A look back at the fall semester was the topic of the State of the Senate and State of the University addresses at the Student Senate meeting on Wednesday. 

Speaker of the Senate Megan Fox, who was unanimously reelected for the spring 2026 semester, said the Senate had faced difficult decisions and impactful votes specifically in first-generation student celebrations, honoring late Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar and working for faculty reinstatement. 

“I can safely say this has been the most eventful semester I have witnessed by far,” Fox said. “I am incredibly proud that our senators have held firm to their ideals and have always done their best to represent the student body in every vote.” 

Fox thanked the leaders of committees and the work they have done in planning events for the Senate and the wider campus. 

“I’m grateful to every committee for their continued hard work for the Senate and the student body,” Fox said. 

Fox also thanked the seven new senators, the advisors and the executive board members, saying that many stepped up into roles they weren’t in at the start of the year. 

“The state of the Senate is strong,” Fox said. 

Student Body President Claire Weber began her address by speaking on the large moments that impacted the university; including the removal of language surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion by organizations on campus, including student government; the decline in the number of international students and faculty layoffs. 

“I won’t sugarcoat it. It’s been a rough semester for Eastern,” Weber said. 

Weber also said there were positives this semester, with the university seeing the largest group of first-year students it’s had, 20% of first-year high school students coming in with a 4.0 GPA and first-generation students being at its highest point ever. 

“This year has not been easy,” Weber said. “However, one thing I see getting built upon is our community. I’ve been so proud to watch students, faculty and EIU members alike work together through these challenging times.” 

Following the addresses, the Senate heard from Mindy Hurst, an employee from the EIU technology office, on recent ITS issues. 

According to Hurst, most of the problems ITS is facing with the campus Wi-Fi network are due to the age of the hardware.  

Hurst wrote in an email that the hardware varies in age, as some components have been upgraded in the past, but this is the first complete hardware upgrade in 15 years. 

“The issue we are having is when the wireless [Wi-Fi] was installed, it was only installed to cover classrooms,” she said. “So, any of your faculty’s offices or computer labs, none of them were set up to have wireless in them.” 

Hurst said ITS has new Wi-Fi hardware for all buildings except residence halls as those fall under housing and dining. 

The core of the system is set to be upgraded July 4-7 next year, with the goal of getting it done by August.  

Hurst said the upgrades should help with some wireless problems as they will upgrade the current core output from 10 gigabits at a time to 100 gigabits. 

However, she said this won’t fix all the problems. 

“It is not going to be fixed until we go through the buildings and upgrade each building individually,” Hurst said.  

Hurst said that during the next nine months ITS plans to take each building down one at a time and upgrade the hardware.  

“We plan to do every building in one day,” she said. “Hopefully over the next nine months you will see massive improvement.” 

Hurst said there is no set time for buildings to be upgraded yet, and occupants of affected buildings will get a notice 2-3 weeks before upgrades take place. 

For the future, Hurst said ITS will prevent problems by putting hardware on a rotation cycle so that it is replaced with new equipment every five to seven years.  

Some problems are harder to solve because ITS isn’t able to see them, Hurst said. 

“We are literally walking in the dark trying to figure out these problems,” she said. “I’ve had my network engineers sit down in a residence hall in one of the actual empty rooms for a full day working from there, streaming three different things at the same time, and we can’t reproduce it.” 

A reason why they may not be able to replicate a problem is due to the timing being different. 

“I feel it’s a timely thing, like it’s between 6 p.m. and midnight, while we’re doing this at 8-9 o’clock during the day,” Hurst said. “We just don’t have eyes on it.” 

Hurst said that ITS is continuing to evaluate systems and that people who are experiencing issues should reach out to ITS. 

Next, the Senate heard from Institutional Repository Librarian at Booth Library Todd Bruns about services provided by The Keep, EIU’s online archives. 

According to Bruns, Panther Tracks is a way for groups at Eastern to be able to archive photos, social media posts and other materials. 

“We really want to start to record in a permanent way campus life,” he said. 

According to the Panther Tracks homepage, 13 RSOs have put material into it. The page also contains hyperlinks to other student publications, Student Government and Greek life. 

Organization pages have a “content carousel” showcasing material, then below there is information about said organization, followed by points of contact and hyperlinks to browse collections by date.

Jason Coulombe can be reached at 581-2812 or at [email protected].