At Thursday night’s SGA Senate meeting, Paul Anderson, director of writing across the university, updated students about the Writing Initiative, part of the university’s Quality Enhancement Plan.
“We will be emphasizing a couple different kinds of writing students will be using in their careers or their professions and figuring out ways to help you develop those abilities,” he said. “We want students to learn to write in other contexts and put an emphasis on developing different types of writing for different audiences and different purposes.”
As part of the initiative, the Writing Center in Belk Library will be expanded to offer more services to both undergraduate and graduate students, according to Anderson.
“It could provide help for upper level classes, help with graduate essays, advocacy essays, fiction writing,” he said. “We’d like to know what kind of services people would like.”
Anderson then yielded his time, and representatives from Spectrum, Elon’s queer-straight alliance, took the floor.
Emily Kane, an education and advocacy chair for Spectrum, announced the organization’s decision to suspend its resolution to remove Chick-fil-A from campus. The franchise declared yesterday its intention to cease its donations to anti-gay organizations, and Kane said Spectrum is currently investigating the claim.
Spectrum is not suspending the legislation because of the criticism it received after drafting the resolution, said Laura Lee Sturm, vice president of Spectrum. She reiterated the organization’s stance on Chick-fil-A’s presence on campus.
“Both (SGA and Spectrum) have received a lot of backlash within last 24 hours about legislation, but there have been some misconceptions,” she said. “Spectrum does not think we have the right to tell Elon student what to eat. We think Chick-fil-A’s presence here goes against the university’s discrimination policies.”
Kane further clarified the basis of the resolution.
“Some people think this is about free speech,” she said. “Spectrum is a strong supporter of free speech. We are not responding to Dan Cathy’s statement, we have a problem with Chick-fil-A’s corporate policy.”
Chick-fil-A donates money to anti-gay organizations such as the Family Research Council, Exodus International and Focus on the Family, she explained. The Family Research council is registered as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and two of these organizations lobbied Congress to prevent its interference with the Ugandan Kill the Gays bill, she said.
“We do not want to see one dollar money of our going to an organization that hates us and wants to change us for the worse,” Sturm said.
Spectrum will host a Deep Dialogue discussion about the resolution on Sept. 24 at 6:30 p.m. in Irazu.