Photo and story by Ethan Clark / Contributing Writer
Members of Middle Tennessee State University’s Student Government Association met Thursday afternoon in the Parliamentary Room of the Student Union Building to discuss plans to to make the organization more connected and accountable to the student body.
The meeting’s first proposed resolution, introduced by Sen. Nathan Watkins of the College of Liberal Arts, would allow representatives from Sidelines to film SGA meetings every Thursday and upload them to the newspaper’s website. Sen. Watkins said this would allow for a larger audience to view SGA’s meetings.
“They’ll be broadcasting to an audience of roughly 3,000,” Sen. Watkins said. “Whereas, we broadcast to about 997.”
SGA currently live-streams meetings through the use of the Facebook Live app on Sen. Hermon Phuntling’s phone. It’s still uncertain whether the Facebook Live stream will continue if Sidelines starts filming the meetings, but Sen. Watkins said the Sidelines filming process would be an improvement over Facebook Live.
“Right now, not many people know about us,” Sen. Watkins said. “We borderline make the policies of the school. So, I think the more people learn about SGA, the better off we’re going to be.”
The resolution will be put up for a vote next Thursday. Sen. Watkins said he didn’t expect much opposition against its passage.
“I don’t think it’s controversial,” he said. “The only opposition I can see is if somebody just has a bad hair day and they don’t want to be filmed.”
In keeping with the theme of staying more connected with the student body, Sen. Kobe Hermann introduced a resolution to allow for the addition of a senate directory on the homepage of each college’s website. This directory would make it easier for students to contact their college’s representatives in SGA, and the bill will be voted on next Thursday as well.
“We think that the MTSU website itself is a place that a lot of people visit, but they don’t go directly to the SGA page,” Sen. Hermann said. “This is just going to be a ‘let’s see how this works’ to see if we can get more traffic and more suggestions for legislation.”
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