Graduate assembly evaluates elections

Some members of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly said they would consider… Some members of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly said they would consider changing their bylaws after this weekend’s controversial elections, in which a current undergraduate student was elected president.

Presidential candidates Dustin McDaniel and Joe Pleso both said after the elections that they questioned whether Nila Devanath, who won the presidential election, was a valid candidate for office. Devanath, currently an undergraduate senior, will attend Pitt’s School of Medicine in the fall.

The assembly’s bylaws state that a graduate and professional student can run for positions on the assembly’s executive board and define “graduate and professional students” as those “currently enrolled and registered graduate or professional student at the University of Pittsburgh.”

David Givens, chair of the Assembly’s Elections Committee, said the committee has been reviewing the board’s bylaws for several months to make sure that all eligible students were given the opportunity to run for office, including undergraduate students who would be graduate students in the fall and wanted to run for positions. He said that the committee did not change its bylaws. It did not anticipate this controversy, he said, adding that the board might want to address the issue at a future meeting.

Daniel Jimenez, the current Assembly president, said, “The election is definitely something that needs to be discussed. We should look at the bylaws because something needs to be changed.”

The Assembly’s bylaws say that if it wants to pass an amendments, it must a two-thirds majority vote from all of the Assembly members. “The amendment must be read in final form at a regularly scheduled Assembly meeting at least two weeks before the vote takes place.”

“Amendments in section numbering require a two-thirds vote of bylaws committee members at an announced bylaws committee meeting and be presented to the Assembly Board for final approval at the next regularly scheduled Assembly Board meeting.”

An Assembly Board meeting will take place tonight in the Room 527 of the William Pitt Union from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

But this idea didn’t seem to calm down the other candidates.

McDaniel, a student in the law school and Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, said in an e-mail to the Assembly members yesterday that he would like to see the Elections Committee follow the current bylaws.

“In order to resolve the issue I recommend that the Assembly Board rules Ms. Devanath is not a valid candidate,” he said in the e-mail. “The Elections Committee should be expected to follow the rules that have been democratically decided on by the Assembly Board, i.e. the by-laws.”

Givens said that McDaniel is under the impression that the Assembly Board and Elections Committee are two separate entities because he addresses why the two are not corresponding about the election controversy. The Elections Committee is composed primarily of the Assembly Board.

The bylaws do not say anything about whether Pleso, who is studying math in the School of Arts and Sciences, and McDaniel could contest the election, though neither said they would if they could.

“I don’t think there is any point in formally contesting,” Pleso said. “If they don’t want to follow the bylaws, then I’m not sure that I want to belong to GPSA.”

McDaniel says that contesting will not prove anything, but that the Assembly Board needs to address why it diverged from its bylaws.

Devanath says that the outcome will be positive for her no matter what the decision is.

“If I’m not president, that will give me time to concentrate on my first year of medical school,” Devanath said.

She said she’s not surprised by the controversy.

“I knew being an undergraduate and running for a graduate student position, I would take a lot of heat,” she said.

Devanath does not appear to be the first undergraduate student to run for GPSA office.

In a previous interview, Givens said two undergraduate students who were preparing to attend Pitt’s graduate schools ran for office in 2003.

In his April 6 e-mail, McDaniel made said the two undergraduate students were Nicole King and Lindsay Howard. He said their elections occurred in spring 2003. Both women graduated in 2005 and King was in a three-year program and King was in a four-year program. He concluded that they could not have been undergraduate students when they ran for office.

Givens said to The Pitt News yesterday that he didn’t know to address McDaniel’s concerns about the two women.

McDaniel said the only mention of undergraduates as officers is in the minutes of a University Senate Council meeting from 2003. He says that what is unclear is that it refers to King and Howard completing their undergraduate degrees at Pitt, not that they were currently undergraduate students.

Many of the Assembly members interviewed said they didn’t understand why Devanath’s candidacy was so controversial.

“It seemed that the election was won in a fair way and [McDaniel] is trying to make something out of nothing,” said Assembly representative Mark Donnelly, who voted for Devanath.

McDaniel said, “This is not about Nila as a person, but about the relationship between the graduate students and the administration.”

Devanath received 273 votes, whereas McDaniel received 159 and Pleso received 53. About 600 students voted in the election, which was open to about 10,000 graduate and professional students. This turnout is similar to last year’s.

Devanath is scheduled to take over as president May 1. Undergraduate commencement is scheduled for May 2.