The UT Senate of College Councils submitted a letter to the Office of the Dean of Students along with other administrators on March 31 addressing the recent changes to its governing documents by the Dean of Students Office.

The changes to these governing documents revised Senate’s recruiting efforts. Before, students did not need to be a member of a college council in order to serve in the Senate. Now, Senate membership is composed of college council members, meaning the general student body will no longer be able to join Senate.

“We’re not tapping into a whole other body of students that are more interested in doing student government, whether that be Senate or SG,” said Sumer Zakaria, Communication Council policy chair and Senate representative.

Along with putting up barriers for students who want to join Senate without previous college council experience, the changes also impact current council members. Smaller councils must now recruit for Senate along with their council, according to Geoff Carlisle, Senate representative for the Graduate Public Affairs Council.

Members will be taking on extra work as they serve their council and Senate. Some council constitutions prohibit holding leadership positions in Senate and their council, according to the letter.

“Those (Senate) committee chairs have to be from council leadership, serving on those two positions at the same time without any compensation,” said Danny Islas Becker, College of Natural Sciences Council president and vice president elect for the Senate of College Councils. “We thought it was something that was going to be detrimental to the accessibility of those leadership positions within councils.”

An additional change the Dean of Students Office made to the governing documents took out the statement “Senate recognizes that academics are inherently affected by the intersectionality of identities” from Senate purposes, according to Carlisle. According to the letter, this “limited the interpretation of academics,” which created a disparity between Senate and the Dean of Students Offices’ definition of academics, further impacting student experience.

“We feel that a lot of these changes are made in response to a growing progressive voice and a voice for (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives from Senate because those are the only legislative actions that have been impeded by the Dean of Students,” Carlisle said.

According to the letter, the changes to Senate’s recruitment efforts ultimately strips Senate of its status as an “official voice of students,” a title the University of Texas Board of Regents gave them in 1973.

“It’s frustrating that it’s the 50th anniversary of when the UT Board of Regents designated Senate as the ‘official voice of students,’” Carlisle said. “That this is the time the Dean of Students has decided to strip Senate of that title and a reason has not been given.”

The Dean of Students Office did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Texan for this story.

Multiple student leaders expressed frustration that the Dean of Students Office did not include council or Senate members in their decision-making process.

“Everything’s been messed up with little to no input from the actual councils and the people who have helped build this and have been elected to these positions,” Communications Council president Nickoli Benkert said. “Regardless of what the content of the changes is, that alone is a really big violation of what student (governance) is supposed to mean.”