USenate may vote on confidentiality rules soon

The University Senate may vote later this month on a policy more than three years in the making—its own confidentiality rules.

“It’s like the Voldemort of senate resolutions,” said Andrew Springer, a senator and Journalism School student. “It will not die.”

The policy would make senate committee meetings—where resolutions are drafted and debated—closed to the public by default. Committees would be allowed to open all or part of any meeting to the public.

The resolution reflects the senate’s current practice, said research scientist Daniel Savin, a member of the senate’s Structure and Operations Committee who has been instrumental in crafting the confidentiality resolution.

“We’re not changing our current mode of functioning,” Savin said. “We’re just being explicit about it.”

The resolution, which will probably be introduced at the full senate’s April 29 plenary meeting, calls for all committee minutes to remain confidential for 50 years and establishes a mechanism for senators and outside scholars to request access to those minutes before the 50 years have elapsed. Under current policy, all minutes remain confidential indefinitely.

Ron Mazor, CC ’09, Law ’12 and the chair of the S&O committee, said the resolution is “not anything special.”

“It’s simply a matter of putting down slightly more modernized and slightly clearer rules for what committees already do,” he said.

Meetings of the senate’s Student Affairs Committee, which includes all 24 student senators, are currently public by default, although the committee occasionally goes into private “executive sessions.” Mazor, who is running for co-chair of the SAC on a ticket with dental school senator Dustin Bowler, said that SAC meetings would “absolutely” remain open if he is elected.

Alex Frouman, CC ’12, who is also running for co-chair with Business School senator Adeel Ahamed, said he too would keep SAC meetings open if elected—as did student senator Jose Robledo, GS, who is also running for co-chair.

Frouman said he would only request that SAC go into executive session under “extenuating circumstances”—if senators needed to discuss information given to them by the Board of Trustees, for example. Robledo added that, if elected, he would push SAC to establish an internal protocol that would make all meetings open by default.

“There’s no way for SAC to keep its current openness under the new resolution unless SAC takes measures to keep that openness,” Robledo said.

The review of senate confidentiality policy began in 2007, when a Journalism School student asked for access to a committee’s minutes for a research project. The S&O committee realized that there was no procedure in place to answer the request, and set out to review senate confidentiality policy.

But there has been some opposition to the current resolution, most notably from Springer. He has argued that the resolution will make the senate less transparent, since most of its work takes place at the committee level.

“This is closing the lid on senate activities,” Springer said. “This is the senate secrecy act. This makes it harder for senators to be held accountable.”

Asked about the need for transparency, Savin referred to a clause in the resolution which says that “decisions and work within Senate committees are advanced more fruitfully without publicity at every stage … members of committees should be able to seek solutions without concern that everything said is subject to public scrutiny.”

Savin added that the senate’s monthly plenary meetings, where all resolutions are ultimately debated and voted upon, are open to anyone with a Columbia ID, and that the University’s Board of Trustees also keeps its minutes private for 50 years.

Springer said that while he understands why some committees, such as the Budget Review committee, need to operate in private, he thinks most committees should operate publicly by default with the option of going into executive session when they need to discuss something confidentially.

“I want to know what Savin’s doing in a Structure and Operations committee meeting that he wants to be kept private for 50 years,” he said.

Frouman noted that he does not think that anyone outside the senate has asked for its records since the 2007 request that sparked the policy review.

“It’s pretty rare that someone is looking for something that the senate is keeping secret,” he said.

Mazor chaired the senate’s Task Force on Military Engagement, which gathered campus opinions on a potential return of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps earlier this semester. He said that while the task force “had a public face,” making its internal conversations public would have hindered its efforts.

“What we actually said to each other is not something that we would print out and put on our website,” he said.

sammy.roth@columbiaspectator.com