The Office of the Dean of Students and UT Student Government rewrote the SG Constitution over the summer to formalize the Dean of Students’ authority over student elections and increase “efficiency,” SG President Hudson Thomas announced on Sept. 2.

Language in the new constitution now clearly lists the Office of the Dean of Students and the Election Supervisory Board as joint overseers of campus-wide elections as opposed to only the Election Supervisory Board. The constitution also states that the Office of the Dean of Students has the final determination in all election disputes. 

Judge Baskin, a SG Supreme Court justice, said the Office of the Dean of Students has always worked closely with SG, but that there should be flexibility in the oversight. He said the court’s main job is to review and explain the language of the governing documents, but a lot of disagreements about the governing documents arise during election season. 

“It seems like there’s a lot of pull from the Dean of Students,” said Baskin, a Plan II and journalism junior. “It’s a student government for a reason, and it’s disappointing at the very least, to know that … the decisions made within SG, maybe are not worth as much as we hoped they would be.”

In the new constitution, agencies were also written out of the governing structure of the executive branch. Additionally, the provisions that laid out a ranked-choice voting system were replaced with a simple majority provision. 

Thomas said he worked with Thierry Chu, the SG vice president, and a group of students from and outside of SG to analyze the constitution. Thomas said they found a lot of repetitive language. 

“We realized a lot of this wasn’t efficient, because there’s a lot of nuance in the Constitution that people were debating about … we really wanted to trim it down and make it digestible,” Thomas said.

The students worked with Michael Goodman, a professor who studies student government constitutions. Goodman said the Office of the Dean of Students contacted him to work with SG to address inconsistencies and duplicated efforts in the SG Constitution, Election Code and the Code of Rules and Procedures. He recommended constitutional changes to the Office of the Dean of Students, who he said had the authority to enact any changes to the constitution. His efforts cut down the SG constitution from a 90-page to a 22-page document.

“I would argue that all of the student government entities need to take a look at their governing documents,” Goodman said. “Most universities are having student governments do that right now.”

Finance junior Anthony Nguyen, the SG speaker of the assembly, said that even with the changes made, he believed that SG should still be student-focused. Nguyen said he was not involved in the updates made, but was aware SG met to discuss changes over the summer.

“I was aware something was happening, but I thought it was putting the Constitution in more layman’s terms, (and) looking at any redundancies,” Nguyen said. 

Nguyen said that he hopes students continue to engage with SG even with the changes this year.

“It’s really important that students continue to engage with events,” Nguyen said. “If you’re disappointed in things, I want you to voice your concerns.”