Undergraduate Senate advances own interest through gerrymandering, 'shadow government'
Within five months, 11 members of student government re-did the entire districting and election process for Undergraduate Senate.
Some current and former members of student government have raised concerns that these changes advance the interests of those already involved in student government rather than the entire campus community.
"Everything is performative," Samuel Hendrix, a former senator and member of student government said. "And it's performative for them, never for the student body."
Andrew Gary, a graduate justice on the UNC supreme court who self-identified as one of the major architects of these changes,admitted the changes amount to "gerrymandering."
'A shadow government'
Former chair of theUndergraduate Student Government Board of Election, Sophie Van Duin, said the overreach started when the senate passed the innocent sounding “resolution to clarify previous resolutions.”
The title of the 15 page document was on the ballot in the Fall 2023 election as a referendum. The last item on the referendum was the establishment of a Transitional Council, giving 11 student government members “all powers delegated to the Undergraduate Executive Council, Officers, and The Senate“ until the winners of the spring election took office.
“The Transitional Council, for lack of a better word, is a shadow government set up between the general election and the spring general election,” Van Duin said.
Christopher McClanahan, who was a part of the Transitional Council, said that though the group was powerful, its influence remained limited. McClanahan, who now serves as the chair of the senate’s rules and judiciary committee, said the Council was meant to help transition to a new constitution and consider changes to the student code.
Hendrix said he was surprised when the Council was formed, because of his role as the then-vice chair of the oversight and advocacy committee.
“Opinions of the student body were not a part of the Transitional Council,” he said. “The reason I can say this confidently is because the Transitional Council consisted of a lot of people, and the one group in the Senate that works on advocacy for the student body was not included on it.”
Like this message to be 'magically elected'
The Transitional Council passed their first order on Jan. 20, just short of four weeks before the Spring general elections.
According to the order, 22 seats of the undergraduate senate would no longer be in the major-based districts, and instead be elected according to a system of proportional representation with "electoral committees" acting as parties.
The issue, Van Duin said, is that the change happened too close to elections for anyone who wasn't aware of it to participate. The order required anyone who wanted to form an "electoral committee" to collect at least 100 signatures, compile a list of candidates and have a point-person complete a training mechanism, all 14 days before the election.
These changes were put into place 25 days before the general election, leaving interested students 11 days to complete all the steps.
Only one committee registered for the Spring Elections, Progressive Possibilities, which was granted all 22 seats. The committee was headed by Andrew Forbes, who was on the Transitional Council and now serves as the Undergraduate Student Treasurer.
The Daily Tar Heel obtained a screenshot from a student organization group chat, where Forbes asks members of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies to like a message if they want to be “magically elected to the undergraduate senate with no effort or campaigning whatsoever.”
In a different group chat, in which Forbes’ screen name was "Gerry Mandering," he sent a message saying he could “write down the names of 6 people and send it to the BOE at which point they just become senators."
In an email statement, Forbes said the first text was a "humorous plea" to encourage participation in student government. The second text, he said, referred to the six empty senate seats that the Progressive Possibilities party won.
"Legally, I was able to submit six names to the Board of Elections to enter the Senate through the campaign committee, a power I did not exercise before I relinquished control of the committee around September," he said.
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Forbes also said that his screen name was an innocuous nickname.
"Those are frequently given for various comedic reasons," he said. "And I acquired that one because I frequent the website www.davesredistricting.org, where I redistrict various state Congressional maps in my free time."
Currently, the Progressive Possibilities committee holds 17 seats in the senate, including McClanahan.
The Transitional Council allocated the remaining 45 seats to five new consolidated districts, drawn according to “a lot of policy making” Gary said.
Districts are organized by major, with the number seats allocated based on how many students are enrolled in that program. Last year, there were ninedistricts, the largest being District 1, titled the "School for Health and Life Sciences." That year, 11 senators were elected from that district, and 14 seats remained vacant.
In the new system, the largest district is called the "Health, Life, and Social Sciences" district, which combines many of the stem majors with political science, public policy and PWAD.
“If you couple biology with political science in the same district, biology is such a large body of students, so much larger than political science, but all of them are so busy they don’t really participate in student government, and then you just ended up having an over representation of political science majors,” Ryan Kalo, senior who served as the co-director for the state and external affairs committee of the executive branch, said.
One of the effects of this change was a significant decrease in the number of votes needed to win a seat in the senate. In the last year, there was only one student elected to senate with fewer than 10 votes. This year, there were 11, with some candidates receiving as few as two or three votes to secure a seat in district one.
Gary did not refute the claims that the changes in districting led to overrepresentation of certain majors and groups. He said the priority of the Transitional Council was to fill seats, but that there was "a trade-off."
“I wouldn't say that it's as much gerrymandering as in the sense of reinforcing the institutional power of a certain in-group,” he said. “So much the Senate has an institutional interest in making sure its seats are filled and it chose a policy that filled those seats. If that's the best policy to fill those seats, I think that's unclear and time will tell.”
Cutting out student voices
Neither Hendrix, Kalo nor Van Duin serve in student government anymore.
Kalo and Van Duin both stepped down in the fall, both for personal reasons and because of their disagreements with the changes in student government. Van Duin was technically impeached, although she sent the senate a letter of resignation months prior.
Kalo left after the senate passed a resolution prohibiting anyone in their position from speaking on "foreign affairs or foreign policy," which she said felt like a personal attack because she labels the conflict in Gaza a genocide.
"By passing things like this, they make it so they claim full right to be the voice of students on those issues, and they're just not," Kalo said.
Hendrix was formally removed from the senate in February because of an error he made in submitting financial receipts from his campaign. Van Duin, who was serving as the BOE chair at the time of his removal, said she personally disagreed with the decision to remove him, because every member of that election was granted an extension to submit their records.
"You're either with them or against them, and since they realized I was against them they've been trying to get me out," he said.
By consolidating power and ousting people who disagree with them, Hendrix said student government is getting further and further from their mission of representing the interests of all students.
"Nobody ever cared about students," he said. "It's never something that's ever talked about — half the bills the Senate ever passed were just about giving more power to the Senate."
Van Duin said student government's recent actions are especially concerning in regard to social movements on campus. Because senators barely need to collect votes to achieve positions of power, she said they have no incentive to listen to students who disagree with them, even when they represent the majority of campus beliefs. She also said student government's proximity to the administration is a significant source of power that students are being denied.
As a senior, Van Duin said she's grown to know the campus community quite well.
"What has really stuck out to me about UNC students is that they care about the way this University is run," she said. "They care about their fellow students facing food insecurity. They care about the fact that we have a coal plant on campus. They care about the fact that we have an inaccessible campus that is constantly gettingADAviolations. They care about all these things, and rightfully so. But in order to be able to affect change students need a voice in how UNC is run, and student government is supposed to be that."
Aisha Baiocchi is the 2023-24 enterprise managing editor at The Daily Tar Heel. She has previously served as a senior writer on the university desk. Aisha is a junior majoring in journalism at UNC and international comparative studies at Duke University, as well as a minor in history.
