Northwestern’s SGA members met to address a few topics of student concern on Monday, March 22. The first issue discussed was the recent web filter issue.
Director of Computing Services, Harlan Jorgensen, met with SGA and gave an update on the web filtering process at NW.
“About ten years ago, NW made the decision to have a web filtering system in place when Internet became prevalent on campus,” Jorgensen said. “There is a mandate coming from a federal law that will require all institutions to block people-to-people (P2P) programs by July 2010, so our current efforts are to meet this mandate.”
The filter will monitor web content more effectively, but it is understood that some blocked material may be important for student research and homework assignments. For this purpose, a committee will be put in place to review access requests submitted by students and faculty. A committee is currently discussing how this sub-committe will function.
Second on the agenda was the discussion of the upcoming SGA election. The election is for the 2010-2011 SGA committee. SGA president, Wes Garcia, will be sending an email to all students with information about the SGA election, and applications will be available upon email request on Monday, March 29. They will be due Friday, April 2.
Voting for executive positions, including offices of president, vice president, secretary and treasurer will take place Monday, April 12. Voting for remaining offices, including Academic Affairs, Admissions, Honors and Retentions, Campus Life and class representatives will be Saturday, April 17. The two at-large and freshman representatives will be voted on early Fall 2010.
Jordan Gowing, senior class representative, has been involved in SGA for a few years and said he has really enjoyed representing the voice of students.
“SGA is a great opportunity for your voice to be heard. Our campus is dynamic, so a variety of students are needed to equally represent our campus,” Gowing said. If you feel as though you would accurately represent a common voice on campus that is under-represented, go for it!”
