A legal document such as the Peak Publications Society can be a daunting thing to read, particularly when you’re looking for differences between two versions. Here is a simple summary of the proposed changes. Your suggestions, objections, and other thoughts are invited in the comments below, or at <david at the-peak dot ca>.
The Big Changes
Formal recognition of an Editor-in-Chief.
Bylaw 5 of the current constitution leaves the structure of The Peak‘s editorial board entirely in the hands of the Peak Collective, defined as “all members of the Society who have been listed in The Peak masthead in two (2) of the last five (5) issues of The Peak.” Although we currently have a Coordinating Editor who takes responsibility for the publication as a whole and acts in a leadership role, that position can be abolished at any time, and it has no disciplinary power whatsoever. In fact, if an editor were to be elected and either prove unable to fulfill their duties, refuse to do so, or simply produce a bad product, the only options are a recall vote of the Peak Collective (Bylaw 5.2.c), which is unlikely to succeed due to the small group of mostly friends who usually dominate the Collective, or a termination vote by the Board of Directors (Bylaw 4.2.d.ii), which can only be held for extreme transgressions such as sexual harassment or gross negligence.
The draft constitution devotes Bylaw 5.1 to the requirement that The Peak have an Editor-in-Chief. This person will be elected by the Peak Collective (which will include all Society Members who contributed to The Peak at least twice in the current semester). They will have power to write a binding editorial manual for The Peak, to distribute formal warnings at their discretion (with three warnings being sufficient for the Board of Directors to vote to terminate), and to investigate and respond to complaints. They will also sit on the Board of Directors, sit on the committee that hires the rest of the Editors, and have a veto over proposed changes to the editorial structure of The Peak.
Editor hiring committees.
Bylaw 5.2.b requires that editors be selected in elections in which only Peak Collective members may vote. Despite the existence of voting, this is a profoundly undemocratic system. While the letter of the rule states that elections are held every semester, and indeed that is how it is done, in practice, only the first election is a challenge. Once an editor has won a single election, they are nearly guaranteed to hold on to the job until they quit. The small pool of voters is dominated by the editors, who do not want to offend their colleagues and usually vote for the incumbent; contributors are also allowed to vote, but rarely challenge the status quo. Contributors have often said that they would like to run for the editorial position of their favoured section, but don’t want to risk angering the incumbent. This also results in extremely long editorial tenures (as long as three years in a row in the past five years), and makes it difficult to dislodge under-performing editors. In practice, editor elections have not created a meritocracy, but a gerontocracy; in the past five years, with semesterly elections for between 10 and 15 positions, only once has an incumbent sought re-election and lost.
The draft constitution stipulates that editors will be selected once a semester by a three-member hiring panel consisting of the Editor-in-Chief, one member of the Board of Directors, and one former Peak editor selected by a vote of the Peak Collective. I expect that a three-member panel can be expected to take their responsibilities in selecting the editorial staff very seriously — more seriously than a group of largely uninterested voters, at least — and while it is possible that such a committee could make nepotistic decisions, it still seems to be an improvement over the current system, which almost guarantees it. Importantly, a small panel will be able to administer tests and consider writing samples as part of the selection process, which a larger voting group such as the Peak Collective simply can’t.
Board of Directors changes.
Like all legal societies, ours refers all major financial decision-making to a Board of Directors. Our current constitution specifies a seven-member board (plus a seat for the non-voting Business Manager of the Society). One member is the Alumni Representative, who is to be appointed by the SFU Alumni Association. In practice, those appointments have not been received, and that seat has been vacant for several years. Additionally, I do not see how SFU’s community of alumni are stakeholders in the Peak Publications Society.
The draft constitution removes the Alumni Representative from the board and replaces them with the Editor-in-Chief. I feel that it’s important that this position be given a clear leadership role in the organization, including a seat at the Board; this replacement also ensures that the Board will have an odd number of members, preventing tie votes.
Membership and quorum changes. (updated)
Currently, every fee-paying SFU student is a member of the Peak Publications Society. While it’s a nice arrangement for political purposes, it has two important practical problems. We currently can’t alter our constitution without a meeting of five five per cent of the membership, which last semester worked out to 1,504 people, which is for practical purposes impossible. We also can’t provide a complete list of our membership, since we don’t control or have access to those records, which could potentially cause us some legal problems in the future.
The new constitution makes it so that only directors, editors, collective members, and employees are members of the Society, and others can only be added with a vote of a Collective or a vote at a General Meeting. The chief advantage of this arrangement is that the size of the meeting required for major decisions and changes can be raised to 30% of the membership. I regret that it’s necessary to revoke the membership of the mass of SFU students, but in practice, this doesn’t reduce their privileges very much: all SFU students who are not disqualified by some other concern retain their ability to contribute to our publications and apply to become editors or employees, while every student remains able to seek refunds of their subscription fees. There are no formal provisions for the average SFU student to sit on the Board of Directors, but since new members can be added at every General Meeting, where At-Large members will be elected, there will be ample opportunity for interested students to get involved.
The minor changes
Recognition of the Graduate Student Society. The GSS was only formed in 2008, so our constitution still refers to “the SFSS” (the undergraduate student society) throughout. The new Constitution’s definitions section refers to the “Student Societies,” referring to the SFSS and GSS in aggregate. A side effect of this definitional change is that the three At-Large Members of the Board of Directors will now be elected by the “Student Societies” rather than the “SFSS,” guaranteeing one spot on the Peak Board of Directors to an SFU graduate student.
New Statement of Purposes. The current statement of purposes was written before the invention of the Internet, and reflects it. We also feel that it doesn’t adequately capture the goals of our organization. We have re-written a version that is more modern and more clear about the role that we see for The Peak in the SFU community.
New Code of Ethics. The current constitution outsources the Code of Ethics to the Canadian University Press, a national organization of student newspapers that we are not certain we want to continue our membership in. The draft constitution includes a new, homegrown Code of Ethics that covers the major points while removing the possibility that our operations could be influenced by ideologically-motivated changes made to CUP’s code in Toronto.
Closure of the “two semester loophole.” The constitution defines membership in the society as expiring when the member has not taken any courses at SFU for two semesters. This creates a loophole allowing people to remain editors of The Peak for two semesters after they graduate. The draft constitution closes this loophole by removing the two semester grace period.
Non-eligibility of outside governors. The Peak is a newspaper, and the central concern of our society is journalism; as a result, our independence is of paramount importance. The current bylaws allow officers of the student societies and members of the university’s governing bodies to be editors or Board members at The Peak, which creates potential for conflicts of interest. The new constitution prevents such people from being Editor-in-Chief, At-Large or Collective members of the Board of Directors, or Editors.
