The Student Senate formed the “select committee on hate crimes,” which held its first meeting Friday to discuss the resolution introduced at the last Senate meeting about the incident at the Free Expression Tunnel.

Four students admitted to painting hateful messages about president-elect Barack Obama in the Free Expression Tunnel the day after the election.

The final vote for the bill will take place Tuesday and another meeting where students can voice their concerns will take place today at 5 p.m.

Morgan Donnelly, Senate Campus Community Committee chair and junior in political science, said the turnout was as expected.

“People were kind of confused with what the purpose of the bill was, whether it was to create a policy, to punish the students who wrote the things in the Free Expression Tunnel — really the resolve was to punish the students by expelling them or suspending them,” Donnelly said.

And the ideas students came up with were beneficial, she said.

“We heard from a lot of the students and they thought of things that we didn’t, and they kind of wanted to reccommend that they do community service or take cultural diversity classes and educate students more rahter than publishing them, and we got some really good feedback because we probably wouldn’t have thought of anything like that just because the original content of the bill was so severe,” she said.

During the forum, each person was allowed one minute and 30 seconds to speak.

Sen. Maritza Adonis, junior in lifelong education and author of the bill, said the bill’s intent was to bring attention to the incidents.

“This bill is not about establishing a hate crime policy,” she said.

Ben Mazur, senior in religious studies, said the University already has a hate crimes policy in place.

However, other students at the forum had other concerns with the bill, like its punishment for the students.

“There’s no reason to expel someone for that behavior,” Courtney Parnell, a CALS senator and senior in biological sciences, said.

Mazur agreed.

“It would create a precedence that we’re not going to give anyone second chances,” he said.

Others, like Rishi Patel, a junior in biochemistry, said the Ku Klux Klan is a terrorist organization and by censoring the members’ speech, the University is acting out of fear.

But James Hankins said speech is the not the issue at stake.

“The point is violent language,” he said.

Hankins said the response is the problem.

“[The Student Senate] can’t change laws on campus,” he said. “We make strong recommendations.”

And for this reason, he said he thought it would be a good idea to amend the resolution, rather than starting it from scratch as Student Senate President Greg Doucette suggested should happen.

But Doucette, a senior in computer engineering, had his reasons for suggesting the change.

“The statement needs to be structured in a way that’s effective.”

Donnelly said the next step is to continue working on the bill and getting student feedback.

“We really want this to be the student’s bill because it affected everyone, and we don’t want just the senators’ voices heard — we want the University’s voice heard,”  Donnelly said.

Deputy News Editor James Layman and Staff Writer Chris Allred contributed to this report.