The Graduate Student Council Senate passed a resolution on Monday night urging the university to relocate the Confederate monument from the Circle to the Confederate cemetery with 15 senators approving, four voting against, and one abstaining. This comes just before the Associated Student Body Senate plans to vote on a similar resolution tonight.
“This doesn’t exist without ASB,” Sen. Tom Porter, one of the GSC resolution’s authors, said. “They put it on our radar, and at that point, we felt comfortable that if ASB is going to talk about it, we should have this discussion, too.”
While Porter said the GSC resolution is essentially the same as the resolution coming to the ASB Senate floor tonight, the most notable difference lies in the GSC’s addition of a line to “disavow white supremacy” and “stand in solidarity with UM student groups” like the Black Student Union and Students Against Social Injustice.
“Over the last 3 1/2 weeks or so, groups like SASI have been written out of the grander narrative,” Porter said. “We see these student groups who are working to build a better campus, a more inclusive campus.”
The GSC Senate meets monthly, and when the March agenda was released on Friday, Porter said there was no time allotted to discuss the Confederate rally that took place on campus the weekend of Feb. 23 or the ASB resolution to relocate the monument, which prompted him to propose the resolution.
This is the first resolution calling for the relocation of the Confederate statue on campus to be passed by any campus government organization.
Porter authored the resolution alongside Sens. Hooper Schultz and Mary Berman, and he said they expect a faculty senate vote to follow the GSC and ASB resolutions.
