The Student Union (SU) Senate discussed the possibility of continued protests in regard to Professor Philip Dybvig’s continued employment and made preliminary preparations for the upcoming Boeing resolution vote in its meeting this Tuesday, March 5. 

The continued employment of Dybvig amid numerous sexual assault allegations and the SU Senate’s recent resolution to investigate and suspend him has led some senators to call for Senate-led protests to increase community activism and maintain it in the long term. 

Sophomore Senator Sahil Soni proposed that SU Senate host one protest a week.

“I think a continued push from the students would be the best way to not let this die out. Otherwise students are going to stop caring again,” Soni said. “We should have as much attention towards this as we can get.”

Senators such as sophomore Ashton Lee and junior Braeden Rose expressed their support for this idea. However, Rose had some concerns about the actual impact of these protests.

“We are well within our purview of as representatives of students, students who are by-in-large not happy with what is going on, to continue to press this,” Rose said. “But I think protests are easy to ignore and only last for a short time…what else can we do in addition to that, perhaps?”

While Soni did state that the point of these protests is not necessarily to place pressure on the administration, additional actions were floated. Sophomore Speaker Sonal Churiwal proposed the use of flyers on dorm doors in the South 40, and first-year Senator Mahid Abdulkarim proposed a painting on the underpass. 

Moving away from this topic, the President of SU, senior Emily Chen, and the Executive Vice President, junior Hussein Amuri, announced that the Thursday after Spring Break, from 5-6 p.m. in the Tisch Commons, Washington University will hold its first tuition forum in several years, which comes shortly after the latest tuition increase. 

“[The University’s financial team] provide context as to why tuition increases…and how tuition is used across the University,” Chen said. “It’s a great opportunity for students to ask administrator questions and have them actually answer to students and think about it. Please come show your support.”

The Senate then moved to discussing the upcoming resolution which will be voted on after Spring Break, which calls for the University to cut all ties and divest from Boeing in response to the Israel-Hamas war. Soni explained the importance and difficulty of this resolution and addressed a petition against the resolution.

“It’s going to be in the public eye and, frankly, I think all of us should hold a unified front on whatever our stance is,” Soni said. “Instead of going back and forth and worrying about the backlash that is going to come with this, I want to talk to all of you about it. Right now, it’s kind of a shitshow, and we need to fix it.”

Due to the controversial nature of this resolution, Churiwal stated that she was looking into ways to make the voting anonymous, at least to the public (such as clearing the room or having a secret ballot), in response to voting and safety concerns she said were raised by multiple people. However, SU advisor Sarah Edmondson could not confirm the constitutionality of a secret ballot being used in this context. 

At the very least, voting in this manner would require a majority vote by the Senate, and some senators, such as Rose, expressed their opposition on the grounds of protecting representative democracy.

“At the end of the day, we did run for these positions,” Rose said. “It defeats the whole point of representative democracy. In the event that [the students] don’t want a Senate who votes in the way that we did, it’s well within their right to remove those officers, to vote them out, and they can only do that by knowing who voted for what.”

Soni echoed this sentiment. However, Churiwal and sophomore Senators Natalia Leon-Diaz and Lee emphasized both the safety of senators and that senators should not feel intimidated into voting a certain way.

“I think there’s a distinction between fear of getting backlash and your actual safety concerns,” Churiwal said. “We have seen this distinction put out by similar conversations at other universities.”

Lee stated that he did not want his fellow senators to feel intimidated.

“Your decision is your decision,” Lee said. “I don’t want you to be intimidated that you possibly will feel harm, because there is fear on both sides of this issue that you will be harassed either physically or verbally, or that you won’t feel safe.”

Ultimately, the Senate did not reach a decision on this matter due to a purported lack of information, choosing to vote on it before the resolution on the Tuesday after Spring Break. The Dining Services Subcommittee met after the Senate meeting, however, it was closed to the public and no minutes were taken.