The Board of Regents is the most important policy-setting body in the lives of university students in Iowa. As such, the board should go out of its way to make meetings accessible to students.

After the May 4 and 5 meeting, just one of the four preceding regular regents’ gatherings will have been held while students were in school following a normal academic calendar. Two will have been held during Iowa State’s Finals Week and one during Spring Break.

The board isn’t trying to escape scrutiny or hide from students with these meeting times — they reflect the difficulty of scheduling any large public meeting around a laundry list of restrictive criteria and participants’ conflicts.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important for the board to do better in making its meetings accessible to students, whom the regents should consider their constituents. To that end, we applaud Greg Nichols, the executive director of the board, for saying he will look into having fewer meetings conflict with student schedules, as reported in Friday’s Daily.

It is true that students don’t often attend the meetings, and it is also true that the meetings often threaten to bore your socks off. Like any legislative or quasi-legislative body, the regents also aren’t likely to reverse course suddenly because of the impassioned pleas of a few people during a meeting.

So we understand where Government of the Student Body President-elect Angela Groh was coming from when she said what the regents do is “more of an administrative meeting — it is not designed for students.”

Poor choice of words. On the contrary, students should expect the meetings be conducted “for” them, and the regents seem to share that view. Being accessible to students is certainly one reason the board’s meetings take place around the state. Those visits also give busy people a chance to talk with the nine policy makers who can affect their lives through setting tuition, fees, by cutting or adding majors, by changing the student code of conduct, by increasing or decreasing graduation requirements — well, by doing anything related to the governance of the universities.

Even if most students choose not to attend, it is important for the student media to be able to cover meetings in a timely matter for those who can’t get there — the Daily sends a reporter to every Board of Regents meeting.

And at no time will this need be more obvious than at the regents’ next meeting in May, during Finals Week — when the board will probably be forced to increase tuition for 2005-06 because the state Legislature seems unlikely to provide the money the regents requested to stay afloat. If you want to know about that (and you might have a mild interest in that topic), you’ll have to keep up through the Daily’s Web site. If you’re not too busy studying or moving out — or both.