Nominations for Governing Council student representatives are due January 29th at 9 a.m. Didn’t know? Not sure what Governing Council does? Don’t know who your current representatives are?

You probably aren’t alone. In the 2001 election of students to U of T’s supreme governing body, only five per cent of full-time undergraduates used their votes. Graduate student, part-time student and faculty voting statistics were equally dismal.

Governing Council now hopes to change all that by stepping up its profile.

After a Student Voting Survey found that 80 per cent of students surveyed were unfamiliar with the work of GC, the Elections Committee recommended the Council begin a public relations campaign to “highlight the link between the decisions of the Governing Council and the daily experience of faculty, staff and students at the University.”

Lack of knowledge isn’t the only factor keeping students from voting. Elected students are greatly outnumbered by their appointed counterparts on GC, and some students say their voice is so muffled that voting is a futile exercise.

But Governing Council full-time undergraduate representative Geeta Yadav disagrees. On the fifty-member council, “everybody comes from a different background…. There is always a way to appeal to someone to hear your plight or situation,” he explained.

Students should use their voting rights, said Yadav, because GC’s decisions “are integral in all the processes at U of T.”

Issues such as tuition fees, electoral policies, equity and student levies are all pertinent to the work of GC.

Because students’ years at U of T are limited, they begin to feel disenfranchised, explained GC student representative Andrew Morgan. He believes students are more likely to vote when campaigns centre on “issues that are affecting more students.”

Both Yadav and Morgan concur that GC’s activities often realize progress only after many years of research and discussion, a process Yadav described as “chiseling away at a project.”

The composition of the university has changed vastly over the three decades since GC’s founding, but GC has not. The administration is reluctant to alter GC’s composition by amending the U of T Act, claiming it is a difficult and lengthy process.

Nevertheless, Yadav believes U of T is more democratic than some other institutions. In contrast to U of T’s unicameral system, other institutions have a board of governors and a senate. In such a case, students are not represented on the board.

At U of T, said Yadav, “everything gets hammered out at a large table […] and students have a voice at the last level.”