A nearly five-hour-long hearing, which threatened to displace a student group from their office space, ended in compromise last night after the Experimental Media Organization was brought up on charges of defrauding the Student Association.
The group, which also has a subgroup, the Student Action Collective, was accused of violating their constitution and of conning the SA by taking another group’s student space. The SA’s Rules Committee, which presided over the trial, suggested the group be put on a two-week suspension. Their ruling will be presented to the Student Assembly on Monday.
Chris Powell, the financial vice president of the SA and a former editor of the conservative magazine The Binghamton Review, brought the complaint against EMO, claiming that the Student Action Collective had illegally taken over ‘the shell of an old organization’ and the EMO office.
‘This group deserves to be punished,’ Powell told the Rules Committee Thursday night. ‘They are basically functioning as a new group. It was a stroke of luck [that there was a group] with a set of keys.’
Powell recommended that EMO should be evicted from the basement space they share with the Women’s Center in the New Union and that the office be turned over to one of the ‘established and flourishing’ organizations that exists without an office.
The media group was also violating their constitution, he said, by not adhering to a publishing quota and not having a sufficient number of elected members on their editorial board.
‘There are so many groups that thrive without office space,’ he said in an interview, adding that he wanted to make the distribution ‘equitable.’ ‘It should be a reward for groups.’
But members of EMO and SAC fired back at Powell, claiming that the former conservative editor has the group in his cross-hairs because of their liberal ideologies and activism.
Andrew Epstein, EMO’s president, quoted one of Powell’s columns where he refers to the ‘many radical student groups who preach hatred that they veil, thinly, as multiculturalism.’
At the hearing, Epstein noted that EMO ‘ and the ‘action’ component of the group, SAC ‘ has been particularly active in the last year and has attracted dozens of new members and organized media events showing documentaries and film series.
‘We pack our office on a weekly basis,’ Epstein said. ‘Getting rid of our office would effectively kill our group.’
Though the Rules Committee, headed by Boris Tadchiev, ultimately decided to recommend a two-week suspension for EMO. The Assembly will still have to approve of it Monday. Powell, who said he felt the ruling was ‘fair,’ will not be speaking against the organization at Monday’s meeting.
Epstein and EMO will be meeting with eBoard members to amend their constitution and meet SA requirements.
Still, he said his group is ‘on thin ice,’ and he and EMO remain wary of the SA and of being brought up on future charges.
‘Some members of the current SA ‘ and I don’t want to generalize ‘ often don’t have students’ best interests at heart,’ Epstein said in an interview yesterday.
Despite EMO’s accusations, however, Powell insists that his motives to file the grievance had nothing to do with his personal opinion of the group.
‘I am somebody who noticed a conflict with the rules,’ he said. ‘My intent is not to destroy any group.’