Undergraduate Student Government senators proposed several new resolutions Tuesday evening, including tightening the university's financial oversight and declaring USC a sanctuary university.
Sanctuary universities adopt attitudes and implement policies to protect undocumented members of the school community.
"Truly, it's a continuation of a movement people have been trying to move forward for a few years," said Sen. Michaela Murphy, who proposed the resolution.
Murphy cited an email Provost Michael Quick sent last year detailing USC's stance on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients. The memo was full of "really lovely broad platitudes, but not a lot of policy," Murphy said.
Murphy said she was concerned that there is no current transparent policy in place over student immigration. Murphy noted that, with the arrival of new USC administration officials, policies may change.
"Any framework that isn't explicit… is a policy that's really easy to quietly roll back without anybody knowing," she said.
USC currently runs the Immigration Clinic through the Gould School of Law. It offers services like the Immigrant Legal Assistance Center.
The Immigration Clinic services students seeking to renew DACA, students with Temporary Protected Status and undocumented students, among others, according to the clinic's website.
Once passed at USG, resolutions are delivered to the appropriate USC administration officials. These officials meet with the resolution's authors and senators to identify the next steps toward official implementation.
Another proposal addressed the myriad of scandals the USC administration has faced in recent months through the lens of financial oversight.
"A lot of scandal has happened on this campus, especially in regard to where our money goes and where it comes from," Murphy said.
This proposal asks for the Provost's office to assemble an "attack force" with the end goal of "a responsible investment framework and series of guidelines by which future financial decisions about the university [can] be made."
In addition to these two proposals, USG addressed many other issues, including a Von KleinSmid Center Flag Resolution.
The VKC Flag Resolution demands that USC release the current policy and procedure for deciding which national flags are on display there. The resolution also asks that any flags that aren't currently on display be displayed elsewhere in the VKC library.
The Learning Experience Evaluations Resolution, proposed by Sen. Jacquelyne Tan, concerns making mandatory semesterly professor evaluations public and easily accessible.
Currently, many students use the website RateMyProfessor to make decisions about which classes they wish to take. RateMyProfessor uses user-aggregated reviews to give any professor at a given institution a rating on a scale of one to five.
Murphy said that "a lot of the language [on the website] is coded and charged" and that reviews "don't provide substantive information about the class."
Tan said she hopes to make these USC-conducted student reviews easily accessible, so that students have more resources to make educated decisions about their class schedule.
The final resolution addressed on Tuesday was an update to the Terranea Resolution, which calls for the termination of the relationship between USC and the Terranea resort. The resort is embroiled in accusations of poor oversight of sexual misconduct allegations.
USG will vote on Tuesday's proposed resolutions next week. USG meets every Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in TCC 350.
For more information on the Gould School of Law's Immigration Clinic, call 213-740-0497 or email immclinic@law.usc.edu.