Starting student government at NYUSH
NYU Shanghai’s first Student Government approaches the end of the semester with academic and integration challenges to address, and its Executive Board ...
Olivia Bergen
,- and
Mandy Tan
Dec 7, 2013
NYU Shanghai’s first Student Government approaches the end of the semester with academic and integration challenges to address, and its Executive Board has brought energy and governance tools to the startup campus.
Early in the fall, a selection committee consisting of NYUSH administrators, and student leaders in New York and Abu Dhabi created frameworks for a Parliamentary Board and an Elections Board at NYUSH. The Parliamentary Board was to determine the Student Government’s structure through the writing of a constitution while the Elections Board would facilitate the university’s first Student Government elections.
“We decided we’d help support administratively in setting up the Parliamentary Board,” said Malina Jai Webb, a Global Leadership Fellow at NYUSH and advisor to the Student Government. Webb said that it was the university administration's hope that these students would help lead the charge.
Webb serves as the constitutionally defined liaison between the Office of Student Involvement, NYUSH’s administrative body for student life, and the Student Government. Having held the highest elected student position as chair of the NYUNY Student Senators' Council, she has significant experience in student governance.
The nine-member appointed Parliamentary Board included three Chinese, three U.S. American and three other international students, each according to quotas arranged by the university. The Elections Board had the same nationality breakdown for its three positions.
“They were intentionally supposed to represent the demographics of the university,” Webb said. “There was a lot of debate about this moving forward, but with the leadership of the university and also input from a lot of key players, that was the process that was decided on … Looking back, it worked really well because they were able to work together.”
Students were eligible to apply for the parliamentary board after attending an information session in the first week of the semester. Webb said an estimated 200 students expressed interest in Student Government, and approximately 45 students applied for the Parliamentary and Elections Boards.
The Parliamentary Board worked intensively to draft the student body constitution, holding open forums with students and determining how best to structure the Executive Board and its standing committees. Members of the Student Governments in New York and Abu Dhabi also provided documents and guidance to the Shanghai Parliamentary Board as it was writing the constitution.
“They used the constitution that exists in Abu Dhabi … and they used documents that they had in New York,” Webb said. “They favored the Abu Dhabi ones, because it is more applicable to what they’re doing and their size.”
According to Kenny Song, who had worked as a Parliamentary Board member and is now the Student Government president, the board decided to extend the demographic breakdown of Chinese, U.S. American and non-U.S. students to the vice presidential role.
“Superficially it seems like we are emphasizing the divide of nationality,” he said. “But the idea behind it is to ensure that we have very different perspectives on the Executive Board.”
On Oct. 9, after a weeklong period of online access for the student body, the Parliamentary Board presented its final version of the constitution before the student body in their Global Perspectives on Society class, known as GPS, a required lecture course in which all first-years are enrolled. The document was ratified on Oct. 9, 2013.
After the constitution’s ratification, the Parliamentary Board was dissolved.
The 14-member Student Government was declared on Oct. 30, elected from a total campaign pool of 40 students between the primary and final election rounds. Song, a Chinese American student, was elected president, with Kiki Shen, Rima Mehta and José Antonio Cabrera Sánchez respectively filling the Chinese, U.S. American and non-U.S. American international student vice presidential positions. Fang Siyao serves as the executive secretary, while Li Siyao is executive treasurer.
In addition to this Executive Board, several students hold elected chair, secretary and treasurer positions on three committees: Student Life and Residence, Programming and Clubs.
A little over a week after the elections, the Student Government, along with members of the Office of Student Involvement, gathered for a retreat in Sheshan. According to Song, half of the retreat consisted of meetings to discuss their roles and future goals, and the other half was dedicated to team-building, leadership and getting to know each other.
The university’s first General Assembly was held on Nov. 20. Opening the meeting were a handful of amendments to the constitution, including one that added a treasurer to the Student Life and Residence Committee. Other items on the agenda included a proposal for a new exclusively student Facebook group, a policy on emails sent to the student body and a Breaking Barriers initiative designed to enhance student integration by first providing support and encouragement for students working to improve their English.
After the Executive Board’s presentation at the meeting, students were able to ask questions and bring up grievances. Academic concerns were the first to be voiced, including the difference in grading standards for Chinese and non-Chinese students in GPS and scheduling difficulties for students in the Foundations of Science course sequence. One FoS student had written a document, signed by several other science students, outlining their complaints about the program.
Song reports that Student Government has since met with Academic Affairs twice and is in the process of addressing students’ concerns.
First-year Jialing Wang considers it essential that the Student Government “[act] as a bridge to communicate between professors, students and school's leadership,” and the Student Government has established communication and accountability channels between itself and the student body.
In addition to the questions and comments period at the end of each biweekly General Assembly, it has provided grievance forms for students to address the Executive Board. It has also created a suggestions website for students to anonymously propose changes they wish to see from Student Government. Other students may upvote and comment on those suggestions, giving Student Government an indication of which issues are most pressing to the student body.
The Executive Board is making use of task management platform Trello to make publicly available the tasks each Student Government officer is working on and the progress they have made toward completing them.
Finally, it has created a Facebook page and regular email newsletter to inform students of projects and issues it is dealing with.
A critical challenge for NYUSH continues to be integrating students of different nationalities. With the student body split between 51 percent Chinese nationals and 49 percent international students, it has been difficult to create a sense of cohesive university identity.
Freshman Lancy Huang considers the language barrier and cultural gap to be the most important issues Student Government should address.
“It's such a pity that most students recognize this issue,” she said. “But most are already in their comfort zone, so they are reluctant in leaving and reaching out.”
Webb sees challenge as well as opportunity in the international character of the school.
“Being a Chinese university and an American university and trying to have those identities coexist, that will be interesting moving forward,” she said. “We’ll see as the year passes what that entails.”
For some students, the Student Government seems to be a fair representation of Chinese and international students.
“At first I was worried that the Chinese kids weren’t going to be represented well … but it turns out that most of the Student Government is Chinese kids; it’s actually a higher number,” said freshman Luke Roesler.
NYUSH’s Student Government is preparing for a productive spring semester. What headway officers and their constituents will be able to make on course planning, student integration and other issues will shape the future of this young university.
Olivia Bergen and Mandy Tan are contributing writers. Email them at editorial@thegazelle.org.
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