The Observer

Issue date: 11/20/09 Section: News

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Breakdowns in notifications and miscommunications between administration and the student body are nothing new. Every day, students across campus regularly delete unread Case Dailies and Undergraduate Student Government newsletters, inadvertently ignoring vital information. But Duwain Pinder, president of Case Western Reserve University's USG, is seeking to improve the way such important information is disseminated amongst the student body.

With the goal of facilitating communication about events that will affect the student body, the new transparency ad-hoc committee was developed as an extension of the USG public relations committee. Despite the connotations with its name, the committee will not be focused on financial transparency. Chaired by USG representative Jared Hamilton, the committee is also charged with working with CWRU administration to determine what information students should know.

"I hope to open a dialogue with administrators to help them understand students' needs.  There is a lot of potential for this committee," said Hamilton.

The transparency committee, however, is notably different from the USG PR committee as the latter focuses on informing the undergraduate population about what USG is doing, while the transparency committee is designed to focus on distributing all necessary information about what actions the university administration is taking to the student body.

"The hope is that through the activities of this committee, the undergraduate students will feel more informed [about] the university and more aware on how decisions affect them," said Pinder.

According to vice president of public relations Jacklynn Sanford, the committee will begin its task by getting feedback from the student body about how they want to receive information and most importantly, what information they feel that they do not know or have sufficient access to. Then the committee will then evaluate this information, and determine what type of media would be most effective to reach the students.

Jared Bell, a sophomore engineering USG representative, commented on the newly created ad-hoc committee. He was hopeful that the committee would be able to deliver university information to students and stressed the committee's potential benefits to students.

"I think that it will vastly improve CWRU campus, because if the students are more informed about policies and events, maybe that might lead to a better school spirit, and perhaps that will encourage people to be more involved in the university," he said. An additional benefit, Bell added, would be students' inability to feign ignorance about campus events.

"If [it is] successful, people won't be able to just say they didn't know about something."

The transparency committee will be having a meeting today at 5:00 p.m in the USG office in Thwing.

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