Enrolment
As of Oct. 1, St. Thomas University has 1,953 full-time students, up by one per cent since last year, which President Dawn Russell said is due to a nine per cent increase in the number of continuing students and larger upper-year classes.
STU has 605 new undergraduate students, down by 72 students from last year. However, the intake of domestic high school students is up slightly. International enrolment increased by 11 per cent.
Trans-inclusivity in residence
Sara Nason, the St. Thomas University Students’ Union Sexuality and Gender Diversity representative met with Matt Sprague, residence manager for Residence Life, to discuss plans to make residences more trans-inclusive. They discussed what the buildings would look like, the cost and importance to STU’s LGBTQ community that this be implemented and how to argue that to the “higher-ups.”
“Matthew was great, he was super into all my ideas and he seemed really, also passionate about what I was asking for,” said Nason.
External internships
STUSU president Brianna Workman met with Clara Santacruz, STU’s internship co-ordinator to discuss creating internships off-campus. Santacruz is working close with the provincial government to bring these types of opportunities to students.
“We touched base on some of the nitty-gritty details of actually implementing that funding and what it looks like at STU,” said Workman.
UNB Winter Carnival sponsorship approved
STUSU voted in favour of sponsoring the University of New Brunswick’s Winter Carnival in the new year. The UNB Student Union reached out to STUSU for funding. The finance committee recommended they give them $2,500. This sponsorship will allowe STU students to participate in the activities.
At-large representative resigns
Emilie Hanlon, STUSU at-large representative, has resigned from her position. Her letter of resignation was read aloud at the student representative council meeting on Oct. 17.
“I want to thank you guys for the opportunity, and hope to see the continuing success that the team brings to St. Thomas University,” the letter reads. Hanlon didn’t say why she chose to resign.
The position is now vacant.
Post-election conference
The NBSA is holding a post-election conference on Oct. 28. Emma Walsh, STUSU’s vice-president education will be attending the conference.
“That will be to debrief about the recent provincial election that we all just went through, look at both the [Get Out the Vote] efforts that we did with the NBSA, and also … how do you advocate to a government where there’s no clear majority and just how do we adapt to that particular circumstance,” she said.
Course proposal
A new journalism course about memoir writing was proposed by journalism professor Jan Wong, titled “First-person Writing in the Selfie Age.”
Carey Watt, the chair of the History department raised some concerns about the course, citing the course proposal has a single assignment worth 50 per cent and that some of the course texts are written by the professor.
Michael Camp, the chair of the Journalism department, said he has taken note of the concerns and will pass them along to Wong.
“Concerning the workload, anyone who has taken a course with Jan Wong knows that she’s quite demanding,” Camp said.
As a member of the curriculum committee, the chair of the Criminology and Criminal Justice department Dawn Clarke said this proposal was approved because they gave Wong the benefit of the doubt as the expert in the field.
“As we said before, about this version of the curriculum committee is we do operate on the assumption that the instructor posing the course is that expert in the field, and we were actually quite pleased to see the journalism program branching out into areas that are very difficult to nail down in a course proposal because they’re constantly shifting and moving,” she said.
“So we approved this course because of the topic focus and the lack of work in journalism toward first-person writing and thought this would be a interesting topic for the students.”
The motion was tabled until after the proposal has been resubmitted.
