A poll by the Undergraduate Council of Students found that most students want the council to take stances on University issues. But only 36% want the body to take stances on off-campus issues.
The council’s fall 2024 priorities poll was conducted between Oct. 17 and Nov. 3 and received 1,013 responses, according to a report released by UCS on Thursday. Student responses were gathered through tabling, the UCS Instagram and emails sent to all undergraduates.
Most respondents said they want UCS to take a position on the University’s admission policies, curriculum, investments and campus labor relations. 10% of respondents do not want UCS to take a position on any of the issues in its poll.
The poll comes eight months after UCS President Niyanta Nepal ’25 was elected on a pro-divestment platform.
In October, the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, rejected a student proposal to divest from companies affiliated with the Israeli military. A week later, UCS organized a referendum demanding student seats on the Corporation, which ultimately passed by a margin of 1,368 to 508 students.
UCS wrote in a campus-wide email Thursday that it “will continue to listen and advocate for student concerns to University leaders on issues such as labor rights, diversity in admissions and ethical investments.”
In the email, UCS said it recently created a Special Committee on University Governance to “increase community input in decision-making structures at Brown.” The committee is open to all students.
In response to “off-campus issues,” like local politics and global conflicts, 36% of respondents want UCS to “take a position.” But a majority of students want the council to provide resources and engage in advocacy. 13% do not want UCS to respond to these issues at all.
First-year students represented an “outsized portion of the sample,” the report reads. 39.5% of respondents identify as first-year students. Less than a quarter of degree-seeking undergraduates are first-year students, according to the Office for Institutional Research.
UCS’s poll found that 53% of students approve of the council’s work on campus. 22% of respondents said they were unaware of UCS’s work.
The Herald’s fall poll, conducted one month earlier, found that a majority of students neither approve or disapprove of UCS. Only 29.6% of respondents to The Herald’s poll approve of UCS. The Herald’s poll, which gathered responses from 1,177 undergraduates, used a slightly different methodology and allowed respondents to select “neither approve nor disapprove” of the council.
On campus, students primarily want UCS to address housing, dining and student activities. Earlier this month, UCS named transparency, dining and student mental health as its top priorities for the year.
UCS also plans to reinstate its general body, which was removed in fall 2022. 313 poll respondents expressed interest in joining the body.
The “polling data was hugely supportive of many initiatives we had already been working on,” Nepal wrote in a message to The Herald.
Julianna Chang is a University News Editor who oversees the academics and advising and student government beats. A junior from the Bay Area, Julianna is studying Biology and Political Science on the pre-medical track. When she's not in class or in the office, she can be found eating some type of noodle soup and devouring bad books.
