When students cast their ballots today for next year's Duke Student Government Executive Board, they will also vote on a referendum to change the DSG Constitution.
The revised document is shorter than the current one and "brings the constitution into line with current DSG best practice," said President Pro Tempore Gregory Morrison, a sophomore. The new version was approved by the Senate Feb. 25 and will take effect this Fall if at least 25 percent of the student body votes and a majority of those vote in favor of the referendum.
"The goal of this referendum and the revisions we made are not so much to do radical, broad rethinking of DSG-though I think it needs to be done-but it's to bring the old constitution up to date to the best way that we have found DSG works," Morrison said.
The proposed constitution eliminates nine Senate and cabinet offices that Morrison said are now defunct, including the administrative secretary, student services director, public relations director, parliamentarian and director of undergraduate computing. Morrison noted that presidents had still been appointing the positions because they are constitutionally mandated.
Additionally, the revised document requires representatives to be apportioned by class instead of by living groups, which are no longer applicable because the housing model has changed over the years.
"I think that the old constitution reflected a body that was much more bureaucratic and in many ways much more centralized than how we are now and how we should be," Morrison said.
Other modifications include the establishment of the Student Organization Finance Committee as an independent branch of DSG. The current constitution was written in the 1970s when DSG formed from the Duke Student Government Association and was last updated March 31, 2005, Morrison said.
"We're in a situation where if we actually did what we were supposed to constitutionally, we would be delivering a poor government," he said.
President Jordan Giordano, a senior, created the Rules Committee last November to rewrite the constitution in cooperation with the Executive Board. The committee consists of five members and is chaired by Morrison.
"The constitution that we've been using is filled with a lot of old material that doesn't really apply to DSG anymore or to the way that we run things now," said Executive Vice President Sunny Kantha, a senior. "A lot of the previous constitution was written with sinuous language."
Revisions to the document's wording were the major changes, Kantha and Giordano said. The new version streamlines how the document is read and makes it easier to understand, Morrison said.
The revised constitution, however, removes gender neutral language that is in the current document, changing "he/she" to "he." This modification led to a discussion among senators and precipitated two dissenting votes.
"I voted against it because it did not include gender neutral pronouns," said Academic Affairs Senator Julia Chou. "It was a matter of principle even though I definitely applaud all the other changes that were made to the constitution. I could not vote [for] it based on the fact that we took a social step backwards."
Chou, a junior, noted that gender neutrality would not have hindered readability because pronouns were only used six times in the new version. But the push for gender neutral pronouns "was not strong enough to cause the constitution to be overturned and rewritten," Kantha said.
Morrison noted that "he" is the all-inclusive pronoun used by the U.S. Constitution and the committee selected it for "purely aesthetic purposes."
Despite the various modifications to the constitution, Morrison said the committee was not able to rethink and restructure the judiciary because it was beyond the scope of the committee's mission.
"The weakest part of DSG is how we have the judiciary set up," he said. "Ideally what we want is a group in DSG that knows the constitution and the by-laws, that is competent to make a ruling to say this resolution that we passed, this process we went through, is legal by our own constitution and by-laws. The judiciary now does not do that because they're not expected to, they're not required to in the constitution or by-laws-there's no precedence of that."
Morrison noted that one of the priorities for next year is to create a fully functional judiciary that is independent, active and utilizes a system of checks and balances, adding that more rigorous qualifications should be implemented for the group to serve as a watchdog over the organization.
The Rules Committee is also working to amend the by-laws so they are in compliance with the new constitution, Morrison said.
"The new constitution works because we worked to make sure the structure was solid and that we had eliminated grey areas in it," he said. "It's not necessarily some of the policies we've changed, but the way the document reads and how easy it is for people to access."
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