Updated document reflects various changes made since 2000.
The University of Tulsa Student Government Association is set to ratify a significantly updated version of their constitution pending a vote from the board of trustees this Thursday, Oct. 29. This step follows unanimous approval from the board committee on Tuesday, Oct. 20, and a student vote held from 9 a.m. on Oct. 19 to 9 p.m. on Oct. 20. The new version has been in the works since the summer of 2024, and has faced significant delays in publication over time, despite containing many corrections to the content of its predecessor from the year 2000. The only change in the 2023 ratification was the switch from Student Association (SA) to SGA. This is the furthest the updated constitution has ever come to being signed into effect, after miscommunications and typographical errors prevented it from passing approval from the board committee in 2024 and 2025.
The changes made to the constitution are long overdue, according to members of SGA. Jules Yang, a senior in SGA who has been working on the document since the summer of 2024, said, “Because of the budget cuts, the university just doesn’t run the way that [the old constitution] said it did,” and that the new constitution was needed to “better reflect that.” Additionally, SGA President senior Bruce Bigler said that much of the constitution was written in ways that were “just not the terminology SGA uses anymore, like ‘Executive Cabinet’ versus ‘Presidential Cabinet,’” and went on to highlight other discrepancies: “We didn’t have complete control over the student fee according to the constitution like we did according to the board … our relationship with the dean of students was not the same in our constitution as the university saw it … just one million little inconsistencies.” As SGA’s chair of the Internal Affairs Committee, junior Luke Tidrick commented, “Over time, if you’re not updating your document, you have something that doesn’t accurately reflect how you do things.”
The first attempt to update the constitution was drafted in the summer of 2024, and came to the floor that fall. Though it passed through the student senate twice and was approved by a student body vote, the draft was never submitted for approval by the board of trustees. It was not until the fall semester of the following school year when the 2025-26 administration, led by President Kadee-Jo Ransom “found out that the exec team that was supposed to have carried out that process … didn’t take it before the board to get approved,” explained Tidrick. From his understanding, it was “unclear” why the 2024-25 executives, President Mike Combs and Vice President Sophia Zoellner, did not go through this step, while President Bigler was only able to recall that it was “due to a lack of communication.”
According to Tidrick and Bigler, SGA has been effectively operating under this supposedly-ratified constitution since the fall of 2024. “We kind of used that new constitution on accident, but really the old one was still in place until we were like, ‘okay, wait, this is not right,’” recounted Bigler. At that point, the constitution was brought before the board of trustees Student Success Committee for approval to be ratified officially, but due to typographical errors, inconsistencies, failure to reflect the control SGA has over the student organization fees and what Bigler described as “one board member in particular who was just throwing a fit,” the board refused to pass the document. After this, he explained, “Everybody just kind of lost passion; everybody in SGA who cared about it was kind of gone at that point, and so then when I came into office, and Tidrick was IAC chair and Holden [Caldwell] came into office in the summer, we were like this needs to be done and … worked to clean up the constitution.”
After many summer meetings with the board and General Counsel Sharolyn Whiting-Ralston, SGA managed to produce the document going in for review this Thursday. The new draft addresses the many typographical and format errors in the 2024 version and reflects the already-present but unrepresented operational norms that SGA has taken up in the past 26 years. It will also, in the words of Bigler, include “a lot of little changes.”
The new document is also meant to be far more adjustable, meaning that the process of ratifying a constitution like this one is no longer necessary in the near future. As Bigler put it, “the goal was just to make it consistent; to make it a document that doesn’t need to be changed over time because it’s a constitution. We should leave it the way that it is, and any amendments that come and go you know happen as they happen. But for the most part, our job was to make it … something that would stand for future generations, so our plan is to be done with it.”
