Among the many, many activities I have going this semester, I've been working with the Law School Assembly to figure out ways to improve the school. Our new dean, and the rest of the administration, has been extremely proactive and welcoming of suggestions for making the process, the building, and the experience better.
Towards that end I've mostly been involved with the Communications Committee, and we've been trying to figure out how the blizzard of information the school needs to tell us can be more effectively disseminated. We've been having meetings with various stakeholders to try to figure out what works, what doesn't, and what can be done differently.
Meanwhile, there was a latent issue related to student group use of classrooms. As president of the IP Law Society I'm well aware of the scarcity of facilities – I've often had to shuffle our meeting times in order to get a room. I'm further stymied by there being a paucity of rooms we can eat in. If we have to have a meeting over lunchtime because it's the only time we can get a room, we're going to need to be able to eat during it. Otherwise people will either not show up, or if they come they will be all cranky and unfocused. But ever since the classrooms got new carpet this year there has been forbidding food in them.
The policy has left the groups hamstrung. It's hard enough to get a group going and sufficiently congealed that it won't peter out immediately. Being able to meet, often and effectively, is critical to getting groups off the ground so that they may be a resource for students. I happened to mention in one of these meetings that the no-food rule was a penny-wise, pound-foolish policy. That we might maintain our clean carpets, but at the expense of maintaining our student groups.
Apparently the penny-wise argument resonated, and the meme was relayed to the power-that-be in charge of the rule, who reversed it. So today it seems I did make a difference, albeit in a small way. Stay tuned for tomorrow...
Backdated a day to when I intended to post it.