April 25, 2024 | NEWS | By Veronica Bianco
CCSGA funds Cutler Publications, which means The Catalyst indirectly receives money from the student government to operate. The Catalyst remains independent and does not allow student government to influence its coverage in any way.
Update: This piece has been edited to remove the former Vice President of Internal Affairs member who faced an impeachment inquiry and later resigned. This decision was made in order to preserve the opportunities of the student named and to further our DEI initiatives at The Catalyst.
Student government meetings at Colorado College are typically open to students — like city council meetings are to the general public. But during Block 7, Colorado College Student Government Association (CCSGA) officials decided to close their April 4 full council meeting to the rest of the student body.
Some members of the council said the move was unprecedented. “We’ve never done that before,” said Rakim Johnson ‘26, a CCSGA member.
The reason? Student government leaders wanted to engage in a restorative justice conversation facilitated by the Butler Center and focused on conflicts surrounding the most recent CCSGA elections. At the center of the controversy was the Vice President of Internal Affairs.
Following the meeting, Addi Schwieterman ‘24, the vice president of finance, emailed a document to the Internal Affairs Committee calling for the Vice President of Internal Affairs impeachment. The committee found the allegations of electoral misconduct and absenteeism to be sufficient grounds for a hearing. In an April 8 email, they gave the Vice President of Internal Affairs the option to resign or face an impeachment hearing.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs resigned about an hour after she was notified of the call for impeachment. In her official response to their notice, she called the inquiry “gigantic bullshit.”
She never saw the full call for impeachment. The email she received just notified her that someone on CCSGA had submitted an impeachment inquiry, and included the broader grounds.
Any CCSGA member can call for the impeachment of a colleague. The bylaws do not require that the member facing removal sees the call for impeachment if they choose to resign rather than contest it.
The Catalyst obtained a copy of the official call for impeachment, which explains the rationale for attempting to remove the Vice President of Internal Affairs from office. The Catalyst also reviewed emails, meeting minutes, documents and CCSGA’s bylaws and constitution.
The Catalyst spoke with seven members of CCSGA: Addi Schwieterman ‘24, Reign La France ‘25, Patrick Loos ‘25, Surakchya Risal ‘25, Rakim Johnson ‘26, Sophia Murphy ‘27 and Vicente Taijeron ‘24. Taijeron responded to questions via email. The Catalyst also spoke with Lacy Karpilo, the dean of student life and a CCSGA advisor. Christian Gonzalez, a CCSGA advisor and the director of the Butler Center, declined to comment.
The call for impeachment described a “failure to fulfill the duties” of the vice president of internal affairs position. Such duties included “overseeing the CCSGA election process” and “taking the lead responsibility in CCSGA public relations activities,” both of which are enumerated in CCSGA’s bylaws.
In an interview, the Vice President of Internal Affairs said she believes the impeachment inquiry is invalid.
Upon learning she might face an impeachment hearing, she responded that she was choosing to resign because her former CCSGA colleagues were “biased” against her.
“They don’t have the grounds,” she told The Catalyst.
The call for impeachment and the Vice President of Internal Affairs’ subsequent resignation ends a weeks-long period of conflict and tension in CCSGA, some members say.
Having to correct alleged missteps and focus on conflict resolution has taken up time that could’ve been spent serving the student body, some CCSGA members told The Catalyst. “Ever since executive elections, every CCSGA meeting has been confronting her decisions,” said Sophia Murphy ‘27, a first-year representative on the Internal Affairs Committee.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs told The Catalyst that she feels unfairly targeted.
Internal disagreement plagued March’s executive elections from the start. An election commission, made up of CCSGA members, facilitated the proceedings in partnership with the Internal Affairs Committee.
The call for impeachment made five misconduct claims against the Vice President of Internal Affairs regarding the elections.
The first charge was the Vice President of Internal Affairs’ opposition to letting prospective candidates collect signatures digitally, not just in person. CCSGA hopefuls are required to collect and submit 25 CC student signatures to run for an executive position.
After internal CCSGA discussions about whether candidates could collect signatures digitally, the Vice President of Internal Affairs sent an email to the student body saying that digital signatures would be accepted if the student collecting them had a physical disability. She asked students to disclose whether or not they needed the accommodation to CCSGA.
The call for impeachment references that email: “This email … put students with disabilities in a position where they had to disclose sensitive and personal information in order to be permitted to run for CCSGA.”
The Vice President of Internal Affairs told The Catalyst in an email that her intention wasn’t to put students in an uncomfortable position. “It was not going to be disclosed to the entire CCSGA full council, and honestly, it was not meant to be uncomfortable for anyone,” she said.
On Thursday, Feb. 22, CCSGA passed a motion to allow all aspiring candidates to submit digital signatures, according to the meeting minutes from that night. It was the Vice President of Internal Affairs’ job to notify the student body that CCSGA would accept digital signatures. She sent that email the following Saturday night, less than 16 hours before the application deadline.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs told The Catalyst that she did not intentionally wait until Saturday but that her attention was consumed by personal affairs.
CCSGA’s intention was to promote inclusivity in their election process by making it easier for students to gather enough signatures to run. They wanted to make the process more accessible for students with disabilities and those studying abroad during the signature-collecting period.
“We did not get a single email from anyone from the student body claiming that the ‘normal’ signature system was not inclusive,” the Vice President of Internal Affairs said.
The call for impeachment also stated that the Vice President of Internal Affairs made an official CCSGA Instagram post announcing the elections and did not list the Vice President of Finance, for which she was a candidate, as one of the vacant positions.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs did not win her election; Reign La France ‘25 will serve as vice president of finance next year.
Some CCSGA members took issue with the Vice President of Internal Affairs processing all candidate applications while also being a candidate herself.
The bylaws don’t require the vice president of internal affairs to recuse themselves from handling candidate applications if they are also running.
However, multiple CCSGA members told The Catalyst that it is standard practice to do so. If the vice president of internal affairs is running, “they appoint someone else to do it for them,” says CCSGA member Johnson.
Several CCSGA members told The Catalyst that they made their concerns with the Vice President of Internal Affairs’ involvement heard at an intense full council meeting during Block 6.
The bylaws give the vice president of internal affairs the power to oversee the CCSGA election process, which includes receiving and approving all candidate applications. The Vice President of Internal Affairs contended that doing so didn’t give her an advantage in the election because there was no significant information she was privy to that other candidates were not.
“There’s no way I have [an] advantage because I’m literally just copy-pasting everyone’s statement,” she said in an interview, referencing how she compiled candidates’ campaign statements into a single document to be distributed to the student body.
The call for impeachment also accused the Vice President of Internal Affairs of making the decision to exclude seniors from the voting process, which they say violated Article II Section F of the CCSGA bylaws. The bylaws define eligible voters as, “all students currently enrolled in the college, regardless of physical presence.”
According to the call for impeachment and multiple CCSGA members, the Vice President of Internal Affairs did not consult her committee or tell anyone about her decision until Schwieterman asked if seniors would be allowed to cast ballots the day before voting was set to begin.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs’ choice inadvertently meant that not just seniors, but anyone with enough credits to graduate, didn’t receive the email to vote.
After an emergency executive meeting and discussions between CCSGA members and their advisors, CCSGA emailed seniors the voting link. They gave them an additional five hours to cast their votes because they received the ballot five hours later than the rest of the student body.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs said that her rationale was that because seniors were graduating, they shouldn’t help decide who would head the student government the following year.
After detailing concerns with the election process, the call for impeachment accuses the Vice President of Internal Affairs of not fulfilling her duty to take the lead responsibility in CCSGA public relations activities.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs took Block 7 off from attending CCSGA meetings, citing personal reasons, but says she told the president she would continue to fulfill her duties during the upcoming elections.
The specific terms of her leave of absence were unclear to her colleagues. Some members of CCSGA told The Catalyst that they thought her absence meant a complete dismissal of her duties for the Block. “It appears as though she’s not on break because she’s sent out a lot of emails and she’s been doing the elections for the other positions,” said Johnson.
The section on public relations activities in the call for impeachment focuses on an April 3 email that the Vice President of Internal Affairs sent to the whole school promoting a Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) event. She sent the email while she was on leave.
YAF is a nationwide organization that calls itself “the leading organization for young conservatives.” It is a non-partisan non-profit with branches at campuses around the country.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs’ email concluded with, “You are more than welcome to join in this exciting and diverse speaker event!” She signed the email, which she sent from the official CCSGA email address, with her name.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs told The Catalyst that she is involved in some capacity with YAF. She said she is a part of the club’s group chat but doesn’t have time to attend meetings.
Twenty minutes after the Vice President of Internal Affairs’ initial email, Student Body President Taijeron sent out another email rescinding the Vice President of Internal Affairs’ endorsement of the event and apologizing for any confusion. “The email promoted an event that was not sponsored and/or funded by our body and we would like to retract our invitation to the event,” he wrote.
The CCSGA bylaws do not prohibit members of CCSGA from promoting events that are not sponsored or funded by the organization, something that the Vice President of Internal Affairs pointed out in her interview with The Catalyst.
Even though the bylaws don’t prohibit it, CCSGA members claim that in a Feb. 22 full council meeting, the group came to the consensus that they would not use their mass emailing privileges to promote unsponsored clubs and events. There was not a formal vote, but the meeting minutes show that multiple CCSGA members, including the Vice President of Internal Affairs, said CCSGA should avoid overloading students’ inboxes.
All of the CCSGA members The Catalyst spoke with said they believed that decision would apply to all requests by student organizations for promotion. “All of the arguments being made were general,” CCSGA member Murphy said.
The context for the discussion was a request from The Catalyst for CCSGA to disseminate a weekly newsletter via the CCSGA email.
Despite coming to a consensus, the council never put it to a vote.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs said she did not believe the discussion applied to all unsponsored clubs and events.
“There was a consensus of like, ‘let’s not do it for The Catalyst,’” she said, but that she thought the decision didn’t mean CCSGA had to say no in every other case. She also said she believed that much of the pushback she experienced from her colleagues was because the YAF event was sponsored by a conservative club and brought in a speaker with some conservative views.
The call for impeachment directly addresses the conservative nature of the event, arguing that by advertising the event over email, CCSGA was endorsing a “political event” and therefore failing to represent the entire student body.
In contrast, the Vice President of Internal Affairs argued that promoting the event aligns CCSGA’s Accessibility, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ADEI) values. “Inclusion, to me, means including everyone, despite their backgrounds and differences,” she said.
The third section of the call for impeachment is titled, “Further Demonstrations of the Dismissal of ADEI Values.” The section includes quotes from a GroupMe conversation about accessibility regarding the dispute over digital signature collecting. Johnson said that the Vice President of Internal Affairs’ arguments for prohibiting the use of digital signatures hinged on assumptions, which she then characterized as “fair assumptions.”
The call for impeachment states that the exchange “demonstrates how [vice president] willing[ly] and admittedly operates on assumptions that exclude people who do not fit her personal experiences and identities.”
The last section of the call for impeachment claims that the Vice President of Internal Affairs managed her committee ineffectively, focusing specifically on alleged absenteeism.
The document detailed two instances: the Vice President of Internal Affairs canceled one committee meeting with limited warning and failed to come to another during the Spring semester.
“That was the only time I missed a single meeting with my committee,” she said.
The Vice President of Internal Affairs expressed frustration with what she said was a lack of accountability for other CCSGA members who missed full council meetings. “I’m probably the only member who never missed a full council meeting,” she said.
She reiterated to The Catalyst multiple times that she feels the inquiry was born out of bias, not fact. “Who do you think is gonna win?” she said.
Schwieterman, who is graduating in less than a month, said that beyond the situation regarding the Vice President of Internal Affairs, she has concerns about CCSGA.
“I just feel like CCSGA the past few years has been so lenient,” she said. “I think things haven’t been happening and it just depends on people’s personal motivations.”