras getting hired? housing said something about starting the process.
  • cameron: probably discussed in reopening team.
  • alexandria: probably happen with regular gra interviews in the spring

q about ec gras:

• current proposal is that gras are going to be given options. either stop being gra or be community liaison with some compensation and foster community or try to be gra in different dorm. community liaison we no like. compensation not sufficient. they tried to do this for bc but no one decided to stay on.
  • community liaison get 2500 annually. 5 hours a week. graduate housing is an option but cost is on them.

random: forgot to ask. for dorm presidents. are your exec and house meetings open to your house team?

• next: yes
• ec: yes

jordan: in response to cameron with leave of absence people. had conversation with david friedrich about it. the response was that there will be no guarantees.

caragay: any other last comments?

mohan: simmons currently does not have express guest list. we would like to change that. if your dorm has a process we would like to know

• meghana: if you could also send that to us, would be appreciated
• zawad: email ec-exec because ec very recently went through the process

caragay: ec and random have top optional policies on some of our floors between 7pm and 7am.

• process for how this gets approved. very supportive of trans and non conforming students. body positive benefits. got formalized in explaining to admin why this is valuable
• any dorms interested in considering having a floor with this policy? maybe expand to dsl about bringing to other dorms. the subcommunity would have to vote unanimously for this policy to be approved.
  • macgregor: we can gauge interest
  • next: we could also gauge interest at our next house meeting

adina: i noticed that if you bring in a guest you have to write out email and phone number but during dining hours people don’t have to do that.

• caragay: I think during hours you can track but not during hours you can’t track.
• but why can’t this track?
• zawad: we asked housing about this. they said the system doesn’t do the things you would want it to do. if your id would let you tap into the building it would have contact tracing information but else it doesn’t
• adina: would be nice for guests to not have to write down information every single time.
• caragay: could raise the question of is contact tracing necessary in a guest situation like this?
• zawad: problem is that bringing this up to housing...they can’t do anything because this is under medical

caragay: it is time for the meeting to be over.