[2693] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: [Mit-talk] Upcoming UA Issue - Student Group Property Ownership
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James M Harvey)
Wed Oct 18 02:23:40 2006
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 02:23:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: James M Harvey <jmharvey@mit.edu>
To: Jonathan Wang <jtwang@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <d404aec07d3a8e89704c2edf10b4ea3c@mit.edu>
Cc: mit-talk@mit.edu, Andrew Lukmann <lukymann@mit.edu>
Errors-To: mit-talk-bounces@mit.edu
The jurisdictional issue is legitimate, but the UA has a long tradition of
granting themselves arbitrary authority (for example, the Spring 2005
election reform bill, which the UA Senate passed with no debate, gave the
UA the power to impose arbitrary penalties on students who didn't vote in
UA elections).
On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Jonathan Wang wrote:
> In my reading, at least, this seems to quite clearly delegate full
> ownership of property purchased by student groups to those groups.
>
Most student groups have the ASA God/Governance Clause in their
constitution, which means that if ASA exec rules to take property from a
group with this clause in their constitution, they can. Also, it has long
been the case that capital items purchased with finboard capital
allocations are the property of the UA, iirc. (I can't find the relevant
policy, but it's mentioned in this tech article from 1993:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_113/TECH_V113_S0820_P006.pdf ).
The ASA is not the puppet of the UA Senate, though. (It's a joint
committee of the UA and the GSC, so if both governments make the same
rule, it needs to follow it, but otherwise it retains a fair degree of
autonomy.)
So basically, the UA Senate can make whatever rule they want, but that
doesn't mean they can enforce it.
James Harvey
Former UA Finboard and ASA guy
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