In an interesting article on how one university student government is restructuring itself, I read this section on the new procedure appointing the parliamentarian:
The Parliamentarian who is in charge of running meetings and ensuring the Assembly follows parliamentary procedure and Robert’s Rules of Order, will no longer be appointed by the SGA President.
The Assembly will vote on the Parliamentarian the first meeting of fall semester. The hope is that the Parliamentarian will be more accountable to the Assembly.
What would it mean to hold a parliamentarian accountable? I can imagine some good things, such as making sure that the parliamentarian is indeed showing up to meetings prepared, ready to offer advice.
At the same time, however, it almost sounds as though a sports team were asking to appoint their own referees in order to hold them more “accountable” to themselves.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, though.
Related posts:
David Pinn
/ April 16, 2010It seems logical to me. The parliamentarian is there to serve the interests of the meeting, so it is to that body that he/she should be accountable. I think this will only work if assemblies have adopted a constitution, like Robert’s Rules of Order NR; there needs to be an objective statement of what is required of the parliamentarian so that a) members of the assembly have grounds for complaining against breaches of the code; and b) parliamentarians have grounds for appealing against spurious complaints.
Jacob D. Gerber, CPP-T
/ April 17, 2010David–
Those are good suggestions, and perhaps this is just a different kind of setup than the how I think the parliamentarian ought to serve an organization. The more I think of this, I see two issues.
First, this setup seems to imagine that the parliamentarian has some kind of power to make rulings. Of course, Robert’s Rules says, “The parliamentarian’s role during a meeting is purely an advisory and consultative one–since parliamentary law gives to the chair alone the power to rule on questions of order or to answer parliamentary inquiries” (449). Why make the parliamentarian accountable to the assembly, if the chair, and not the parliamentarian, is the one making rulings?
Second, I see the parliamentarian’s service to the whole organization as defined primarily as service to the presiding officer. Again, Robert’s Rules says, “If a parliamentarian is needed by an organization, the president should be free to appoint one in whom he has confidence” (449). The relationship is primarily between the president and the parliamentarian (even if the organization has to approve the parliamentarian’s fees, although in an SGA, fees are unlikely). The parliamentarian’s main job is to advise the presiding officer, so that the presiding officer can make informed rulings. The parliamentarian should generally (even if he/she occasionally answers questions and informally advises members) have two degrees of separation from the assembly.
I suppose that, instead of arguing that this is like a team appointing their own referee, the situation is more like when a team wants to hold their coach’s mentors and advisors accountable to themselves.
Help me out, though–am I making this more complicated than it should be?