AAS to Consider Constitution “Overhaul”

After over a month of debate across four meetings, the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) composed a revised constitution that aims to increase student engagement with the AAS. Senators made final amendments to the constitution on Monday, and the proposal will be voted on by the student body within the week. 

The role of the constitution is to outline how AAS operates by detailing the powers and responsibilities of each member. AAS Vice President Phuong Doan ’26 explained that “the new constitution keeps essentially all of the government structure the same, not changing day-to-day procedures of students or senators.” While constitutional amendments are frequent, Doan said that such an “overhauling” of the document is quite rare.

Doan said that the two main purposes of rewriting the constitution were to encourage student body involvement in AAS activities and hold senators accountable for their projects. 

The new constitution also omits “unnecessary” and “esoteric” language to make the document more readable to students who aren’t involved in AAS. 

Doan clarified that the removed language regards only governmental procedures, such as explanations of survey protocols and ranked-choice-voting procedures. As The Student’s Editorial board wrote in an editorial, removing language from AAS documents was one of the biggest concerns with the proposed honor code revision, which was rejected in a 39-575 student body vote in March. 

Both Doan and senator Joey Supik ’27 (who is also an editor for The Student) publicly opposed the proposed honor code revision. Doan voted against the revision because he was “afraid that crucial things were being removed,” while Supik believed that the honor code was “doomed to fail.” 

Despite these past concerns, Doan and Supik support AAS’s constitutional revisions. They believe that unlike the proposed honor code, which relocated core protections to the Student Code of Conduct, “the new constitution doesn’t change or move any student rights.” Supik clarified that if anything, protections are being added. “The powers being taken out from the constitution are being moved directly into the by-laws, which the student body votes on,” he said. 

Doan added that he “would not fully support [the new constitution]” if the senate and the [executive] board did not work to ensure that any language removed does not impact the ability for students to engage with the student government. “In fact, it makes it easier for students to impeach us, to remove us, to petition us,” he said.

One of the key changes to the constitution aims to allow students to amend the constitution themselves. Currently, an amendment requires signatures or votes from 10% of each class year. Under the new constitution, that threshold drops to just 10% of the total student body, making the bar significantly lower. “I hope students recognize the senate wants a more involved student body,” Doan said.

The second main function of the revision is to “hold senators accountable,” according to Supik. The new constitution will alter AAS’s attendance policy, requiring senators to inform the secretary, an elected member of the executive board, if they will miss over 30 minutes of a weekly meeting, now termed a “half” absence. While Supik confirmed that there was not a “serious senator-absenteeism issue,” the new process creates clearer guidelines about what counts as a “full” versus “half” absence.  

The new constitution will also formalize committee chairmanships — roles that keep committee meetings productive and on-task. The vice president will also support these initiatives,  as the revisions will grant them  access to committee meeting transcripts and the opportunity to drop-in to committee meetings of their choice. Doan and Supik both expressed hope that these revisions will increase the quantity and quality of individual committee projects. 

A rejected amendment, proposed by senator Beckett Lawrence-Apfelbaum ’29, aimed to alleviate the vice president’s “moderator” duties in general AAS meetings. Doan explained that the current vice president role is primarily one of a general “facilitator” who sets the agenda and moderates meetings for the entire AAS. The rejected amendment suggested that the vice president’s role of AAS meeting moderator be replaced by a “Speaker of the Senate” position, who, in theory, would take over moderation to allow the vice president to focus more on actionable projects. 

However, the proposal suggested that the speaker be internally elected by senators in the first meeting of the year. Supik raised concerns about the internal voting process, noting that the proposed amendment may not be received well by students if it excludes the student body from election procedures. To uphold the precedent — that there are no AAS roles that are not voted on by the entire student body — the proposal to internally elect a speaker was rejected. The vice president will continue to moderate all senate-wide meetings, along with overseeing individual committee meetings under the new constitution.

In the upcoming vote, Doan and Supik hope for student support of this initiative. “The only way for the student government to work is if students are more involved,” Doan said. “I hope that [students] see that we’ve made [the constitution] more accessible and we have streamlined the powers they have to hold AAS accountable."