History of the Avery Constitution
John P. Sadowski
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The current Avery Constitution was created during early 2005 in preparation for Avery's first Rotation later that year. This page presents documents on the creation of the Constitution and its subsequent amendments, along with historical context. The documents are in Rich Text (rtf) format unless otherwise specified.
I was the chair of the 2005 Avery Constitutional Convention. I was a student at Caltech during 2003–2007, and I lived in Avery during 2004–2006. See a critical edition of the Constitution annotated with the origin of every word in the document! This document is current through March 2015, and an updated version is currently in progress. Original constitutionInformation about the original Avery Constitution is based on my perusal of Avery Council minutes collected by the Avery History Group; the actual documents were provided to me by Ryan Hamerly. Avery House opened in fall 1996, and the Avery Council first met on October 21 of that year. Writing a constitution was of course the first order of business. The Council minutes indicate that the constitution was drafted within the Avery Council. The final draft was dated November 11, 1996, and was ratified sometime after the beginning of Winter term 1997.
Draft dated October 15, 1996 [doc] The first Avery Constitution was apparently very effective, since there was no serious discussion of it in the Avery Council minutes until May 2002. Only relatively minor changes were made: some officer responsibilities were shuffled, the "Host" office was removed, and the quorum was changed. The final draft is dated May 9, 2002, but the ratification vote was held sometime after May 16.
Changes from the 1996 to the 2002 Constitution [html] Frosh in Avery: Constitution of April 5, 2005The Avery Council's proposal to house freshmen was the major controversy of the 2003–04 school year, culminating in the Faculty Housing Board vote in May 2004 that approved Avery's inclusion in Rotation. There were very strong feelings about the issue on both sides: the Avery Council strongly pushed for Avery to house freshmen, but the aforementioned Faculty Housing Board meeting was protested outside Millikan by several hundred students, a significant portion of the undergraduate population of Caltech. To prepare for the integration of freshmen into the structure of Avery, it was deemed necessary to draft an entirely new constitution. The Avery Council prepared a draft around April 2004, but an outcry about the lack of public participation in the drafting prevented it from ever coming to a vote. The following year, 2004–05, the constitution effort was started anew, with a great emphasis placed on public participation. The "Original Draft" from the previous year was revised into the "Preliminary Draft" by the Avery Council. A period of public comment followed, and the Council used these comments to produce the "Intermediate Draft." The Avery Constitutional Convention was then held, where the members of Avery could themselves vote on changes to the draft constitution. The resulting "Final Draft" was then put to a ratification vote of the full House. The Constitution was ratified and took effect on April 5, 2005.
Drafts:
Public documents:
Agendas and minutes: As a postscript, a separate amendment was on the same ballot as the Constitution, regarding the "waiting period" for Avery Council members to become eligible to run for Chancellor. I seem not to have the text of the amendment. This amendment did not reach the required quorum of 2/3 of all Avery members and did not pass. This would be a harbinger of problems to come. Avery's Constitutional Crisis: Amendments of November 19, 2005A vote for Avery Chancellor was held in mid-October 2005, shortly after the first class of Avery freshmen moved in. Seven amendments were on the ballot as well, which included the Chancellor waiting-period amendment from April, as well as an amendment to reduce the quorum requirement, which the Council had realized was untenably strict (the quorum was 114 votes for that particular election). Surprisingly enough, while the amendments all got the required yes–no ratio, none of them met the quorum. Furthermore, since Chancellor-elect Harold Hsu had not been a member of the Council for the requisite six months, the election's validity was in doubt. This caused nothing short of a constitutional crisis in Avery House. The realization that the high quorum effectively prevented any amendment to the constitution led to extended debate among the Avery Council and House members on how to resolve these issues. It was decided to hold a "House Convention," along the lines of the previous Constitutional Convention with the power to resolve the issue. The House Convention was held on November 19, 2005. It voted on three questions which had the effect of approving the quorum change retroactively, validating the previous votes on the other amendments and the Chancellor election. The validity of this result was not fully accepted by all, but the Convention's decision allowed life to get back to normal in Avery.
Avery-Council emails containing the text of the amendments (including correction) [txt] Constitution of November 19, 2005 Council Disestablishment Day: Amendments of April 7, 2006Over the 2005–06 school year, the Avery Council became less active and eventually stopped meeting. The reasons for this were unclear, but they may have included weak recruiting of the new freshmen, as well as the bad feelings left behind from the crisis of the previous autumn. A less-than-polite discussion on the Avery-Council list in mid-February 2006, much of which was forwarded to the public Avery-Disc list, lead to a consensus that the form of the Avery government needed to be revisited. A house meeting was held on March 4, 2006, and afterwards an omnibus amendment was drafted that abolished the Avery Council and replaced it with the Avery ExComm system. A few other changes were included, most notably removing many of the stipulations regarding roompicks, and, strangely, changing all instances of the word "shall" to "will." The amendment was ratified on April 7, 2006. Thus April 7 is celebrated as Council Disestablishment Day every year.
Avery-House email announcing the house meeting [html] Constitution of April 7, 2006 [doc] Subsequent amendmentsThese amendments were passed after I left Caltech, so this information is based on my perusal of the minutes and mailing lists. Amendment of February 9, 2008 Avery during the 2007–08 school year was much different than it was two years prior. Fully three classes for freshmen had rotated in, meaning that the dynamic regarding membership and especially roompicks had changed. Most contemporary Avery members did not remember the battles surrounding the original proposal to place frosh in Avery or even the major constitutional upheavals of the 2005–06 school year. In this new environment, a number of proposals centering upon membership policies and roompicks were extensively debated by the house. Two amendments were eventually put up to vote: one giving the Avery ExComm the power to set a membership deadline for eligibility in roompicks was passed. (A similar provision had existed in the constitution prior to the 2006 amendment.) Another amendment establishing social membership was rejected. A bylaws-related referendum rejected distributing rooms among the classes. Notably, this is perhaps the first vote in Avery history to reach quorum without requiring a voting period extension.
Ballot [xps] Constitution of February 9, 2008 [doc] Amendments of November 15, 2012 and January 29, 2013 Six amendments were voted upon in June 2012, but failed to reach quorum. These amendments were reintroduced in November 2012, along with an additional two amendments and a non-binding referendum. The amendments related to membership petitions, election procedures, the quorum, roompicks, and dues. Curiously, for unknown reasons the bylaws were by then considered to be integrated into the Constitution, requiring the same amendment process, and two of the amendments contained only changes to the UCC (Upper Class Councilor) and Social Team bylaws. All eight amendments on the ballot were ratified. One additional amendment was voted upon and passed in January, reforming the Head UCC position and removing the Vice Chancellor from UCC responsibilities.
Brief summary of these amendments Constitution of January 29, 2013 (external link) MiscellaneousOther documents Changes from the original (2005) to the 2008 Constitution [html] Avery Code (partial draft) - at some point there was talk of creating a consolidated bylaw, and Harold asked me to write up a draft framework. It was never acted upon, though. These refer to the 2006 version of the Constitution. Avery Subcommittee on Subcommittees (proposed) [doc] - I wrote this half-jokingly, but no one else thought it was funny. Further information Avery convened a History Group in 2008 to compile and record the history of the House. This information is available at their website. The Avery server crashed in 2016, leading to a near-total loss of data. Here are links to various older versions of the Avery website from the Internet Archive: 1996, 1998–2002, 2003–2005, 2005–2007, 2007–2011, 2011–2016. The Giant Blinking A—a June 2006 prank involving a 32-foot-tall letter "A" made of Cristmas lights suspended above the Court of Man in front of Beckman Auditorium. |
Updated March 31, 2019