SGA Senate Scheduling and Communication Blunders Continue
By Anthony Curioso
The Student Government Association (SGA) appears to have had quite a difficult time both scheduling and communicating the details of its Senate meetings in the 2025-26 academic year.
On April 27, the SGA executive team posted on their Instagram account at approximately 6 p.m., indicating that a special Senate session would take place at 8:15 p.m. that evening. That special session was necessary because two pieces of legislation had been referred to the Senate committees at the previous Monday’s final regularly scheduled meeting. However, a member of The Tower’s editorial staff happened to run into one of this year’s Senators, Austin Janssen (a junior politics major who represented the Class of 2027), at approximately 7:40 p.m. on that day and learned that the special session had already concluded by that point.
In an email, Student Body Vice President and President of the Senate Matthew Moskowski said, “It was an accident. We do not intend to deceive anyone with erroneous time listings for SGA events.”
This incident marks at least the fourth time this school year that SGA has improperly communicated the dates and times of the Senate meetings or changes to the meeting schedule. Initially, a meeting was scheduled for March 2, before spring break, but it was rescheduled to March 16 to take place after the break. However, this meeting was then postponed again to March 23 due to the CUA campus closing at noon on March 16 because of an unexpected severe storm. It was subsequently postponed a third time, to March 24, because SGA failed to account for a scheduling conflict (with the Board of Trustees’ “GRATUS” dinner overlapping the SGA’s scheduled meeting time on the 23rd, and both events slated to occur in the Pryz Great Rooms).
Throughout these changes, the SGA executive team kept the University community completely uninformed about the timing updates for the March meeting, and Janssen was the person who informed The Tower staff about the final postponement of that particular meeting.
An article published in the Journal of Education and Training suggests that some metrics of the success behind a college’s student government association include “attendance, voting participation, level of student participation in elections, expressions of interest, and the number of [legislative items] that are introduced and passed.” However, for any of these metrics to be determined and improved, the first step would be to ensure that information on how to participate in improving these numbers is accurate and widely accessible to that university’s student population.
At CUA, more specifically, a large portion of those who choose to run in SGA elections campaign on a desire to increase SGA’s transparency to the student body. Scheduling communication blunders of the types and severity that occurred this year constitute major setbacks on SGA’s path towards that goal.
