The Student Leader Blog

The Etiquette of Texting On Campus

I'm guilty as I've done it many times...

I'm chatting with friends and my phone buzzes alerting me of a text message. I stealthily pull the phone from my pocket and text back in hopes no one notices. But my multitasking skills are not good enough and I often play catch up in the conversation.

I'm not nearly as experienced as some students who can text, reply, and order lunch without looking at their phone. But does it mean they are being rude for not fully engaging in the converstaion, or nice because they are txting instead of calling?

Group McPotayves says txting is the same as pulling out your phone and talking, and they want to do something about it via a college campus campaign:

Group McPotayves is working on a campaign to reduce cell phone usage in class. Here is an overview/outline of the campaign:

Goal: To create awareness among students at Oklahoma State University about classroom etiquette.

Objectives:

1.To reduce the use of cell phones, by students during class, by five percent each semester.
2.To increase awareness among incoming freshman about proper classroom etiquette by 50 percent the first semester.

Their blog is filled with a complete action plan including Commercials, PSAs, News Releases, and pre written Opinion Articles (which is kinda funny to think about). They are trying to make it a turn key campaign for your campus.

The question is, is it a problem worth addressing with a campaign blitz? What is your experience on campus?

Don't Forget About Night Time Programming

Palomar College reviewed their current programming and realized that almost all their student activities occur between 10am and 2pm. The problem is 5,000 to 7,500 of their students strictly take evening classes.With a FTE of 30,000, night goers make up nearly 25% of the student body, but yet were receiving almost 0% of the student activities.

To curtail the imbalance and to seize the opportunity:

The college's Associated Student Government hosted its first "Coffeehouse Night" last month, during which students heading to class in the twilight were treated to coffee, cookies and the sounds of an acoustic guitar, as played by a fellow student.

"People drop by, grab a cup of coffee and listen for a little," said Jesse Lyn, student government president. "Many night students come straight from work, so they need an opportunity to unwind before class."

More than 100 students stopped by within the first hour of the event and were "thrilled" by the break from class, Lyn said

Commuter campuses, like Palomar, are known for their large percentage of evening or non-traditional students. Sherry Titus, interim director for student affairs, said:

"They get here after work, take a class and get home to get dinner

started," she said. "They have no buy-in (to the college) besides the

educational one."

Coffeehouse events give these students an

opportunity to become a part of the Palomar community, even if it's

just for a few moments, Titus said. Students are entertained by their

peers or can use the venue to showcase their own talents, including

music, poetry and dance, she said.

So don't forget about your night time students. How are you servicing them with the same student activities fees that everyone else is paying?

Facebook is more Popular than Student Email

There's been talk for awhile now about college students not checking e-mail, instead preferring new technology like text messaging and Facebook.

Schools, in an understandably institutional response often now "require" students to check their email, making the process not exciting to the students by calling it "official". I really do have sympathy for the institutions, especially the poor community college that has been fighting for 3 years to get the budgeting to get a .edu e-mail, finally gets one for 2 million, only to find students used it to get a Facebook account and now don't check their .edu at all, because they get all the info they think they need by logging into Facebook everyday.

While big rich universities like PSU can afford to live on the edge of technology, the bell curve of schools is being left behind by the spam filters of students.

Gen Y, or C, depending on who you are reading, is bombarded with media. (Just think of advertising on the 1/2 inch strip of trim above the glass backboards with www.godaddy.com on them.) They have had to erect incredible powerful filtration methods to sort through all the "junk" that comes at them all day.

E-mail as a mechanism, to a Gen-Yer, and to anyone that hasn't figured out their spam filter yet, is more junk that good. Too much Viagra, sales pitches, "send this to ten people or else . . " Students are simply de-emphasizing this channel in proportion to its usefulness to them.

It's hard to keep up with their preferences, for sure, but it's very silly for institutions to try to force them to use a channel that students have reviewed and dismissed. The students are simply making optimization choices for their inputs. They are making smart choices based on their experiences. Schools will not convince them they are wrong with policies, at best they will cow the students and thereby reinforce and "out of touch" reputation.

Students like text messaging and Facebook precisely for the reasons institutions struggle with them - they are hard to Spam. Of course institutions don't see their communications as Spam, neither does Coke or Expedia, but in the aggregate all of the messages that are not immediately relevant tick one point negative in the student's minds. With Facebook, and incidentally, screwing this up is why myspace will continue to degenerate, students get messages that come from pre-filtered sources: their friends. Same goes for text messages, though now spam is starting to creep into this medium too.

The start of an answer for schools is too work on relevancy. They must do the hard work of pre-filtering their communications and try to get it to the right students at the right time.  Regardless of what channel the message goes through, if institutions lazily bomb out mass e-mails, this generation will simply tune them out with the other junk. Of course this is extra hard for schools with no technology, it is always easy to "send all".

My personal opinion is that PSU has it right.  I think RSS feeds are the way to go. This is a scalable system and is free (sign up for a free typepad account and then feedburn it and you've got an RSS feed). The only challenge is that RSS feeder adoption rates are not yet high enough to make it work (in fact they are extremely low). Institutions could require these instead of -e-mail however, and avoid looking silly by spending money on ineffective channels or requiring outmoded technologies. Instead the risk is on RSS adoption in general, but at least this experiment doesn't put the IT department out 2 million. Very importantly, RSS gives the students a Spam free info channel allowing the institution to show off its understanding of the current challenges of its most important stake holders.

Clipart/Stock Photos = Cheap

vs.        vs.

No matter how cute the clipart puppy is, if it's on a piece of marketing material for an event, it screams cheap. Many schools use clipart because they think it's the only free way to use images. Not really true. The web has many great resources for you and your student leaders to get free, high quality images that you can use for your marketing. Here's a brief list:

• Sxc.hu is the largest free photo site on the web with millions of images. I use this one all the time as my main source.



• Stockvault.net has over 8,000 royalty free photos for personal and education projects.



• Openstockphotography.org is a search engine that goes through all of the Wikimedia Commons images, which as of April 2007 was over 1.3 million.



• Flickr.com is run by Yahoo and has millions of photos uploaded by amature photographers from around the world. The trick with Flickr is each photo has a different set of copyright settings attached to it, so you'll want to read about Creative Commons before you grab the photo you love.

Here's to happy photo finding and better looking marketing materials for campus events.

Examples of Student Club Constitutions

Jeannette Sullivan from Palm Beach Community College was looking for some examples and guidelines to creating a student club constituion. With the help of my infinitely knowledgeable friend, Mr. Google, I found this detailed outline of a student club constituion:

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College of XYZ University

Constitution

XYZ Club 

Article I: Name and Purpose 

Section 1: Name

State the name of the club - you may abbreviate the name after this section if you identify that abbreviation here.

Section 2: Purpose/Mission

State the purpose/mission of your organization – the reasons why you exist. This can be in a list format, or in a paragraph.

Section 3: Affiliation:

If your organization is affiliated with any regional/national organizations, please state those affiliations here.

Article II: Membership:

Section 1: Eligibility for Membership

CSB/SJU joint clubs must be open to any CSB/SJU student. Non-students [e.g., faculty/staff] are not allowed to be full members, but they can be non-voting, affiliate members. State all categories for membership – voting, affiliate, non-voting, etc.

Section 2: Voting Member Criteria

State how a student becomes a voting member [e.g., attends a certain % of meetings/events, pays dues, etc] and if there are any criteria for any other membership categories. This is an important issue for your organization – you want to make sure that students listed on your voting member list are active, interested students in your group.

Section 3: Removal of Members

State the process to remove any member who is not in good standing with the club. Due process must be followed. Things to consider are: reasonable notice to the person being considered for removal, opportunity to defend their position, quorum* needed to vote, timeline for the process, appeal process.

While you will hopefully not need this section, it is very important that you have a process in place. When you need it, this will clarify the procedure and take out some of the difficult personal issues….

Article III: Officers:

Section 1: Officer Qualifications

Identify what qualifications a student must have to be eligible to be an officer. This may include GPA, length of time in organization, previous experience, etc. All officers must be current CSB/SJU students. See Article IV for Election procedures.

Section 2: Elected Officers

List the positions in descending order (e.g., President, Vice-President, etc). If you choose to have a non-hierarchical structure -–that is great! Then just list the Department of Student Activities contact person first. Also clearly identify the Co-Funding Board (CFB) and Joint Club Board (JCB) contacts.

Section 3: Duties of Officers

List each officer position and their duties. You can include this information in Section 2 if you prefer. You may rename positions and form a non-hierarchical structure (we encourage this actually!). Term of office should also be addressed (e.g., academic year, April 1 – March 31)

Typical duties include:

President: preside at meetings, call special meetings, primary contact with the institutions, appoint committee chairs, runs the election process, other Vice-President: assume President’s duties in his/her absence, schedule meeting/practice rooms/facilities, primary contact with the JCB, plans member/officer training programs, other Secretary: takes and distributes minutes of all club meetings, recorder keeper (current and past members, files minutes, etc), club historian, notify members of meetings, handles the official correspondence of the club, other Treasurer: keeps all financial records, submits monthly audit statements to CFB contact (this is a mandatory requirement if you receive CFB funds), notifies organization of financial issues, prepares budget/allocation requests,

Section 4: Vacancy in Office

In the event a vacancy should occur (resignation or removal), provisions must be made to fill the vacancy. Officer succession/"chain of command" should be addressed (e.g., in the event that the President leaves office, the Vice President will assume those duties until a special election is held. Then refer readers to the special election section of Article IV.

Section 5: Removal of Officers

Grounds for removal of an officer must be clearly identified. Similar to the removal of members, due process must be followed. (see above) Make sure you note the role of your club advisor.

One example:

A petition to remove the officer in question must be submitted to another officer. This petition must contain the signatures of x% of voting members. When such petition is received, the officer shall call a meeting of the club to determine whether or not the officer should be removed. Grounds for removal are to presented by the officer in charge at a regular or special club meeting. The officer in question shall be provided an opportunity to present a defense either in person or in writing. A quorum shall be present, and a (x%, 2/3, simply majority) vote of the voting members shall decide upon removal.

While you will hopefully not need this section, it is very important that you have a process in place. When you need it, this will clarify the procedure and take out some of the difficult personal issues….

Section 6: Appeal of Removal of Officers

This section clearly outlines what procedure a removed officer can take to appeal the club’s decision.

Article IV: Elections:

Section 1: Nomination Process

State how officer candidates will be nominated (by a current officer/member, self-nomination, etc.) and the timeline associated with the nomination process.

Section 2: Election

Election procedures, quorum present, method of voting (secret ballot, etc.), number of terms a person can serve, and when the elections will be held (the JCB mandates that by April 1, officer elections take place and that they and the Department of Student Activities are notified of the new officers).

Section 3: Special Elections

This section outlines what procedures will take place if an officer leaves/is removed from office. Clearly state the timeline for these procedures (e. g, within "x" weeks of vacancy occurring). You may use the same procedures from Section 2, with a revised timeline.

Article V: Advisor:

Section 1: Selection

Indicate how your club will choose an advisor. Note: All club advisors MUST be an employee of CSB or SJU.

Section 2: Duties

What do you want your advisor to do? See advisor contract for ideas.

Article VI: Meetings:

Section 1: Regular Meeting/Club Activities

Address how often business meetings will occur, any regular club activities, etc., process to notify members of meetings/activities.

Section 2: Special Meetings

Identify why you would call special meetings, and the process used to call these meetings/notify members, etc. Will these meetings be run any differently than regular meetings?

Section 3: Parliamentary Authority

Will you use Robert’s Rules of Order? How will the meetings be run…

Section 4: Quorum*

What % of your membership must be present for official club business to occur? 2/3 is a standard number.

*A quorum is a certain percentage of voting members required to be present during a vote. It is VERY important to clearly indicate what your quorum will be (often, it is 2/3 of the voting members). You want to make sure that when a vote takes place, that you have a representative sample of your voting membership present.

Article VII: Committees

Section 1: Committee Structure

Include what committees (if any) that your club will have. Include responsibilities of each committee and who is responsible for each committee. Examples include Membership, Programs, Elections, Fundraising, etc.

Section 2: Special/Ad-Hoc Committees

State that special/ad-hoc committees may be formed if needed…

Article VIII: Finances:

Section 1: Co-Funding Board

State whether or not your club will apply for CFB monies and that if allocated resources, your club will follow all CFB and institutional regulations.

Please note that recognized clubs MAY NOT have an off-campus account, even if it is from club generated funds. This is an institutional policy.

Section 2: Honorariums

State whether or not any officers or members will receive an honorarium/stipend from the organization. Note: if honorariums are given, they must come from club generated funds.

Section 3: Dues (optional)

State here if members are required to pay dues, and if so, how much that will be.

Article IX: Amendments:

Section 1: Ratification

Identify the process to be used regarding proposed constitutional amendments: voting procedures, timeline, etc.

Section 2: Submittal to Department of Student Activities and Joint Club Board

Any changes made to this constitution must be submitted to the Department of Student Activities and the JCB.

Article X:

The following is a required statement for all organizations:

The (name of organization) admits students without regard to their race, religion, color, sex, age, sexual orientation or national or ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and other activities, generally accorded or made available to members of the organization.

Article XI:

The following is a required statement for all organizations:

The (name of organization) considers hazing to be a degrading and destructive activity which is inconsistent with the standards of this student organization. The (name of organization) recognizes the dignity of every person and opposes all forms of hazing.

Date of recognition/revision:

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If you are still itching for some more examples here are ya go:

1. University of Notre Dame



2. Madison Area Technical College



3. Washington University in St. Louis



4. Campbell University

Does your university have anything special not included above? If so what is it and why? Or if you have a digital copy of a student constitution at your university, post the link in the comments to share with us.

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