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A second Binghamton Student Association representative who used racist slurs against an SA vice president last week has lost his position as a result.
As I reported last Saturday, representative Mike Lombardi resigned from the SA days after telling vice president for finance Alice Liou to “go eat a dog,” while Ehlad Bar-Shai, who had taunted Liou for having “squinty eyes” prior the Lombardi incident, was elected chair of the SA’s Student Assembly in a close vote.
News of Bar-Shai’s comments spread widely on campus after his election, however, and a protest rally was held last weekend calling for him to be removed from office.
Last night, at the final Assembly meeting of the year, Bar-Shai asked to make a formal apology, but a motion to reconsider his election was introduced before he was able to do so.
Bar-Shai argued that the motion to reconsider was out of order, but was turned aside. When the Assembly approved the motion Bar-Shai and several supporters withdrew from the meeting, causing it to lose quorum.
But the Assembly was eventually able to re-establish quorum, a new election was held, and incumbent Assembly chair Josh Berk, who had lost to Bar-Shai at the previous meeting, was re-elected by a vote of 15-4.
Last fall, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs student government president David Williams refused to sign a $2100 budget allocation for a National Coming Out Day event sponsored by Spectrum, a LGBT student group on campus. His action didn’t block the money from being disbursed, but did delay its release.
Williams said that the decision reflected his personal beliefs. Other students said it violated the student goverment constitution, and launched a campaign to remove him from his position.
The removal effort drew broad support, but ran into various bureaucratic and procedural stumbling blocks. Six months later, Williams remains in office, and he even ran for re-election this spring.
That election campaign gave the students of the campus the chance to weigh in on the controversy directly, however, and the result was decisive. Not only did Williams and his running mate lose, they lost to Daniel Garcia and James Burge, who are both gay men of color.
The effort to impeach Williams, whose term ends June 1, continues.
Steven Oliver and Kendra Key met in the contest for the student government presidency at the University of Alabama this year.
More than fourteen thousand students, well over half the campus population, voted — the most in UA history. The race was close, with less than two percentage points separating the two candidates. But in the end Olvier, a white man, defeated Key, a black woman, by two hundred and sixty-one votes.
UA is the flagship campus of Alabama’s state university system, and it has never had a black student body president. In the fourteen years since its current student government was established, seventeen students of color have run for campus-wide office. All have lost.
Race is not the only factor in Alabama’s student government elections, of course. (The campus’s student body is more than eighty-five percent white, to start with, which means the majority of Key’s support came from white students.) Oliver ran with heavy support from fraternities and sororities, and the divide between greeks and independents played a major role in the campaign.
But the fact that UA’s student officers have been — and remain — all white has significant consequences for the student government, and the campus as a whole. UA’s student newspaper, the Crimson White, grapples with those consequences in two articles — here and here.
A vice president of the Binghamton University Student Association has been the target of racist taunts from members of her own student government twice in the last week.
Last Sunday night, according to witnesses, Binghamton SA Vice President for Finance Alice Liou, who is Asian-American, was arguing with Elahd Bar-Shai, a member of the university’s Student Assembly, in the Student Association offices. After she made a disparaging remark about his appearance, he said he was surprised she could “see anything with those squinty eyes.”
At a meeting of the Student Assembly the following night, Bar-Shai, who last semester sponsored an SA constitutional amendment to eliminate the student government’s Vice President of Multicultural Affairs position, stood for election as chair of the Assembly, winning in a 14-11 vote.
After that vote, several of Bar-Shai’s supporters left the meeting, causing the Assembly to lose quorum. An SA officer followed them out, attempting to convince them to return, and the group’s discussion got heated. Eventually Liou became involved, and Assembly representative Mike Lombardi, a supporter of Bar-Shai, told her to “go eat a dog.” (In one account, he told her to “shut up and go eat a fucking dog.”) At that point, Liou says, she called him a “white bastard,” and had to be restrained by friends.
Campus police were called to the Assembly meeting as a result of the disturbance, and the Binghamton administration is now investigating the incident, but no disciplinary action has yet been taken. Lombardi, who is the former business manager of the Binghamton Review, a conservative newspaper on campus, resigned from the Assembly on Wednesday.
A group calling itself “A Coalition of Angry Students” is planning a protest rally on campus this afternoon (Facebook Event page here). They are demanding that Bar-Shai and Lombardi “be suspended for a semester, stripped of their SA positions and sign written apologies” to Liou.
May 4 update: This post is still getting a lot of hits, and I’ll be following up as I get more information. In the meantime, if you attended the Saturday protest, or have other news to share, please leave a comment or send me an email.
May 5 update: The Student Assembly ousted Bar-Shai as its chair at a meeting last night.
“No one likes to be a rat,” University of Minnesota vice provost for student affairs Jerry Rinehart said today. But he’s hoping at least a few students will do it anyway.
The U of M plans to put up a website featuring recognizeable photographs and video of participants in last weekend’s off-campus riot, and will encourage students to anonymously identify those pictured. The information gathered in this way will be turned over to the police. (see update below)
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the Daily, the U of M student newspaper, does not intend to grant the university access to the more than one thousand photos its staff photographers took at the riot.
April 29 update: University officials are giving varying statements about whether website IDs would be turned over to the cops. The Minnesota Daily says Rinehart told them that such students “would most likely face University code of conduct punishment, not criminal charges,” but says that the campus police intend to “forward any information they receive from the website that involves criminal activity to [the Minneapolis Police Department].”
studentactivism.net 
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