THE General Body is continuing to press the Syracuse University administration on issues raised in the fall, which were highlighted by group members during a press conference Tuesday.

The press conference took place Tuesday in 500 Hall of Languages, and group members voiced concerns with campus issues that they said they feel still haven’t been adequately addressed. About 50 people were in attendance.

THE General Body, which is a coalition of student organizations, staged an 18-day sit-in in Crouse-Hinds Hall in November 2014 to protest topics listed in the group’s 45-page list of grievances and demands. Tuesday’s press conference focused on issues including divestment and mental health resources.

Danielle Reed, a junior African American studies and Spanish major, discussed the reopening of applications for the Paris Noir program, the draft of the Academic Strategic Plan released last Thursday and decision making at SU.

“As Chancellor (Kent) Syverud and his administration open up his week-long comment period on their proposed Academic Strategic Plan, we are once again bombarded with the language of ‘excellence, innovation and entrepreneurship,’” she said.

She added that those terms “present the university’s commitment to corporate values over student educational needs, safety, transparency and access and a strong stance against oppression in all of its forms.”

Reed called for a shift in the “top-down process of decision-making” at SU.

Jonathan Schmidt, a freshman political science and geography major representing Divest SU, said that SU’s current plan to divest isn’t enough. SU announced on March 31 that it is formally divesting endowment funds from coal mining and other fossil fuel companies.

“This announcement simply makes (divestment) a formal policy without changing what they actually do,” Schmidt said of the administration.

Schmidt called on SU to divest all co-mingled funds within the university’s endowment and said Divest SU has another meeting with the administration on Wendesday.

“We see clearly the university’s continued commitment to appearing to make a difference,” Schmidt said.

Montinique McEachern, a graduate student in the School of Education, discussed the lack of mental health resources at SU, and said that marginalized students are “the most visible and the most ignored by the university’s mental health system.”

She added that the Counseling Center is “understaffed, underfunded and overcrowded,” and said the lack of resources at the Counseling Center has a negative effect on other resources throughout campus, such as the LGBT Resource Center.

Kulsoom Ijaz, a third-year law student, focused on sexual assault and said there is “a well-founded fear” that attacks like the alleged drugging of a College of Law student and her friend at off-campus house parties hosted by third-year law students in the fall of 2014 would happen again.

Ijaz said SU should send an alert whenever a student is sexually assaulted, similar to the alerts DPS currently sends out.

“The administration cannot prevent these crimes from occurring, but it does have an inescapable duty to serve its students,” she said.

–Asst. News Editor Sara Swann contributed reporting to this article.

Published on April 7, 2015 at 7:46 pm

Contact Justin: jmatting@syr.edu | @jmattingly306