The Duke Student Government Senate discussed DukeEngage Wednesday night in an effort to offer feedback to the program's directors.
Sarah Trent, assistant director of programs at the Duke Center for Civic Engagement and DukeEngage, explained at DSG's meeting the various ways students could become involved in civic engagement during the summer.
She said DukeEngage will fund approximately 300 students to participate either in individual projects with a community partner, group projects led by faculty or third-party programs.
Members of the Senate asked Trent about potential procedures for getting students out of politically unstable countries.
Trent said students will undergo training at Duke to best prepare themselves for potential danger.
"What you need to know in Durham is not what you need to know some place abroad, but everyone will have some training in tandem with risk management so students will know how to keep themselves best safe," she said. "We also hire someone to be in every country with every student who is in a Duke program. These on-the-ground program coordinators would often be a graduate student whose primary responsibilities are health and safety."
President Paul Slattery, a senior, spoke about revising University policies regarding judicial affairs and urged members of the Senate to get involved in the process.
"At Stanford [University], students generated their own judicial process," he said. "We need that kind of groundswell here."
He asked members of the Senate to respond to peers' experiences with the Office of Judicial Affairs in order to generate change in their current practices.
"The point is getting broad student input," Slattery said. "For this process to be legitimate, I need you and your friends contributing. I can't tell you enough how important it is to hear from other students. I can't tell you enough how important it is to hear from a diversity of perspectives and experiences."
Slattery explained the need for students to be given a right to remain silent and a right to discovery after receiving a notification letter about their misdemeanor.
"The initial notification letter should expose which specific policy a student violated," he said. "Right now it is a broad area and we would like students to actually know what they did."
In other business:
Slattery and Vice President for Academic Affairs Gina Ireland, a senior, spoke about the need for majors unions at Duke.
"Majors unions could serve as a mediator between students within the major and the department," Slattery said.
He explained that with a majors union, students could look into curriculum design, creation of research programs and hiring practices for teaching assistants.
Ireland spoke of the levers necessary to strengthen majors unions, specifically touching on the need for information technology support.
Vice President for Community Interaction Genevieve Cody, a senior, proposed changes to Intercommunity Council bylaws that would allow the ICC to elect its chair internally. Currently, the vice president for community interaction serves as ICC chair.
An additional change in the bylaws would grant ICC the ability to elect two representatives from the group to be full voting members during the election of students to presidential and Board of Trustees committees.
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