Mahtani (right) with QSLC members Rebecca Buckley ’08 and Vincent DeVivo ’08. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

Five years ago, six freshmen living on Newton Campus founded the Quality of Student Life Committee of Boston College (QSLC), dedicated to producing small improvements in everyday student life. Their idea was to collect suggestions from students, do background research and legwork on the best of them, and pitch fully developed, viable proposals to the appropriate University officials—whether that be the chief of police, the University librarian, or the academic vice president, to cite a few of the administrators with whom the committee has worked. The group now has 30 active members spanning the four classes and is recognized by the University as a student club.

The 2005–06 academic year is the committee’s first without its founding chair and driving dynamo, MichaelAaron Flicker ’05 (now a legislative aide for a New Jersey senator in Washington, D.C.). But the committee has not lacked for ambition. Under Chair Jayshree Mahtani ’06, an economics major and international studies minor from Plainview, New York, the QSLC has focused on two priorities: extending beyond one week the period during which students may drop a course without the brand of a “W”—for withdrawal—appearing on their external transcript; and bundling the lab periods required of pre-med and science majors so that they count, for recording purposes, as one course toward graduation. Both issues came to the group’s attention at the committee’s biannual open forum last fall, attended by some 50 students. After sounding out administrators to identify and work through potential areas of concern, and conducting an “overlap study” of withdrawal policies at peer institutions, the students presented the two proposals to the academic officers council in March.

According to BC’s associate academic vice president for faculties, Pat DeLeeuw, discussions in the council now focus on what a new withdrawal cutoff should be (between three and eight weeks seems typical elsewhere). The council has asked the QSLC also to conduct an overlap study on how other universities treat lab courses.

The QSLC presented its first project proposal in 2001, to the Office of Residential Life. Flicker and cofounders David Polk, Michael Hundgen, Jessica Rosen, Greg Walsh, and Yumi Son were seeking renovation of the Barat House basement on Newton Campus to create a freshman common area, with pool tables and a kitchen. The pitch failed, but the University has enacted many subsequent QSLC proposals, including: extension of the drop/add period for class sign-ups from seven days to seven business days; opening O’Neill Library one hour earlier on Sundays, at 10 a.m.; opening the Lower Live dining hall one hour earlier on weekdays, at 6:30 a.m.; providing free weekday copies of the New York Times, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and the Economist magazine in kiosks around campus; launch of a new faculty debate series on issues of interest to students (e.g., “The Morality of Capitalism”); an education campaign on the costs of borrowing dining hall utensils (trays, plates, etc.), and a new arrangement for anonymous returns; recycling bins in all classrooms; installation of an ATM and a mailbox in Corcoran Commons; and extension of card-swipe access to residence halls for students living in neighboring dorms, from midnight to 2 a.m. on weekends.

Among recent suggestions collected from forums or the QSLC website (www.bc.edu/clubs/qslc): Allow the BC ID card, used for food and other purchases, to apply to photocopies in the libraries; and produce a pamphlet for students living off campus on local housing regulations.

Next year, Mahtani will likely be attending law school; her successor has not yet been elected. Mahtani’s advice to whomever follows: Be “polite and understanding with administrators.” The committee, she says, is lucky that BC’s officials are “willing to hear the ideas of students” who are “essentially giving them more work.”

Read more by Paul Voosen