Collegiate Times

Panhellenic President Angie Puryear, Vice President of Student Affairs Zenobia Hikes, CSA Chair Joe McFadden, and CSA Vice Chair Jessi Brunson listen to a question from Guy Sims, Assistant Vice President of Student Affairs at yesterday's CSA meeting.

The issues regarding SGA elections were addressed at yesterday's Commission on Student Affairs meeting, and while the elections will not be overturned, other problems with the organization's official documents have yet to be discussed.

The CSA is an organization designed to recommend policies to the University Council that affect student life and morale. Aside from the acknowledgement that the CSA does not have the authority to overturn elections, which had been determined during a meeting in 2005, no other decisions were actually made with SGA because there were not enough members from CSA present to vote on the matter.

"The charters became more familiar with the actual issues," said Joe McFadden, chair of the CSA, following the meeting. "We realized we need to act on them, but we don't have quorum so we can't act on them just yet."

A quorum is the minimum number of members who must be present to make the proceedings of the meeting valid. Problems with the SGA originally came about when junior civil engineering major Bill Brubaker, along with others, disagreed with the process of removing a write-in option from the SGA election ballot; they argued that it wasn't done according to SGA official documents, including the constitution.

Adeel Khan, SGA president, recognized that there were contradictory parts of the SGA constitution and that he'd be happy to create a review committee to address the problems, although he's confident that the write-in part of the ballot was removed properly.

At one point during the meeting, Ryan Smith, undergraduate representative to the board of visitors, asked both Brubaker and Khan to retire their seats on the CSA because of their biases on the issues at hand; however Khan quickly declined his request.

Among those present at the meeting were McFadden, Brubaker, Khan, and Vice President of Student Affairs Zenobia Hikes. A future CSA meeting is in the process of being scheduled, even though the four newly elected SGA officers will be inaugurated into office next Tuesday. "We just want to get this to a final resolution," said Vikram Narayan, SGA speaker of the senate. "That's our main goal."