SA historian to help plan SU’s 150th anniversary celebration
Hannah Ly | Staff photographer
The historian is responsible for organizing and analyzing the SA records stored in Bird Library.
UPDATED: Feb. 10,2020 at 6:19 p.m.
Student Association has elected a new historian to help plan Syracuse University’s 150th anniversary celebration.
Antonia Su, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, was elected to the position during an SA Assembly meeting Feb. 3. The historian is in charge of analyzing and organizing SA records, according to the organization’s constitution.
“For the 150th celebration, I want to show off different ideas and initiatives that different committees in Student Association have accomplished,” Su said.
The sesquicentennial celebration will take place throughout March. SA is still determining what its exact role in the celebration will be, Mertikas said.
SA is planning internal events for the celebration throughout the week, and SA members will serve on various sesquicentennial committees, Mertikas said.
Su is SA’s third historian. She initially joined SA to be a voice for international students and to share information from the organization, she said. Now, her job is to learn from SA’s history and use it to move forward, Su said.
John Jankovic, SA’s Student Life Committee co-chair, created the historian position in 2017. He served in the role for two years before passing the position to Cassandra Pravata in fall 2019, he said.
One of the historian’s main roles is to sort through more than 20 boxes of SA archives in Bird Library, Jankovic said. The historian is responsible for uploading the boxes’ contents into an online database so all students can access SA history, he said.
“The position was really created with the sesquicentennial in mind, but now we realize that it could be expanded to so much more,” he said. “I had these ideas of making time capsules or digital time capsules.”
The historian position is not a part of SA’s cabinet, but an internal advisory role for an Assembly member should be collaborative, Jankovic said. Information often gets lost due to yearly turnover within the organization, he said.
“We can actually learn from our history and create these traditions and create these little things that can actually engage more students with knowing what Student Association is, was and will be,” Jankovic said.
CLARIFICATION: The sesquicentennial celebration will be ongoing through March. Additionally SA’s sesquicentennial events will be internal.
Published on February 9, 2020 at 8:07 pm
Contact Mira: mlberenb@syr.edu
