Review Committee History

ASCIT Review Committee

The Review Committee traces its origins to two former ASCIT committees, the Executive Committee (ExComm) and the Election Committee.

ASCIT created an ExComm by a by-laws amendment in 1958 to "formulate and discuss policy and long-range plans." Unlike today's RevComm, which explicitly prohibits BoD members from serving on it, ExComm originally consisted mostly of BoD members, specifically the Corporation President, Vice President (BoC Chair Ex-offico at the time), Secretary, and Treasurer, along with two additional members appointed by the other members. The original amendment did grant ExComm the power to "interpret the by-laws" which would pave the way for RevComm's modern judicial role. For the first few years, however, ExComm was hardly judicial at all. It worked largely to set policy, and in the late 1950s, just as in the mid-2010s, that included the looming decision about filling new residential buildings. The ASCIT ExComm took an anti-rotation stance, in strong contrast to the IHC. The lack of agreement led to the cancellation of rotation until 1964.

By the 1970s however, ExComm was described as ASCIT's "supreme court." At some point between the 1960s and the 1980s, all elected officers except the President were removed from ExComm and the remainder of its members, including a specific ExComm Chair, became appointed. In 1994, an ambitious plan by Corporation Secretary David R. Derkits pointed out that "in standard terminology, the name "Executive Committee" is given to the committee which runs the day-to-day affairs of the corporation. The ASCIT ExComm has no such role." He suggested instead that "to clarify the role of the ExComm" it be renamed the "Bylaws Review and Interpretation Committee (BRIC)." Despite Derkit's clever acronym, the Committee was not renamed, and the only part of his plan that came to fruition was the creation of the modern ARC.

The history of the Election Committee is mostly unknown, but it seems to have existed since before the 1960s.

In the late 2000s, however, dysfunction and apathy brought ASCIT towards crisis. Two consecutive Big T editors never completed the book and disappeared for study abroad. This led to the infamous three-yearbooks-in-one (2006-2009) copy of the Big T. That, combined with questions about the effectiveness of the BoD, pushed students to take action. It's worth noting at this point, that it's clear that ExComm had a somewhat legislative role, and would sometimes also write by-laws amendments. It attempted to repair the issues by writing a major reform of the entire corporation. But some, notably IHC Secretary Dvin Aladin didn't see eye-to-eye with ExComm and some of the specifics of the plan they were writing. Adalin set out to write his own re-write of the by-laws. His plan was officially proposed by grassroots petition before the BoD could vote to propose ExComm's plan. ExComm ultimately scrapped their plan and during the presidential and vice presidential elections of 2009, the new plan passed. Among other things, it merged eliminated both ExComm and the Elections Committee and replaced both with the Review Committee, which would have House representatives and be completely appointed by the IHC.

The new committee was criticized as flawed from the beginning, with early criticism focused on the committee's handling of elections and how well it could perform its new role of supervising the BoD. While it's possible to paint RevComm's creation as a subtle and possibly unintentioned power grab for the IHC, RevComm quickly neglected its oversight role and did little more than run elections. The IHC also stopped appointing all the members, and individual House were appointing or electing their reps by the mid 2010s. The bylaws were eventually changed to reflect this in 2015. The committee's records are also spotty in some years. 2014 brought a sharp turning point when Chris Dosen was appointed Chair and RevComm's approach was more formalized. Some years in the late 2010s, RevComm sometimes played a quasi-legislative role, writing and proposing bylaws amendments or working with the BoD to do so. In 2019, Alejandro López in his second term as chair made more changes to the committee's operations, notably significantly improving transparency and increasing the visibility of the committee among students.