By Steve Babcock

The Student Government Association rejected a proposed resolution on Thursday that would have made annual meetings with faculty advisors mandatory for students.

In the end, the resolution could not survive squabbling over the bill’s main consequence, a block on the classes of any student that failed to meet with their advisor.

The vote saw 20 opposed to 15 in favor of the resolution, with 10 senators abstaining. The 10 abstaining, a relatively high number, came after opponents of the resolution pleaded with senators to abstain if they did not have a firm grasp of their constituencies’ positions.

Prior to the vote, Vice President of Financial Affairs Michael Benson addressed the problems associated with the block on classes.

“A block on classes means that the student is severed from the university financially, as well as academically,” he said. “The administration says that a block should be a last resort used when a student has failed to maintain the status of a responsible student. This legislation goes too far.”

Senator Jason Kravitz added that the College of Arts and Sciences did not support the resolution. Student opinions were reported by many senators as being virtually 50-50.

Argument in favor of the bill was not as loud as in previous weeks, but Vice President for Administration Emerald Gravel did bring a more personal reason for why the legislation should have been passed to the table.

“I haven’t gone to see my advisor before semester conversion yet,” she said. “No one is making me do it, so I haven’t gone.”

The debate on the resolution, which had lasted three weeks, finally came down to a direct vote that interrupted the senate’s final session of debate.

The motion to close debate, which passed with five minutes of debate time still remaining, came just after Vice President for Academic Affairs Andres Vargas, the legislation’s chief proponent and co-author, had inquired about making amendments to the bill.

After the meeting, Vargas said that the amendments he planned to make would require advisors to make available more walk-in hours, and would make it impossible for a students’ classes to be blocked if the advisor was at fault for not meeting with them.

Vargas, who vehemently argued for the resolution over the previous two weeks, was disgusted that all the discussion in SGA over the past weeks came down to a virtual silencing of his ability to change the resolution.

At the meeting’s close, he thanked the SGA for three good weeks of debate but, he also reiterated the larger problem that the resolution was attempting to repair.

“The clock is ticking on semester conversion,” he said. “It’s going to come whether we are ready or not.”