This past Wednesday, Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) gathered for its first meeting of the spring semester to discuss Super Snack and the possibility of revamping the BSG constitution.

Chair of Student Affairs Harper Stevenson ’27 began the meeting by addressing the lack of Super Snack last weekend and providing context for why Thorne was closed on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.

“Supers was closed because at this moment Dining does not have enough student employees or employees in general to cover Supers, and that’s coming from a place of [employees] feeling disrespected, and students not cleaning up after themselves … or saying rude things to staff members,” Stevenson said.

Moving forward, Stevenson suggested that the general assembly should work toward drafting an email to the student body to address the behavior from students that has reduced the number of employees willing to work during Super Snack.

The main focus of the evening was the possibility of revamping the current BSG constitution so that it reflects the current structure and practices BSG follows.

According to Vice President Elliot Ewell ’27, since Covid-19, the constitution has become an obstacle to how the student government operates. Ewell presented a series of changes to the constitution to the general assembly in order to help the document better represent the current structure of BSG.

“When we were looking at the assembly and the way that things have worked in the past couple years, and then we looked at the [constitution], we actually saw the document was quite hindering the way in which the assembly functioned,” Ewell said.

One of the guiding themes for the possible revised constitution is to make the structure clearer and voting procedure more set in stone so it is obvious what members of the assembly vote.

Finally, Ewell focused on the idea of deconcentrating power from just a few students and making the document more understandable so that all students have the opportunity to quickly read the constitution and understand exactly what BSG does.

“We need to clarify responsibilities such that a reader can read documents, understand how we work really fast, which is the most important thing,” Ewell said. “Also, decentralizing power away from one student so that it is not just one person that picks, for instance, the [faculty committee representatives] by themselves, which is not good. It’s not good to have one student pick everything.”