On Monday night, the Student Activities Commission voted 12-0 with one abstention to amend its constitution, officially eliminating the requirement that the Georgetown University Student Association appoint and approve all SAC chairs. The amended constitution also officially states that individual SAC commissioner votes are confidential.
The meeting, which club leaders and several GUSA Senators attended, grew heated at times, notably when GUSA Senator Nick Troiano (COL `11) refused to leave the room so that commissioners could vote privately on funds for a Take Back the Night event.
“He almost prevented us from meeting. I’ve never had that experience before,” SAC chair Sophia Behnia (COL `09) said.
Troiano, who argued that SAC’s constitution did not give commissioners the right to a secret vote because SAC meetings are open, visibly angered Behnia, who dropped funding discussions and called for an immediate vote on constitutional amendments.
“You all can stay in here for this vote, I don’t give a damn,” Behnia said.
A few minutes of chaos, during which nearly every commissioner spoke simultaneously and several GUSA senators strove to be heard., followed.
“It’s clear to everyone that you’re moving in the wrong direction,” Troiano said. “Instead of changing your constitution, why don’t you just change your behavior to the way that you should act? (Diazepam) ”
Maintaining a view that she has espoused several times, Behnia described SAC’s constitution as outdated and said it needed revision to reflect the independence that the organization has assumed over the last five years.
The revised constitution, she said, now formally reflects the de facto practices of SAC chairs over the past five years, allowing the outgoing SAC chair to personally appoint his or her own successor.
GUSA President Pat Dowd (SFS `09) said he has remained mostly uninvolved in the conflict between GUSA and SAC, but has acted as a mediator between the two groups at a few meetings.
In October, in an effort to make SAC more accountable, GUSA Senators and Behnia entered into a good-faith agreement to involve GUSA in the chair selection process. At Monday’s meeting, GUSA senator Matt Wagner (SFS `11), said that he had “full faith” that SAC would continue to work with GUSA towards creating a more accountable method of selecting SAC chairs in the future.
SAC commissioner Frances Davila (SFS `10) felt certain that next semester would bring more changes to SAC’s constitution, including the adoption of a committee comprised of SAC commissioners, GUSA Senators, and student club leaders to select the next SAC chair. This would happen early enough, Davila said, that the committee would likely make the next chair selection. Behnia has already chosen Aakib Khaled (SFS `10) to replace her in the spring.
Khaled said that he recognizes that the group has some transparency problems and he hopes to create and distribute a regular public report on SAC funding. On changing the SAC chair selection process, however, he has mixed feelings.
“I will be honest, I don’t think it’s all that necessary,” Khaled said. “All the other boards have self-selected leadership, and I think that’s for a reason. But that being said, if the students really do want to have a different system, it doesn’t really bother me. I think that’s what we’re moving towards.”
Vice President of Student Affairs Todd Olson, who initiated the tradition of SAC chairs selecting their own successors when he identified SAC as an organization independent of GUSA in a 2003 memo, seemed to agree. He wrote in an email that he feels SAC represents student organizations “in an accountable and appropriate way.”
GUSA Speaker Reggie Greer (COL `09) also said that he was not alarmed by recent developments.
“Sophia talked to us and assured us she wasn’t going off and doing something renegade-like,” Greer, who did not attend the meeting but spoke with Behnia after, said. “Things sounded kind of worse than they really are … No one’s secretly plotting anything.”
At Wednesday’s GUSA meeting, Troiano motioned to start debate on a SAC resolution but because GUSA members misunderstood a debate rule, the motion failed. When their error was discovered, Greer denied Troiano a second motion, because the room was in chaos.
