hen Columbia’s administration announced in early November that the University’s Student Governing Board would move from the Chaplain’s office in Earl Hall to Student Development and Activities, the student leaders of the SGB feared new administrative supervision. It may just be a shuffle of bureaucratic acronyms, or it could be a radical change for the organization. And so far, students have been kept in the dark.

The SGB was created in the wake of the student protests in 1968. As its name implies, it was intended as a self-governing organization of students. From the beginning, it was located in Earl Hall, under the oversight of the Chaplain’s office, and it encompassed religious, cultural, and activist groups. This structure of governance recognized their missions as intertwined. The SGB currently operates with little administrative oversight: student groups do not need approval from administrators to hold events or obtain funding. Paperwork is kept to a minimum, allowing students to organize and stage events quickly—an important feature of political activism. Some have, of course, been controversial.

Still, administrators say that the change is not meant to crack down on explosive events, but to provide the SGB with more resources than it has. This isn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds—if it were only a question of funds, the administration could, after all, give the SGB more money. The move is intended to augment not only the SGB’s money supply, but its advising bureaucracy. Chaplain Jewelnel Davis said that it was largely a question of advising staff. Davis currently has only two advisers other than herself to oversee 86 groups.

The Activities Board at Columbia, which oversees non-political student groups under the direction of SDA, enjoys a more extensive advising system. This has advantages as well as drawbacks. Keith Hernandez, chairman of ABC, said that his organization benefits from extensive resources and advising, and that the administration has largely deferred to students: “What we say sort of goes, and the administration is there to back us up.”

One of the biggest initial concerns was that the SGB would be subjected to ABC-style bureaucratic procedure, but most of ABC’s procedures are self-imposed. Hernandez is careful to distinguish the two organizations, characterizing ABC as less of a deliberative body and more of a student service, ready to provide funds and advising. Still, ABC does operate under some direct administrative control from the SDA, which sometimes imposes rules. Hernandez cited a recent case in which SDA began requiring groups to obtain permits from the administration to show copyrighted material. Overall, he said that “ABC has an extremely large amount of latitude.”

Another problem stems from the fact that SDA is located within Columbia College, while the groups they oversee—under ABC, and soon under the SGB—draw on all of Columbia’s undergraduate schools. Hernandez acknowledges that this has been a problem for ABC: “It’s always going to be a hairy issue because of the feeling among those communities [Barnard and GS] that they are outside the system.” Under ABC rules, groups must apply separately for co-recognition from Barnard, and ABC groups may not be led by non-College students. Provost Alan Brinkley said that the SGB move was in no way intended to impose similar restrictions on the SGB, and that it is “not meant to make this into a College organization.”

It is not yet clear how the change will affect the way student groups run. Administrators assure students that it won’t, more or less. “Student Affairs’ Community Development philosophy also values the belief that a student’s needs are best articulated by the students themselves (which has also been articulated in the SGB Constitution),” wrote Dean Chris Colombo in an e-mail. Brinkley echoed him, saying, “We expect the character of SGB to remain unchanged.… The procedures they use to run the activities will be unchanged in any significant way.”

The reason some students find it difficult to take these reassurances at face value has been the decision’s lack of transparency, for which there has been no clear explanation. Brinkley said that administrators “had hoped to have a series of conversations with SGB leadership” before the announcement—though that would not have made the decision any less unilateral. Davis lamented the way the decision was made. “There’s always an upside to involving students,” she said, “and I’m sorry the decision was not more transparent.”

The SGB students responded soon after the announcement by presenting the administration with a list of questions, including a request for a timetable, about the change. They asked for the hiring of a senior associate dean to oversee SGB in its new position, and asked when that dean, and three new adviser positions, would be hired.

Dean Colombo gave his responses to those questions on Nov. 30. Though he reiterated his commitment to preserve SGB’s mission and provide it with high-quality advising, he provided no specific dates and committed to no deadlines. On the question of Barnard and GS, he wrote only that he was in discussions with the deans of those schools.

Davis is optimistic that she and her office will have a meaningful and productive relationship with SGB. “There’s an incredible amount of simpatico between the Chaplain’s office and the SGB,” she said. She suggested that, freed from bureaucratic duties, the Chaplain’s office would be able to step into a more purely advisory role and tackle more ambitious projects. “We’ll be able to talk about civil disobedience,” she said as an example. “The SGB has been very excited about some civil disobedience training.”

Finally, it’s worth noting that the move to the SDA is not necessarily final—administrators say that if the new arrangement is deemed unsatisfactory in a few months, they might look for a new arrangement, though they have declined to speculate. To what degree students would be involved in such a new arrangement is also unclear. For now, students have no choice but to wait and see.