During Elon University’s Student Government Association meeting on Feb. 16, Provost Rebecca Kohn said that her new role has allowed her to work more with diversity, education and inclusion, as well as health and wellbeing within the university.
Kohn said that she has been a part of work being done to advance the equity requirements that Elon students will be required to take, beginning in fall 2023. Kohn also said she helped with recruitment and retention of people of color on staff. Part of this work included looking at where there may have been existing bias and taking a closer look at how to recruit with diversity as a priority and use inclusive language.
“We were able to get things passed,” Kohn said. “We rewrote the introduction for any advertisement for faculty or staff that goes out.”
SGA also passed legislation to update its election packet which will be available on Feb. 28 for students to fill out. The main change to the election packet was that candidates previously were allowed to spend up to $50 of their own money toward their campaign.
Now, students are still able to do that, but in the event that they cannot afford their campaign, they can request funding from the SGA budget. This change was made to increase equity and Vice President of Finance senior Megan Curling said that while there is still a procedure that students will have to go through to request funding, SGA wanted to provide students with this option.
“I personally don't foresee a situation where if someone feels the need to ask us, unless we have a much smaller budget than we currently do, that we wouldn’t be able to accommodate that,” Curling said.
The next meeting will be at 7:30 p.m. on March 2 in Moseley 215.