Today, the Board of Trustees converges on the Hill. If this is news to you, we’re not surprised.

Aside from extending an invitation to a few involved students to attend a dinner here or a forum there, the University has made little effort to inform the community of this weekend’s events.

In the coming days, the Board will meet and discuss some formative and consequential plans that could very well fundamentally transform the University. At past meetings, news broke of Kent Fuchs being tapped as the next provost, and the board announced a decision to sell $500 million in bonds. These two announcements were important on a University-wide scale, and given the multitude of changes taking place on campus — both academic and administrative — we think it likely that some of these discussions will be one worth listening to.

President David Skorton will deliver his State of the University Address tomorrow morning. Though the event is open to the public, we’ve seen no evidence of publicizing the event. The date, time and location of the address are not easily accessible on the University wesbite, and are only found on the alumni section of the site. Students should consider attending the address, which is at 8:45 a.m. in Statler Auditorium.

Given the University’s dire budget situation, every decision affects the entire community. Students should be concerned with what's being said in all open sessions throughout the weekend. Unfortunately, the University again failed to provide adequate notice of when and where these sessions are to be held.

In fact, the information provided by the University regarding these sessions barely satisfies the requirements of New York’s Open Meetings Law, which states that “Public notice of the time and place of a meeting scheduled at least one week prior thereto shall be given to the news media and shall be conspicuously posted in one or more designated public locations at least 72 hours before such meeting.” We, for one, received no such notice, nor do we think public notice has been “conspicuously posted.”

But it is not only the administration that has not done its job. Since the student trustee elections that took place last April, we’ve seen little from the undergraduate student-elected trustee, Asa Craig ’11, whose job it is to bring the student voice to the board as liasion between the student body and other trustees. With full voting rights, we hope that Craig will keep in mind the opinions of those he is supposed to represent and will make a more concerted effort to get feedback from his constituents in the future.

We approve of the transparent way that the University has handled the administrative shuffling, and we hope that the administration will continue to handle University matters similarly. We urge the University to do a better job publicizing this weekend’s events and trustee weekends to come.