ASG passed updated B-status group funding guidelines at their meeting Wednesday night and introduced a proposal to support an Asian American studies major.
“These are all procedural improvements: after a year’s worth of discussion, our committee makes some guideline changes every year,” said Kenneth Mok, vice president of B-status finances. “A lot of these hold student groups accountable for communicating with us in a reasonable amount of time … and also for us to hold ourselves accountable to communicating with student groups.”
Changes included a section stating that unspent money allocated to a student group for a certain quarter would be collected at the the end of the quarter and redistributed to other students groups.
Additionally, an amendment was made to allow first-year graduate students to hold leadership positions in student groups if they had previously held the position within the past two years.
Earlier in the meeting, Kevin Luong, the Asian Pacific American Coalition's ASG senator, introduced legislation supporting the creation of an Asian American studies major at Northwestern.
“There are a multitude of benefits to both ethnic studies and Asian American studies,” Luong said. “Assimilation theory and ethnography have both been challenged, refined and made better by ethnic studies. Ethnic studies often uncover history’s narratives that are often simply erased in many academic venues.”
The legislation promotes a formal proposal for the Asian American studies major presented by the Weinberg Curricular Policies Committee earlier this month. Faculty will be voting on the proposal in late February, according to Luong.
President Noah Star briefly mentioned the Association of Big Ten Students winter conference held at Rutgers University last weekend. There, Star and Christina Kim, executive vice president, and Simran Chadha, chief of staff, presented legislation criticizing governors’ decisions to reject Syrian refugees. Last quarter, Northwestern’s ASG passed a similar resolution decrying Governor Rauner’s decision not to accept Syrian refugees.
“We altered that resolution so it applied to the rest of the Big Ten because, unfortunately, 12 of the 14 schools in the Big Ten reside in states whose governors have denounced the acceptance of Syrian refugees,” said Star.