On Saturday, October 28, the Student Body President, Vice President and USNH Trustee and Representatives from Plymouth State, Keene State and the University of New Hampshire met on the Plymouth campus to discuss issues pertinent to all three campuses.
The Student Leadership Summit was organized by the Plymouth State Student Body President and Vice President, Peter Laufenberg and Andrew McLean. A letter went out to Keene State and UNH at the end of September and the process was underway. It all came together on Saturday when everyone convened at PSU to tackle important issues and improve communication between the student leadership on the different campuses.
The first issue discussed was about tuition, led by the Plymouth State USNH Trustee Jeremy Foskitt. Healthy dialogue followed about what the three schools are doing, people posed suggestions about the most effective way to begin getting towards speaking to legislatures about their ideas.
Sean Kelly, the President of the Student Body at UNH, shared an interesting fact that there will be several graduates of UNH in positions of power at the state level, and all agreed representatives who went to school in N.H. would be a great resource to contact about issues.
They also all agreed that there were many understandable reasons why tuition was rising – general construction, new buildings and many student organizations to fund – and talk about the housing crunches on campuses sprung as a digression there as well. The group agreed that while students are frustrated, they did not see a plausible end in sight.
The next topic discussed, headed up by Laufenberg, was textbook prices and if anything could be done to make them more reasonable. All three universities had bookstores on campus owned by Barnes and Noble and expressed distress with how high the book prices were. UNH and Plymouth both have book exchanges, but it did not offer much choice to students as prices were usually similar if not the same.
Laufenberg spoke of a concern about the difference between book editions, saying that while he understood that sciences needed to constantly update their editions, he did not see the need for classes such as history to need new editions of their books so frequently. The biggest idea discussed was that students were now going online to buy their books, causing all the stores to lose money. Even price matching, which Plymouth did this year, did not spark much hope as an answer, because the prices at the different stores were already so close.
Laufenberg also headed up a conversation about the relationships between the universities and the towns that surround them. Laufenberg said that it really is a give and take relationship, and also spoke about having been on both sides of the argument – he grew up near Plymouth, but now he attends school here. One of the larger points brought up concerning this issue was the monopoly that landlords have on off-campus housing and how they can charge for rent because of the housing crunches all over, even though some of the living standards are sub-par. A goal that everyone wanted to tackle was to rein in the independent landlords to encourage them to maintain stable living conditions.
At the end of the agenda was campus challenges and what the campuses were doing about them. One topic that was spoken about at length was the issue of health insurance being provided through the university. Kelly spoke about the fact that UNH had had one, but it was so expensive that the students that needed it could not afford it, so it was done away with. They are currently in the process of trying to find a more affordable option. John Ouellette, USNH Trustee at Keene, said Keene had 89% of their students covered underneath some sort of non-school funded insurance and so they do not have a plan, but they are still looking into one. Laufenberg mentioned that Plymouth had not yet had to tackle this issue, but it was something that the Senate was looking into.
The Summit also talked about were the issues of randomly generated ID numbers versus using social security numbers, the three-credit system instead of the four-credit system and the technology that was being used across campuses for web portals. Something that generated a fair amount of discussion between Keene and UNH was the issue of student evaluations of the professors and how top professors were being let go just because they didn’t have a Ph.D. The two schools exchanged similar views and concerns about it as the conversation turned to meal plans and how different schools were tackling the issues.
Kelly expressed deep-rooted concern that UNH had spent way too much money on a new dining hall, and to counteract the lost funds they have to create new meal plans that were much more expensive. Sean Greenlaw, the Speaker of Plymouth’s Student Senate, spoke about the push to get block plans and how well they are working out this year. The conversation wrapped up by talking about campus security and what steps were being taken to ensure that students continued to be as safe as possible.
The summit concluded that afternoon with plans to have another summit before the semester is over. Vows to keep in touch and to make sure that the Student Senates are keeping in contact with each other about important issues were made, and everyone parted ways, ready to head back to their own campus to relay everything they had learned.