Four weeks into the spring semester, no Student Senate members have officially fulfilled their requirement to attend at least one diversity event, the Student Senate’s diversity affairs committee chair, said Monday.

Shonda Clancy said some senate members may have attended one event thus far, but nothing has been officially submitted to her.

The diversity bylaw, passed by the Student Senate in November, requires each senate member to attend at least one diverse event, program or meeting per semester, Joe Robbins, speaker of the senate, said Monday. Student government-sponsored events don’t count Robbins said.

Initial discussions of the bylaw drew contentious debate in both the audience and senate participation portions of the senate’s weekly meetings. Part of the discussion centered around how to a define an event as “diverse.”

The senate settled on the definition given it’s the bylaws, which bases diversity on such aspects as race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, culture, sexual orientation and disabilities, Robbins said.

Once members fulfill the requirement, they are required to submit their name, the name of the program or meeting they attended and the date to the diversity affairs committee chair, Clancy said.

Former Diversity Affairs Committee chair Kristen Wooden, who resigned from her chair position after the bylaw was passed, said Monday that she could not enforce a bylaw she did not agree with.

“You shouldn’t force diversity on people,” she said.

This bylaw should not have been necessary, Wooden said, because the senate should encourage diversity, not force it.

She also expressed concern on how the requirement would be enforced.

Currently, no system exists to prove an individual attended an event, Wooden said. People can say they went to one without really attending.

The bylaw is regulated by the chair of the diversity affairs committee, as the bylaw states, and failure to meet this requirement results in a missed committee meeting.

The bylaw as originally written merely encouraged attendance at a diversity event, Daryl Jones, student vice president and co-author of the bylaw, said Monday. However, during the debate it was changed to a requirement and the penalty added, Jones said. The penalty is not a heavy one, partly because members wanted to still maintain the encouragement as well as get the bylaw passed.

“The penalty is really nothing,” Jones said.

Robbins said three missed committee meetings results in one missed senate meeting, and once a member misses three senate meetings, they are removed from the senate.

Prior to the enactment of this bylaw, there was no requirement specifically addressing diversity, although there are currently requirements for attending Recognized Student Organization meetings and hall councils, Robbins said.

The bylaw is an important one because in order to encourage diversity, senate members have to set the example, Jones said.