This week, the SGA were presented with the data collected by last year’s climate survey, which focused on sexual violence. Ryan Rost, Title IX Coordinator, and Stacey Andes, Director of Health Promotion, attended the meeting to speak on behalf of the University faculty about the survey.  As student representatives, SGA members were extremely concerned about the content of the survey.  

“I think we have the duty to our students to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to A. prevent it and B. respond appropriately if it does happen,” Rost told The Villanovan in a separate interview. “It’s a critical conversation, because it is an issue on college campuses, it is also an issue outside of College campuses. It is something that we are battling as a culture.”

“Hearing statistics of instances of sexual violence on campus was distantly somber at first,” Brian King, SGA Executive Secretary, said. “Then sitting with the information and realizing that those numbers represent a classmate, somebody on your floor, perhaps even a good friend, it came into perspective.  It was really quite unsettling.”

Rost plans to continue distributing results of the survey with student groups in an effort to inspire dialogue and gain feedback about the results.

The SGA also plans to implement a school-wide activity calendar.  This calendar would include all campus activities, including club activities, Greek life activities and sports games to act as a visual to show all students what is going on during the month.  SGA hopes that this calendar will be an advertisement for various events on campus.

A  meeting of SGA’s Dining Services Committee with the Director of Dining Services has also yielded positive results. Meal restrictions in CEER Holy Grounds have now been lifted, allowing students to utilize their MPE’s in the engineering building during all hours of operation. The SGA hope this will not only be helpful to students who frequent CEER, but will also remedy the issue of long lines in dining halls during lunch times.

Freshman class elections will take place this week from noon Tuesday to noon Wednesday.  The freshmen will be running for the six positions: Class President, Vice President and Class Representative with three other positions of class senators.