Council will create Escort subcommittee

In an effort to address continuing concerns over changes to Escort Service, the University Council will create a subcommittee of the Council Committee on Safety and Security to work with the University on campus transportation issues. Emeritus Biochemistry Professor Adelaide Delluva, the committee's chairperson, said at yesterday's Council meeting that she would begin discussing specific aspects of the subcommittee at next week's committee meeting. She said the subcommittee would act as an advisory body to Steven Murray, associate vice president for business services, and the process management team which engineered the recent overhaul of Escort. One of the subcommittee's key aims, according to Delluva, will be to increase the role students play in deciding changes to Escort. She said she hoped the subcommittee would draw about half its members from the committee and half from the University community at large, including several students. Currently, there are no students on the process management team. Delluva said that the process management team is "an ill-chosen group" because it does not have representation from students, which she called "numerically the biggest [Escort] consumer." Support for the subcommittee appeared to be strong among Council members, particularly those from the Undergraduate Assembly and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly. "It's about time," UA Chairperson Jeffrey Lichtman said last night. He said the subcommittee would finally give students a chance to influence policy decisions that affect them. After Murray presented Council with an update on the changes to Escort, members questioned him on topics such as the waiting times for pickup, the possibility of extending Escort to 18th Street in Center City and the safety and viability of walking Escort. Murray defended the new system, noting that the service provides about a thousand escorts per night -- a 53 percent increase over this time last year -- and that Escort's cost per rider is lower than it was last year. But he conceded that the system is "not perfect and will need some fine-tuning." He said that extending Escort to 18th Street seemed like "a good idea" and admitted that the average wait for escorts from off-campus locations to campus is too long. He added, however, that the wait for an escort in general has dropped to less than ten minutes on average this year. In other business, Council agreed to vote at next month's meeting on changes to the Council Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid. The changes would reduce overlap with a similar committee overseen by the provost's office. The proposed revisions would expand the reach of the Council committee to include the University's graduate schools. At present, the committee can only consider admissions and financial aid matters for the four undergraduate schools. The Provost's Committee on Undergraduate Admissions, established last year by Provost Michael Aiken, has greater impact on University policy than the Council committee, because Council is only an advisory body to President Sheldon Hackney and cannot implement policy. Statistics professor David Hildebrand, chairperson of the Faculty Senate, said at the meeting that Council members seemed to agree that the proposed changes would make the Council committee into a "two-way communication vehicle." He said the modified committee would generate concerns from students and faculty on financial aid and admissions, and in turn, provide a means for administrators to broadcast their concerns to the University community. Aiken said he believed there would be no conflict between the two committees if the revisions are approved, because the Council committee would be an "informational mechanism," rather than a "policy mechanism." (CUT LINE) Please see COUNCIL, page 4 COUNCIL, from page 1