[Editor’s Note: This is a continuation on previous articles published in TechNews. Please check out our previous five issues for more information and background on this topic.]
Welcome back to part 6 of this ongoing series investigating the FinBoard Accountability, Communication, and Transparency (FACT) Amendment to the Student Government Association (SGA) bylaws, a 2021 amendment expanding transparency and disclosure requirements for Finance Board (FB), as well as formalizing certain nomination and removal processes for members of the board. Last week, I closed with a discussion of a proposed amendment that would repeal the FACT Amendment. This week, I’m going to expand that discussion.
The proposed amendment is called the “Amendment to introduce the Executive Administrator position to the IIT Finance Board.” For simplicity’s sake, I’ll be referring to it as the Executive Administrator (EA) Amendment. I haven’t been able to locate a copy of it on places such as the SGA website, but the full text is visible through a screen-recording in the livestream of the November 13, 2024 SGA meeting, available on the SGA YouTube channel, for anyone interested in reading the amendment for themselves. (I will note parenthetically that, according to former SGA Vice President of Engagement (VP-E) Elio Armas-Rojo, the Vice President of Engagement is supposed to keep the website up to date with proposed amendments.) It was proposed by FB Chair (FB-C) Nya Harrison and FB Vice Chair (FB-VC) Mohit Rathi.
The main text of the amendment creates the aforementioned FB Executive Administrator (FB-EA) position to FB. Now, on paper, I have relatively few issues with this position. A lot of their responsibilities include email management and reserving spaces for meetings. I even understand that it might make sense for this type of role to be responsible for compiling data. That said, I do have some concerns over the language under the bullet “Ledger Management”. Ultimately, the distribution and communication of the ledger is the primary responsibility of FB and has historically fallen to the Finance Board Chair (FB-C) (such as former chairs Chloe Rubinowicz and Monique Perczynski). It’s possible that this would operate perfectly fine in practice, but on paper, I do think this passes too much of the oversight control of FB to the FB-EA. Alternatively, the role might also be fine if the FB-EA was a publicly elected role, like the FB-C, as an election creates some public accountability, but there is no language that provides for this.
With the basis of the proposed FB-EA now out of the way, I do want to discuss one specific clause in the “further resolved” section: “Must maintain confidentiality of sensitive financial and strategic information.” This is very poorly defined – what constitutes sensitive financial or strategic information? This poor definition might also conflict with constitutional disclosure requirements, or even sharing a detailed breakdown of the FB policies for students to craft budgets based on. Especially given the FB-EA is a position without any clear checks or limits on their power, save for not having a vote on the FB, poorly defined boundaries that could allow FB to claim near anything as sensitive turn the position into a metaphorical black box.
Another “further resolved” clause reads: “previous adjustments made to the bylaws of SGA with regards to the Finance Board which were not formally approved by the Finance Board and are inconsistent with the provisions of our own internal policies shall be rendered null and void.” Now, I have a lot of issues with this repeal, most of which are not ideological. “Adjustments” is probably a poor choice of language, as this seems small, but the FACT Amendment accounts for roughly a third of the current bylaws. Someone could probably make a successful case on this fact alone that this repeal should not impact the FACT Amendment. Second, there is no process through which FB could formally approve any proposal or amendment. This is an impossible standard. Next, inconsistency with internal policy should not be a reason for repealing an amendment when clauses in both the Constitution and the Bylaws supersede internal policy (meaning the internal policy should be adjusted to accommodate). Additionally, the FACT Amendment includes the entirety of the regulations for how to nominate and confirm FB Advisors (FBAs), who are the ones responsible for working with students. Gutting the FACT Amendment would remove the ability of FB to nominate new members and eventually they would just lose the numbers needed to function. Finally, this language doesn’t even properly repeal the FACT Amendment. “Null and void” renders language useless from an enforceability perspective but doesn’t remove it. All it would take is a separate amendment to reactivate that language and suddenly the FACT Amendment is good policy again. If you are going to try to repeal something, at least do it properly.
Finally, I want to draw attention to the final line of the EA Amendment: “Copy of the edited bylaws,” with “bylaws” in blue and underlined as would be expected in a hyperlink. Because this was through a video, I obviously can’t click the link. That said, this highly implies that the bylaws were edited before the amendment was even proposed. This is corroborated by my conversations last week with director of the Office of Student Life (OSL) Patrick Fina, who said FB had sent him a copy of the updated bylaws.
But okay. Let’s say you were open to all of the above issues. The reality is, as far as I can tell, this amendment never passed properly. It went up for a vote on November 13, 2024. According to the text of the document, it was proposed on November 12, 2024. Assuming that it was sent out at 12 a.m. on November 12 (the earliest possible time), then it still could not have been 48 hours before the meeting – while the exact number is hard to determine, due to meetings often starting a few minutes late, it likely would have been around 7 p.m., meaning at most it had been proposed 43 hours before the meeting. In reality, this timeline could have be much shorter. At timestamp 18:52 in the referenced YouTube video, SGA Executive Vice President (EVP) Derrick Hill opens a Slack channel for the SGA Senate, and we can briefly see when the proposed amendment was sent to senators – 4:51 p.m. on November 13. This timeline would be somewhere from 2-3 hours at most. Crucially, in either case, that is less than 48 hours. According to Article VIII, “Other Authority” of the SGA Constitution, “all suggested amendments should be sent out to senators to review at least forty-eight hours in advance of the senate meeting where they will vote.” Senators were not given the proper notification of this amendment. They did not have the proper notice before it went up for a vote.
At this point, I want to zoom out for a moment, because the existence of this amendment raises a lot more concerns for me. None of them are that FB is trying to repeal the FACT Amendment. They need to get better at it, but that is entirely their right. Instead, this is where I need to start talking about my own role as an investigative reporter in this story.
On April 11, 2024, I sent a message to the now-defunct SGA Discord server, notifying FB and Harrison in particular that I intended to ensure they complied with the FACT Amendment. Unfortunately, because the server has now been closed permanently, those specific messages have been lost. I’m able to confirm when I sent them through a contemporaneous discussion of said messages in my private Discord direct messages (DMs) with former SGA President Benjamin “Ben” Barber. A few months later, I decided to send a reminder in the “Illinois Tech” Discord server. On July 24, 2024: “also i have no idea if anyone from finance board will see this, but i do intent to hold them to compliance with the Facts Amendment [sic].” Harrison did respond to that one, and while she seemed hostile to the request, she did acknowledge it. Even if maybe, she forgot about the SGA server request when that server was shut down, this is something she can reference back to still to this day in a server that is open, and she is in.
In the first article, I said I had been working on this article for several months – well, here are some of my earliest investigations. This article was originally meant to be a technical breakdown of the budgeting process through FACT Amendment disclosures to shed light on the process to the student body, but it’s clearly morphed into something else. One of my next efforts to contact FB and notify them of my interest in the FACT Amendment was my disclosure request on November 10, 2024, when I asked for all documents and recordings due to active students under the FACT Amendment. Later that same day, Harrison replied that she “believed the FACT Amendment had been removed prior to [her] time as chair,” and when I showed her the current documents, said “that specific section was ultimately deemed not helpful by OSL and previous chairs”.
First, Harrison claimed ignorance of the amendments. We know she was not; the Discord messages from July 24 show as much. When confronted with the fact that it was still, in fact, active and on the books, she claims it didn’t apply because previous chairs and OSL didn’t like it, which is just not how anything works. If you can pick and choose what policies do and don’t apply to you, that defeats the point of having policies in the first place. Two days later, she and Rathi improperly propose a new amendment in the Senate – and based on the last phrase when it says, “copy of the edited bylaws,” it appears they may not have even waited for the amendment to have formally passed before editing the bylaws. Additionally, the language “previous adjustments made to the bylaws of SGA with regards to the Finance Board… shall be rendered null and void” only makes sense in the context where FB acknowledges that not only is the FACT Amendment still policy, but it is the overriding authority to which they are bound to follow. Why would you need to nullify or void something that isn’t operational or is overruled elsewhere anyway? To the jury that is the reader of this article, I put it to you that this is not just ignorance or confusion breeding non-compliance, but an active disregard for the policies in place and an attempt to cover those tracks.
Responding to a request for clarification, Hill confirmed that he considers the amendment to have passed, and that the website was updated to attach it. Below shows the most recent update of the page “Governing Documents” as October 5, 2024 (before the EA Amendment was even proposed), and that the most recent update date for the Bylaws was August 23, 2023. I don’t want to accuse Hill of lying, as he may have been under the impression that it was updated, but these screenshots say otherwise. Hill also said the SGA website will be shutting down “in two weeks” (on February 26).
This concludes my analysis of the current state of FB and the FACT Amendment, but not the investigation as a whole. To close my investigation on the FACT amendment, I want to investigate what the next steps might look like. These can include enforcement methods, but also other options – such as reforming or repealing the FACT Amendment. This conversation will probably take a couple of weeks, but this does move us into the final stretches of my investigation. To everyone who is still here, thank you for sticking around, and I hope you make it with me to the other side.
