Announcements:

ESA Elections: are underway, thanks to Kristi and Sarah!

April 19 Nominations open

April 26 Nominations close

May 3 Ballot opens

May 10 Ballot closes

Revels: Will be scheduled for Friday May 12th, and will be a BYOB situation as in the Fall. Please think about setting aside time to help us set up on 5-11 and on the afternoon of 5-12.

The ESA sound conference: It was a success! Members of the committee have written wonderful blog posts about the event, which you can read on the Center for the Humanities blog:

Discussion:

Diversity Committee: Last year, the program agreed, in collaboration with ESA discussions and the Diversity committee which was then chaired by Kandice Chuh, that a new format was needed. It was decided that the faculty and students who are elected to the Diversity committee will each be assigned to another program committee. But, since last year when changes were proposed, nothing has been done to implement the new structure, as far as we know. The committee has not even met this year. How might we fix this problem?

Labor Concern: We’ve solicited and assigned volunteers to first years to be ‘teaching mentors,’ but a student-member of the gc community raised a very good point that “Ideally, students would receive even nominal payment for doing this, and it might be a way to use extra ESA funds in the future.” Do we want to spend some of the ESA budget surplus this way? Is this a reason to recommend NOT continuing the program in the future?

Budget: Looks like we will have another surplus of around $500. How should we spend this? More travel grants of $100 a piece? To compensate mentors? To buy a another bookshelf for the ESA library? Other ideas?

Vote:

Paul Hebert has proposed a change to the bylaws. If it succeeds the language will move to the elections ballot for approval by the full ESA.  Basically, the proposal is that we remove language limiting the number of co-chairs to two.