One of the Student Association Executive Board positions faced its possible end and reformation into a new position not on the Executive Board until students spoke out last week against the constitutional changes that would have restructured the office.

The SA Executive Board introduced last week a proposal in the Assembly to dissolve the SA as it now exists and refound it as a corporation with a new constitution and a reorganized governing structure. In the version of the constitution proposed to the Assembly on Feb. 28, the E-Board position of Vice President for Multicultural Affairs would be converted to the Director for Multicultural Affairs, which would be elected by the groups that make up the Intercultural Awareness Committee. The DMA would not be a part of the E-Board, whose members must be elected by the whole student body under SUNY Board of Trustees policy.

At a Town Hall Forum on the proposed constitutional changes last Thursday, members of cultural groups voiced their opposition to this change. As a result, the SA leaders who moderated the discussion agreed to scrap the constitutional provision for a DMA and keep the VPMA position.

In an e-mail yesterday, Assembly Speaker Randal Meyer assured that the VPMA position would be included in the constitution when it is put to a vote in the Assembly on Monday, March 14. He stated that the SA was still working with cultural groups to determine how they want the office to be designed in the proposed constitution.

The VPMA is currently responsible for organizing the activities of multicultural student groups and advocating on their behalf.

According to Edmund Mays, the current VPMA, “the originally proposed changes to the VPMA position [were] meant to allow the VPMA to work with the [Inter-Cultural Awareness Committee] instead of SA government structure.”

Mays argued that this change would make the position more accountable to cultural groups by having it be directly elected by the ICA.

“But as it stands now the VPMA is back on the E-Board,” Mays said. “This means that under the new structure, the VPMA will do everything it does right now, except for being [able] to implement policies without the councils. The new constitution will require all E-Board members to go through the councils in order to implement any policies.”

Under the proposed constitution, E-Board members would sit as non-voting members on the three “subsidiary councils” that would make up the basic units of the student government’s legislative branch, replacing the present 60-seat Assembly.

Some SA leaders have suggested that this change will reduce the Executive Board’s power to the point where Executive Board position status will not matter significantly because its members will be subordinate to the will of the councils they sit on.

“Under the proposal, the e-board can’t act unilaterally,” said Daniel Rabinowitz, SA vice president for academic affairs. “They’ll need the approval of the committee they sit on.”

But Adam Shamah, SA vice president for finance and one of the officers involved in proposal’s drafting, said that this would not entirely be the case.

“There’s still an element of autonomy to the E-Board, they can still take up their own projects like they do now,” Shamah said. “On big issues … the sub-council would be directly involved in drafting final policy and the final plan for implementation.”

The draft of the constitution does not currently include provisions stipulating that Executive Board members cannot take action without the approval of their respective subsidiary council.

Leaders of cultural groups said that until the finalized constitutional proposal is presented in the Assembly on Monday, they were still wary about further changes the SA might make. Many questioned the motives of the SA leaders behind the original proposal, in which the VPMA would be replaced by a DMA, citing numerous efforts of the SA in the past few years to remove the VPMA position.

Before the change, Diane Wong, a member of the Asian Student Union and an Assembly representative, said she disagreed with the removal of the VPMA from the Executive Board.

“The VPMA is an advocate for all students on campus, not just students of color,” she said. “The VPMA is the advocate for students who are victims of racism, sexism, homophobia and discrimination. We are not yet at a situation where we can trust our members of the SA to fight for the rights and interests of marginalized populations [on] campus. When that day comes, the VPMA will no longer be necessary.”

Ruth Jean-Marie, president of the Caribbean Student Association, was also skeptical.

“My main concern is the fact that they [the SA] have been trying their best to eliminate the VPMA position for as long as I remember,” she said.

Mays defended the Executive Board’s actions, stating that the proposed changes were not a guaranteed fix to the problem of under-representation of culture groups, but that the changes were meant to benefit students.