The advisory body charged with addressing campuswide issues has canceled its last two meetings due to "insufficient topics" for the agenda this semester.
The University Council, which consists of 94 members representing administration, faculty, staff and students, is supposed to meet monthly. It has not met since Dec. 1.
The cancellations have stirred concern recently over the council's productivity and effectiveness.
"I'm so appalled," said College senior Bradley Breuer, who sat on the UC last year.
"Not all of us have access to the highest-powered administrators at Penn, and so University Council is a very important way for those of us who are just little students to get our ideas out there and to comment on what's being done at the University."
The agenda of the UC is decided by the 16-person steering committee, whose members include the University President Amy Gutmann and Interim Provost Peter Conn.
The Steering Committee is also in charge of scheduling and canceling the general body meetings.
"We don't frankly know what the concerns of the students and staff are unless someone tells us," said Faculty Senate Chairman Charles Mooney, who leads Steering Committee meetings.
"I've been careful before each of the last two steering meetings to have everyone on steering polled [for discussion topics] ... and I have received no suggestions."
According to Mooney, there needs to be better communication between student leaders and their constituencies in order to find matters to discuss.
Undergraduate Assembly Chairman Jason Levine and UA representative Rachel Fersh, who both sit on the steering committee, took partial responsibility for not bringing enough issues to the UC.
"None of the other undergraduate constituencies made myself and Rachel aware of issues that we wanted to bring to the table," said Levine, who is a College senior. He added that the UC is informed of projects that the UA is working on.
Levine emphasized that there are still many other forums that address student concerns, many of which are more effective at instigating change than the UC.
However, Breuer said that this does not change the fact that the UC is not being optimally utilized.
"I can think of at least 10 issues that the University should be addressing," Breuer said.
"This is a huge University of over 40,000 people, and there must be issues that need to be discussed openly at University Council."
According to several UC members, January and February are traditionally slow months because the council committees have not generated proposals or reports.
"There wasn't enough on the agenda to warrant a meeting. It would be much better to have a robust agenda for the March meeting," Gutmann said.
However, Breuer said that the administration is not searching hard enough for the issues.
"We've had a rape. We've had an anonymous $10 million gift. We've had $20 million donated from the trustees. We've had a full University Trustee Board meeting. ... We're on the heels of a major disaster halfway across the world that killed hundreds of thousands of people," Breuer said. "Do they have seasonal affective disorder or something?"
Many UC members do not even attend the meetings regularly. Fersh said slightly more than half of the body attends on a "good week."
"People have not found much of what happens in council very interesting or relevant," Mooney said.
"We all have some responsibility to find ways to better make the business of University Council known to the community and inform the community when [the] council could perhaps serve a useful function," he added.
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