QLC and Trans* Collective are working to provide greater transparency surrounding housing policies for transgender students on Boston College’s website this year, said Maeve Yurcisin, QLC policy coordinator, at the UGBC Senate meeting on Tuesday night.
“I think communication is going to be the main thing we’re going to work on this year, so figuring out how to tell prospective and current students about the policy that’s kind of going on behind the scenes,” Yurcisin, MCAS ’27, said.
According to Yurcisin, the housing application is the only place on the University’s website that states students are housed based on their sex assigned at birth, not their gender identity.
The application can only be accessed after students submit their deposit and officially enroll at BC, Yurcisin added.
“That’s the only place where you can really find it, which is problematic because only enrolled students can access that, so that’s one of the things that we’re going to be talking about,” Yurcisin said.
Later in the meeting, student senator Will Cortes, MCAS ’28, proposed the Senate look into ways to add the link to the Office of the Dean of Students’ (DOS) reporting website to the back of students’ Eagle ID cards so that they can easily access it.
The reporting website—which officials from the DOS encouraged students to use during their presentation to the UGBC Senate earlier this month—provides students with a central hub to report conduct violations, bias-related incidents, accessibility concerns, and concerns about the well-being of themselves or other students.
“There haven’t been many updates to the Eagle ID cards in quite a long time, so adding that gives students another place to have access to it and see it,” Cortes said.
Also during the meeting, Danny Wise, student life committee chair and MCAS ’25, said his committee is struggling to make progress on initiatives like installing printers in 2150 Commonwealth Ave. because administrators have been frequently unresponsive to emails, even after multiple follow-ups.
“We’ve kind of noticed this semester a major lack of responsiveness from [administrators]—not just on one or two initiatives, but on a wide variety of them,” Wise said.
Many administrators do not work directly with students, so they might be unfamiliar with the UGBC Senate or what it does, said Katie Garrigan, UGBC vice president and MCAS ’25.
“A lot of the administration are typically not student-facing, so I think sometimes that can also come into the issue of when they receive an email from X student, they might not even be sure who UGBC is, what the relationship is to the organization, and that can also lead to some delays in getting things done,” Garrigan said.
Garrigan stressed that student senators must be creative and find other ways to approach administrators.
“I think that’s where it gets tough—sometimes we have to go back to the drawing board with our ideas and look at things a little bit differently,” Garrigan said.
