Safety, minority issues on agenda at Council meeting

University Council, which serves as the main advisory board to the president and provost, will hold its first meeting of the semester today at 4 p.m. in the Quadrangle's McClelland Hall. Comprised of about 90 administrators, faculty members, staff and students, Council meets monthly to discuss University-wide issues in a public forum. Much of today's two-hour meeting -- which will begin with status reports from members of the steering committee, including University President Judith Rodin and Provost Robert Barchi -- will center on the selection and ranking of "focus" issues for Council this year. At last year's final meeting in late April, Council selected six issues that it considered particularly relevant at the time. The six topics -- which include women's safety and the safety of the entire community, minority recruitment and retention, admissions and retention statistics for minorities, the pluralism report on financial aid and graduate and professional students' relationship with undergraduates -- will all be revisited today. Other issues could be added to Council's year-long agenda but none of the above six will likely be deleted from the agenda, according to Faculty Senate Chairperson John Keene, who also heads up the Council's steering committee. "There obviously were people there [in April] who had thought about [the issues] in one way or another and thought they should be considered again," Keene, a City and Regional Planning professor, added. At today's meeting, the steering committee will charge each of Council's 13 standing committees with individual goals and projects for the year. In addition, chairpersons from three of the committees -- Admissions and Financial Aid, Bookstore and Facilities -- will present brief reports to the entire Council. United Minorities Council Chairperson Chaz Howard applauded Council's efforts in bringing issues like minority recruitment and women's safety into a public forum this year. "Any growth for any group of color is a step in the right direction for the University," the College senior said. Last year was a relatively quiet one for Council, as two meetings -- one in October and another in February -- were both canceled due to a lack of substantial agendas. The issues that were discussed, however, focused largely on campus safety and minority concerns. In last September's meeting, for example, Council brainstormed ways in which the University can better recruit and retain minority students and student leaders encouraged Penn administrators to develop financial aid initiatives comparable to those at peer institutions. At December's meeting, in the aftermath of an early morning attack on a then-sophomore woman in a basement bathroom of Steinberg-Dietrich Hall, then-College junior Erin Healy spoke on behalf of the Penn chapter of the National Organization for Women. Healy presented a list of four demands to Council, including regularly maintained emergency alarms and multiple victim advocacy resources that could be employed in preventing on-campus violence.