On Thursday, Feb. 20, Macalester College Student Government (MCSG) gathered at the Weyerhaeuser Boardroom for its weekly Legislative Body (LB) meeting.
The meeting began with committee updates. Representative of the Student Employment Advisory Committee (SEAC) Noah Koch ’27 introduced an hour tracker for student employees, which will announce to students through email the remaining hours of their employment award.
Seeking chartership, first-year class representative Chloe Xu ’28 then introduced Go Club, in which students would be able to partake in the strategic board game originating in China.
“There’s a significant cultural association with this game so we thought it distinct enough to have its own club separate from the Board Games club,” Xu said.
The Go Club was approved with all 22 votes in favor.
The LB then moved to discussing the MCSG Special Election Amendment, which was proposed by sophomore class representative AnLian Krishnamurthy ’27. This bill would eliminate special elections, replacing them by an appointment of any member of the student body by MCSG’s president and the approval of two thirds of the LB.
After taking into consideration all ideas that members of the student government brought up during the MCSG meeting a week prior, Krishnamurthy adjusted the amendment. The updated iteration proposed that the new appointment process would occur only in the case of a vacancy during the spring semester. If there was an empty position during the fall, MCSG would still hold a special election to fill it.
“From what we’ve seen this year with regards to special elections for the Financial Affairs Committee (FAC) specifically, it’s just made it impossible to operate without an influx of members,” FAC Chair David Christenfeld ’27 said. “So I definitely support something like this in its entirety right now. We just need to deal with it somehow, because we’ll get more members in.”
“I had some concerns about the iteration we built last week, but based on how this is changed — limiting the appointment process to the spring semester and including the clause about EPC’s [Elections Procedures Commission] ability to overrule — I can say as one of the people who’s been doing the most to run the special elections… I support the iteration developed,” President Joel Sadofsky ’25 said.
Senior class representative Cooper Glick ’25 expressed, as they put it, a “very unpopular opinion,” suggesting that in case that there were multiple candidates running for the vacant position, the decision of who would assume it should be up to the student body, rather than the president or EPC.
Sadofsky responded to Glick’s critique, saying that the restrictions of the president’s power and “checks and balances” of EPC’s override, which the proposed amendment includes, are sufficient.
“I think that this provides a happy median between the ridiculous status quo, where we look incompetent to the student body, because our special election triggers another special election and we have four elections during [the school year], and then The Mac Weekly flames us and calls us ridiculous,” Sadofsky said.
After an ongoing discussion among the members of the LB, Vice President Ryan Connor ’25 motioned to amend section 7.1 d point ii of the bill: “Special elections shall remain the primary mechanism for filling vacancies. Appointments shall be used sparingly and as a result of conversation between the MCSG President, EPC, and LB.”
23 voted in favor of this amendment and one abstained.
Connor then motioned for the MCSG Special Elections Amendment to pass. 19 representatives voted in favor, three opposed and one abstained. The amendment was thus passed in its entirety.
Gabe Karsh ’25, student liaison to the Board of Trustees (BoT), introduced a resolution they have been working on with senior class representative Tor Olsson ’25, to increase transparency between the BoT and the student body. Its main goal is to ensure publicly available summaries of BoT’s meetings.
“I just want to say a big thank you to Gabe [Karsh],” Olsson said. “They [suggested so many] provisions that were needed on this bill, and just provided feedback and input throughout the whole process.”
Junior class representative Marina Molberg ’26 then motioned to approve this bill. The resolution passed with 23 in favor and two abstaining. Cabinet updates included Belonging and Accessibility liaison Willow Albano ’26 reminding everybody of the ongoing application process to live in the Culture house and be part of the delegation to Cuba over J-term.
Chief of Staff Else Gerber ’25 announced that the Executive Director of Residential Life Kyle Flowers would be coming to the next MCSG meeting and encouraged everyone to write questions for him into the Google document she shared.
Following committee updates, Sadofsky announced that the following week, LB is going to meet 30 minutes early so it does not overlap with an information session regarding the “Dear Colleague” letter, which Macalester’s President Suzanne Rivera announced through email the same day.
