Since he joined late in the game, Billy Freeland, CC ’09, is trying to cram two semesters of University Senate action into one.
After losing the standard election last spring by a mere eight votes, Freeland, a second-semester senior in the five-year SIPA program, saw an opening when former Senator Tiffany Dockery, CC ’09, resigned. Freeland faced off against four candidates in an internal election conducted by the Columbia College Student Council in January. He only won his seat after presenting a statement to and being interviewed by the council. The council then whittled the candidates down to two, leaving Freeland and Alex Frouman to vie for the position.
Freeland, who beat Frouman’s 8 votes with 20 of his own, will only serve in the senate until May, when Dockery’s term would have ended.
“I think you have to be very focused in what you want to achieve,” Freeland said upon election, in light of his shortened term. “You can’t have a laundry list of proposals.”
Freeland immersed himself in University policy—and politics—before he took his seat in the senate, serving on SIPA’s student life committee for the Manhattanville expansion. Having worked on the committee, in which he discussed student-oriented expansion issues, Freeland says he is in favor of the expansion because it will “free up space for the undergraduates” and create jobs for neighborhood residents.
Freeland—who transferred to Columbia to immerse himself in its political atmosphere after one year at Rice University—said that his term, which is now half gone, is “going well” so far and that it is “everything he expected.”
Freeland has chosen to focus on a few major initiatives during his time in the senate. Those include requiring professors to post their class syllabi online before course registration, putting videos in circulation at Butler, and improving CourseWorks.
According to Freeland, a policy requiring professors to post syllabi before the start of the term would save time for students by decreasing the shopping period for classes, as many students would be able to make choices before classes begin. It would also save money for students by allowing them time to find the best deals on textbooks.
Freeland hopes to have this policy in place by the fall 2009 term. He said he would like this to be “his legacy on campus” after his curtailed senate stint, and that he hopes to gain support from students and professors.
“I’ve only been there [the senate] a few months, but if I can focus on that issue and get something done, then I would be real proud,” he said.
Freeland is also focused on making more videos accessible to students through the library. The 17,500 films transferred from Kim’s Video Store to Columbia’s library are presently in a New Jersey storage facility. Freeland said he would like to see these videos come to Butler Library, where Columbia students would be able to rent them for free. Freeland said that the library’s committee is “still sorting the videos,” which “takes a lot of time and manpower” before they can be put in circulation.
Freeland said his other priority is replacing CourseWorks with Sakai. Sakai is a server which would give “professors more tools to communicate with students,” including one that allows them to upload videos. But this process has been delayed “due to the recent economic crisis,” Freeland said. The senate is working to get funds for the project.
Freeland said that he has experienced some frustrations with what he described as the senate’s “huge bureaucracy” and “unwieldy” nature. He also said that “it is so dominated by faculty” and that many of the faculty senators have poor attendance at the meetings. He thinks that it would be nice “if the students had a larger voice.”
Following his May graduation from the College, Freeland will complete his master’s degree at the School of International and Public Affairs. Although he will remain at SIPA, where he hopes to stay involved in University issues, he will not be able to run for office again.
Alix Pianin contributed reporting to this article.
news@columbiaspectator.com
COMMENTS
Comments will be moderated in accordance with our comment policy