In its first meeting of the spring semester, the Student Government Association at the University of Massachusetts approved a letter to Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy requesting that a link to Campus Pulse be included on the official University website homepage.

According to the letter, the request was made because of the low level of awareness and use of Campus Pulse among students. In the letter, the SGA states that “universally, UMass students are familiar with a few critical student-facing online tools such as SPIRE and Moodle . . . Students are notably less familiar with our student engagement software on campus.”

The request was previously brought up at an Information Technology Vice Chancellor advisory board meeting. The attendees of the meeting asked SGA to create the motion in the hopes that the endorsement would be more effective than previous attempts to include Campus Pulse on the University website.

“Student affairs has wanted to do this for a really long time, but there is a lot of internal politics within administration that has kept them from being able to use this real estate on the UMass website,” said Senator Adam Lechowicz.

SGA hopes to promote student engagement on campus by making this software more readily available.

“We want Campus Pulse to be an integral part of students’ lives here at UMass,” said Lechowicz.

Attorney General Ilina Shah gave the Senate an update on President Timothy Sullivan’s impeachment proceedings. She announced that the hearing on Sullivan’s recall will be held in early February and that she would inform the Senate when she had a more specific date.

“As this was something that the Senate voted on, I just wanted to keep you all updated,” said Shah.

In the meeting, the SGA also announced that there are three open secretary positions in the executive branch:  the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Secretary of Diversity and Secretary of Public Relations. The applications for these positions are currently open and are closing Jan. 28, at midnight.

Kyle Kendall, the former Secretary of Veterans affairs, was sworn into a vacant senator position. Sullivan terminated Kendall from his position in November.

“I never really left SGA,” said Kendall. “I continued working with administrators and working with different student groups around campus.”

Sophia Gardner can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @sophieegardnerr.