Student Affairs Committee
The Student Affairs Committee of the University Senate is the committee that represents student interests. It comprises the 24 voting Senators from the schools of Columbia University (including Barnard and Teachers College) and one non-voting observer from the Union Theological Seminary.
It is also coterminous with and functions as the student caucus or student voting bloc of the University Senate, as all students Senators are automatically members of the Student Affairs Committee. The Student Affairs Committee does not not function as a "super-student council". However, it is primus inter pares and first in the order of precedence of student governance, as it is both the senior body, and the only body at Columbia University representing students across all the schools.
Name
According to the Senate's founding documents, the "Student Affairs Committee" once comprised sixteen students, while the "student caucus" comprised all twenty-four. In the mid-1990s, a merger was effected, and the entire twenty-four member body was (somewhat nonsensically) known as the "Student Affairs Caucus" until 2010. In 2010, it was definitively rebranded as the "Student Affairs Committee" to emphasize its open, deliberative nature, as opposed to identifying it strictly as a voting bloc.
