Correction: Last week, I incorrectly stated that Membership was Article VI, §4 of the SGA Bylaws. §4 is Structure of the Board, a related aspect I often referred to during my research, but not part of the FACT Amendment. §5 is Membership. This will be listed correctly in future articles.
Last week, I introduced the FinBoard Accountability, Communication, and Transparency (FACT) Amendment, an amendment to the Student Government Association (SGA) Bylaws introduced in 2020 and passed in 2021, designed to increase transparency within Finance Board (FB) Policy. I went through a general history, including a brief overview of some of the concerns that led to it, a discussion of the current policies and what they mean, and an investigation of its major criticisms. In this article, I will start to break down the implementation of these policies, beginning with Article VI, §5: Membership.
As I broke down before, this section of the bylaws lays out policies for the nomination and confirmation of Finance Board Advisors (FBAs), who are the students who work with clubs and organizations to determine funding, and Senate Liaisons (SLs), who represent the interests of SGA and particularly the Senate to FB, but do not receive a vote. My research into this area primarily comes from conversations with current and former FBAs, and their experiences in the confirmation process. All requests are to be left anonymous.
Article VI §4: Structure of the Board breaks down how many members of FB there are supposed to be: “The Finance Board shall consist of at most twenty (20) members, including a non-voting chair and up to nineteen voting members, of which includes a voting vice chair”. I’ll note that neither §4 nor any part of the FACT Amendment requires that all 20 positions be filled. However, §5.1 does require that vacancies be posted to the SGA website within five business days of resignation. Currently, there are only eleven FB members listed on the SGA website, at least one of whom no longer attends the Illinois Institute of Technology. Even though there have ostensibly been ten vacancies for at least five days, these are not listed anywhere.
Having said that, the SGA website is the responsibility of the Vice President of Engagement (VP-E), and their committee. This may be an issue from FB not properly updating the VP-E as to the current state of their organization, but it’s also possible it’s from the VP-E not updating the website. At a minimum, there are aspects of the website (such as how it says there are 23 vacant Senate seats, but only 22 vacancies are listed) that show it’s not fully accurate, so it’s hard to know whose end this issue is on.
According to current FBAs, they did have an interview process with the FB Chair (FB-C) and Vice-Chair (FB-VC). No one I spoke to recalled the SLs being present, as was specified in the bylaws, though one person said the faculty advisor was also present. Additionally, no one remembered their interview being recorded, as specified in the bylaws, though also no one was able to say with certainty that their interview wasn’t recorded.
To be fair to FB here, the lack of SLs may not have been their fault. According to SGA Executive Vice President (EVP) Derrick Hill, two senators were nominated and confirmed to these positions during the SGA Senate meeting on November 13, 2024. However, he also said the topic of SLs had only been brought to him two weeks before that meeting, which would suggest that there probably were no SLs prior to this. Given FB has no role in the nomination or confirmation of SLs, it’s not really their fault that no SLs were present for the interviews, if there were no SLs at the time.
Most of the remaining parts of §5 are hard to really discuss without video or audio recordings of FB hearings. These have to do with things like conduct issues or recusals in cases of bias. These are largely things that would only be noticeable with those recordings. I can’t say whether these recordings exist for this semester, because there are a certain number of days needed for a disclosure request, and there would not be enough time between release of spring semester budgets and the submission deadline for this article to test this. However (and I will cover this more next week) those recordings do not exist for the fall semester. There is no record for me to investigate whether FB is properly being held to these standards.
I did want to cover one more aspect of §5 though, as it’s small but relevant to the larger picture. Under §5.8.3.3, if a member of FB is found to be “instrumental in any repeated and/or egregious failure to comply with §10.1”, they can be removed for cause. Because §10 is extremely poorly organized, there is not actually a §10.1; however, I’m assuming this refers to the first level of the multilevel list and all secondary levels underneath it. In this case, §10.1 is the clause that requires meetings to be recorded. Now, I personally do not think that this holds individual FB members accountable if meetings are not recorded, except if they are refusing to allow themselves to be recorded, or if they were supposed to record the meetings and did not do so. If it’s not your job to record something and you are not refusing to be recorded, I don’t think you are instrumental in noncompliance with §10.1. Having said that, at least one former FBA said they brought up the recording requirements but were met with hostility and that this is why there was no recording. If this is true, this would suggest that at least one person had been preventing these recordings, which should be grounds for removal under §5.8.3.3. They did not feel comfortable saying who the individual(s) expressing this hostility were.
Ultimately, there are areas of concern in whether FB follows §5, but the most obvious errors are hard to prove as FB issues specifically and not other groups impacting their functionality. In most of the other areas, there’s just not enough of a record for me to draw any type of conclusions. However, there is likely at least some hostility to §10: Records and Transparency, and it’s this part of the FACT Amendment that I will be investigating next week.
Finance Board did not respond to requests for comment.