The Hillsdale College Student Federation held their first meeting of the semester on Thursday, August 29. The meeting focused on filling both empty committee seats and a chairmanship position, which were left empty in the wake of several members taking on new leadership positions.
Junior Parker Thayer was appointed to an open seat on the philanthropy committee, while junior Katie Ryerson was voted onto the Rules Committee. Senior Matthew Montgomery received a position on the club oversight committee, while the Federation voted sophomore Brandt Siegfried as chairman.
One purpose of the Oversight Committee is to screen club applications before they are presented to the Federation, Siegfried said.
“There are a lot of clubs on the docket right now that we’re considering,” he said. “I am looking forward to working with my fellow representatives to make sure we can continue to have awesome student activities at Hillsdale.”
President James Millius said that a large portion of future Student Federation meetings will be devoted to reworking the distribution of funds for student publications.
“A big focus for the Federation this semester is going to be improving the Publications Committee, meaning we are going to find ways to work better with the college’s publication board,” Millius said. “We are going to look at potentially giving the Publications Board more autonomy from Student Federation to make it less dependent on the Federation’s vote for funding.”
Braden VanDyke, chairman of the Publications Committee, echoed Millius’s sentiment.
“Essentially, the Student Federation has had a long history of having a little bit of a difficult time managing publications, and specifically what we do with the way we manage their budgets each year,” VanDyke said. “We might also see if there is a possibility of taking the publications budget completely outside of Student Federation’s purview.”
The Student Federation meets every other Thursday at 7 p.m. The next meeting will be held in Dow F on Sept. 12, although future meetings will move to the Formal Lounge beginning Sept. 26. All students are welcome to attend.