The University of Michigan’s Central Student Government met Tuesday evening over Zoom to confirm executive nominations and pass resolutions on budget overviews for the 2025 spring and summer terms and on academic processes.
The meeting began with CSG committee reports, which included amendments for resolutions and upcoming deadlines to fill executive seats, before moving to executive reports, which included a discussion of international student visa issues led by Eric Veal Jr., LSA rising senior and CSG president. Several representatives resigned, including Public Policy rising juniors Amr Brown and Emerson Delfin, who could no longer serve as LSA representatives because they transferred into the Ford School of Public Policy.
CSG also confirmed a series of executive nominations. These included Delfin as director of communications, LSA rising sophomore Maeli Peralta as chair of the RISE task force and Engineering rising junior Nina Clark and LSA rising sophomore Abigail Peake as co-deputy chief programming officers.
Veal Jr. then spoke briefly about a meeting he and Lucas Korn, LSA rising senior and CSG Vice President, had with Dean of Students Laura Blake Jones, Katherine White, chair of the Board of Regents, and Interim University President Domenico Grasso. Veal Jr. discussed the work CSG and the University are doing in response to the recent termination of Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students by President Donald Trump’s administration, in addition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by the House of Representatives and its proposed Pell Grant eligibility reduction.
“I’m actually sending an email today to Harvard student body presidents to talk to them and hear from them and hear what’s going on from their perspective when it comes down to students,” Veal Jr. said. “Looking at the bigger picture of what’s going on, I think today, Dean Jones connected with the international center and we want to have some conversations with them … What can we do to protect students and support students at this time?”
Veal Jr. said he has recently been involved in outreach to other university presidents regarding the protection of students’ affordability if the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is signed into law.
“In my capacity as president, I’ve been meeting with other student government presidents to talk about what exactly is going on at other schools,” Veal Jr. said. “Also, our administration is extremely committed to affordability and we brought that up last week in our meeting with President Grasso finding ways to support students.”
One piece of legislation, AR 15-012, was introduced. The resolution aims to update the Compiled Code, a governing document that defines the structure and functions of CSG, to reflect ongoing changes made to the number of ex officio CSG members. It was referred back to the CSG Rules Committee for second reads.
CSG passed several previously introduced resolutions, including AR 15-006, the re-establishment of the Micro-Mobility Expansion Act; AR 15-008, the Mutual Defense Compact; and AR 15-009, the H.A.R.T Act.
AR 15-007, which creates a CSG budget for the spring and summer terms, was also passed with a unanimous vote. Luca Giobbio, Public Policy rising junior, said the new budget allocation is higher than in previous spring and summer semesters in order to meet the growing needs of the Student Organization Committee.
“We want to make sure that the executive and that CSG as a whole can keep going and support the events that we do have at hand,” Giobbio said. “There’s been a trend over the past spring (and) summers to have $60,000 for SOC and we’re increasing that by quite a lot because we’re expecting a greater quantity of clubs being created that need our funding and our support … With this extra funding we’re hoping to be able to meet those needs.”
Veal Jr. said that while supporting the Student Organization Funding Committee is important, he also wants CSG to support funding for welcome events held during the first week of classes.
“Supporting welcome weeks is an intentional move,” Veal Jr. said. “I think the work that SOFC does is amazing. I think that is imperative to the life of CSG, but I think we get so wrapped up in sending money to student orgs that we don’t realize that in this effort that we’re trying to make with funding welcome weeks, it’s twofold. While we’re also supporting student orgs financially, we also plan to be there.”
AR 15-010, which would help Social Work students find field education opportunities, also passed with unanimous consent after being introduced in the previous CSG meeting. U-M alum Hana Kisswani said she wishes to create advocacy movements similar to Payment 4 Placements to raise awareness of unpaid field placements in fields other than social work.
“I hope we can advance (paid placement advocacy) broader as well as move on and focus on connecting this to other professions that experience the exploitative nature of unpaid placements, unpaid clinicals (and) unpaid educational experiences,” Kisswani said. “This is a big issue that impacts a lot of students and so I hope we can advance so much with this and work with a lot of other organizations.”
CA 15-001, which would create an ex officio seat on CSG for part-time students, was also approved by a two-thirds delegation vote. Kisswani said establishing a part-time student voice in the Student Assembly is important to represent everyone on campus.
“We’re knowing who our audience is and who we really want to fill the seat and whose voice we just want to uplift in our space,” Kisswani said. “This would be the first step to ensure (part-time student) voices are represented and heard and advocated in our room and our environment.”
Daily Staff Reporter Kaelyn Sourya can be reached at ksourya@umich.edu.
