Student Association President Aysha Seedat will be attending a Student Affairs Advisory Board meeting on Friday, when she’ll take part in a discussion on the Orange Alerts sent out during Oct. 14’s campus lockdown.

At SA’s meeting Monday night in the Hall of Languages, Seedat sought assembly members’ thoughts on the effectiveness of the Orange Alerts. The assembly also passed a bill calling for Syracuse University to mandate that professors share syllabi outlines before course registration.

One assembly member, Obi Afriyie, said he felt SU “covered all bases” by sending out Orange Alerts via email, phone call and text message. But another member said he knew of people who did not get the alerts to their phone because their contact information wasn’t updated on MySlice.

To fix that, Seedat said she is hoping to make a 15- or 30-second video explaining to students how to update their information.

Another assembly member, Katie Oran, was concerned because SU didn’t go on lockdown as quickly as Centennial Hall, the residence hall of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Oran, who is a student at SUNY-ESF, said Centennial Hall went on lockdown about 20 minutes before the Orange Alert was sent out. She added that SUNY-ESF required students to stay in the dorm during the lockdown. Meanwhile, SU only suggested that students stay in buildings and didn’t mandate it — something that other assembly members said they would like to see changed if there is another incident like Wednesday night in the future.

Seedat said she will relay all of the assembly’s feedback to the rest of the advisory board on Friday.

Later in the meeting, Academic Affairs Chair Sonia Suchak introduced a bill suggesting that SU require professors to upload outlines of their syllabi to MySlice before course registration so that students can look at the syllabi when deciding which classes to take.

On Sept. 30, SA posted a survey to its Facebook page requesting feedback on the initiative. Suchak said that 3 percent of the student body took the survey. Ninety-six percent of those respondents said they would utilize a system that allowed them to view syllabi outlines before course registration.

Suchak said the most important part of the bill is that it would make textbook costs more transparent. She added that students deserve to know the financial commitment of taking a class before they actually decide to register for it.

The assembly voted to pass the bill, but Suchak said it will still be a long-term project and likely won’t be in place for several years.

Published on October 19, 2015 at 11:09 pm

Contact Michael: mdburk01@syr.edu