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Monday, November 21, 2022 I Vol. 119 Iss. 14 INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER • SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904
What’s inside Opinions
The editorial board mourns the lives lost following the recent shooting at the University of Virginia. Page 6
Read our top picks for secluded study spots in the District as you gear up for final exams. Page 7
Sports
The Jackie Robinson Society presents the Jackie Robinson Project Appreciation Award to the baseball program. Page 8
Student groups collaborate to host Trans Awareness Week
Report accuses SA finance committee chair of negligence, bias while managing student funds ERIKA FILTER
ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
ZACH BLACKBURN
FAITH WARDWELL
SENIOR NEWS EDITOR
Student Association leaders issued a scathing report Saturday finding SA Sen. Ian Ching, ESIA-U and the chair of the finance committee, has failed to perform his duties managing student organization funding, leading to delays and accusations of bias within the allocations process. The report alleges Ching delayed the launch of the application for spring SA funding to student organizations by about two months while providing preferential treatment for his friends in other student organizations, like GWU Esports, as part of five bylaw violations relating to finance deadlines and decorum. The report calls for the SA Senate to censure and immediately remove Ching from his position as chair of the finance committee. The senate could vote on a resolution, based on the report, that would remove Ching from his post as the chair of the finance committee and require he publicly apologize for his misconduct as soon as Monday night, when the senate next meets. The Governance and Nominations Committee, which addresses censure cases, drafted a resolution Sunday based on the report submitted by the Office of Senate Legal Counsel. “It is beyond anything I’ve seen in the Student Association and requires its immediate attention,” Senate Legal Counsel Juan Carlos Mora, who authored the report, said to the committee Sunday. In a statement to The Hatchet, Ching said the report does not include his perspective. He said he “never hid” his support for some student organizations, but he has not interfered in decisions about funding for those organizations. “I have served as a student organization treasurer and e-board member for
Culture
ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
NIKKI GHAEMI
CONTRIBUTING NEWS EDITOR
FILE PHOTO BY AUDEN YURMAN | SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR The report states states student organization leaders have raised complaints about Ching to administrators, including a brazen disregard of rules requiring him to familiarize student organizations with the allocations process.
three years, and I am the only member of the finance committee who has had experience dealing with the finance committee from the other side,” he said. The report states student organization leaders have raised complaints about Ching to administrators, including a brazen disregard of rules requiring him to familiarize student organizations with the allocations process. When Ching hosted a required meeting earlier this month for student organization leaders to familiarize themselves with the budget allocations process, he filmed himself greeting student leaders before quickly scrolling through a 13-page allocations handbook, according to the report. “We will now proceed by looking over this,” he said while scrolling through the handbook for roughly two seconds before all the pages could load. “Done. You are all dismissed.” Ching’s orientation meeting lasted a total of 18 seconds. “The OSLC was shocked with the gross negligence
demonstrated by Senator Ching’s actions,” the report states. The report features depositions from three SA members regarding Ching’s conduct, emails from student organization leaders expressing confusion about budget allocations and a memorandum from SA Vice President Yan Xu critiquing the finance committee. Nathan Nguyen, the director of the SA’s legislative budget office, said Ching ignored the SA’s requirements for the timeline of the allocations process as part of his delay of the allocation application’s launch. Nguyen said the deadline for student organization allocations typically falls on Oct. 31 but was pushed to Nov. 27 this year because Ching failed to open the application until early November – about two months later than normal. Nguyen said Ching would hear senators’ motions favorable toward granting funding for student organizations that contained several of his friends, like GWU Esports, during finance committee meetings. GW Engage
shows Ching is a member of GWU Esports. SA Sen. Linsi Goodin, CCAS-G, Ching’s vice chair on the finance committee and a self-described friend of Ching, accused him of showing favoritism toward student organizations during the financial allocations process by “silencing” motions he personally disliked, which violated senate decorum. Xu sent a memorandum to senators Friday stating Ching has led a “haste process” in the finance committee that has created “barriers” to SA funding for student organizations. Xu said the finance committee failed to publish the schedule for spring student organization allocations and end the application period by their respective deadlines and announced an updated allocations schedule. He said the finance committee did not advertise the general allocation orientation sessions, which are intended to educate students how to request SA funds. Ching has arrived late or designated a proxy for four of the six full senate meetings this semester.
Nine student organizations collaborated with the University and local LGBTQ+ groups last week to host 12 social and educational events for Trans Awareness Week. The events, spanning from Trans 101 educational sessions exploring transgender identities to a student open mic night in the University Student Center, concluded Sunday with Trans Day of Remembrance – an internationally recognized annual observance of lives lost to anti-transgender violence – hosted by five D.C. LGBTQ+ organizations in Freedom Plaza. Student leaders said the week’s programming provided a space for transgender students to celebrate their own identity and for allies of the trans community to learn more about how to support transgender people and understand the transgender experience on a deeper level. Trans Awareness Week kicked off last Thursday with an event hosted by GW Women in Business and the Business Pride Network, where the groups wrote letters to support the transgender community. Events like Pride Abroad – a presentation by the Office of Study Abroad and Out in IA – offered LGBTQ+ students an opportunity to learn about navigating their identity while adapting to new laws and social norms that may be critical of the LGBTQ+ community
while studying abroad in foreign countries. The week also included social events like Late Night at the MSSC on Saturday, an event where community members played card games and had dinner, and Trans Day of Relaxation at the Multicultural Student Services Center on Friday, a space for students to destress and connect with the community after confronting difficult topics like violence against the LGBTQ+ community. Senior Maya Younes, the president of Transgender and Non-Binary Students of GWU, said this year’s programming was built on collaborations with other students organizations, like Allied in Pride and the Delta Lambda Phi fraternity, and events like tabling for transgender visibility and a tea party discussing hormone replacement and transition therapy. They said this year’s events were similar to the organization’s first year of Trans Awareness Week events in 2019. They said by opening the week with joint event with student organizations, Trans Awareness Week encompassed broader student groups and represented the intersectional identities that many transgender people hold. These collaborations included a movie screening with GW Black Defiance of “Check It” – a film about a D.C. gang formed by Black, transgender youth to protect themselves from violence – and a panel with the Disabled Students Collective. See WEEK Page 5
Students unable to vote in midterms after ballot delivery delays, mailbox issues GRACE CHINOWSKY
CONTRIBUTING NEWS EDITOR
MAX PORTER REPORTER
Ballot delivery delays, broken mailboxes and a lack of communication from GW Mail and Package Services riddled the voting process for more than 20 out-ofstate students this fall, rendering many unable to vote via absentee ballot in the midterm elections earlier this month. Despite ordering their ballots weeks in advance, two dozen students said they received theirs days before the election, after the election or never at all, leaving many with little time to cast their votes and mail their ballots back before state deadlines. The students said the University’s MPS delays “suppressed” their ability to participate in this year’s elections where 435 House of Representative, 35 Senate and 36 gubernatorial seats were up for grabs as young voters participated in record numbers in the last three decades of midterm elections. University spokesperson Daniel Parra said MPS workers take a little more than a day to process USPS mail, and the University plans to add more electronic lockers to residence halls in the future with the goal of bringing students closer to their mail. Parra declined to say why students may have experienced delays receiving or accessing their midterm ballots last week or how often employees distribute mail to students’ mailboxes.
“Mail and packages are delivered to all residence halls (including lockers at Thurston, Shenkman and West Halls) five days a week,” Parra said in an email. “On average, it takes 1.25 days to process mail delivered by USPS.” Four students said they never received their absentee ballots through University mail for this year’s midterm election. Three said their state offices didn’t count their votes because of issues related to MPS delays leading up to or beyond state absentee ballot deadlines, which range from the night of Election Day to 10 days later. Four students said they returned home to vote in person or to fill out a new mail ballot because of MPS delays. “The right to vote can’t be taken for granted, and we are thrilled that so many GW students start their lifelong civic journey as voters while here at GW,” Amy Cohen, the executive director of the Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service, said in a Wednesday release about student engagement in this year’s elections. MPS receives all student mail and has locations on every GW campus, with their primary package center located at the mailroom in the lower level of the Support Building on F Street. Dylan Weiss, a junior from New Jersey majoring in international affairs, said despite ordering his absentee ballot from the state about a month before Election Day, he did not receive it in time to meet his state’s mail-in ballot deadline, which is six days
ALLISON ROBBERT | PHOTOGRAPHER Four students said they never received their absentee ballots through University mail, and three students said their state offices didn’t count their votes because MPS delivered ballots past state absentee ballot deadlines, leaving them unable to have their votes counted in this year’s midterm election.
after the election. After receiving his ballot three days after Election Day, he found that its delivery date documentation showed USPS delivered it to GW about two and a half weeks earlier Oct. 24. “GW had been in possession of it for a little over two weeks and just didn’t put it in my mailbox until after the election,” Weiss said.
Weiss said it was “messed up” that an institution in the center of D.C. could allow absentee ballot delays to occur past election deadlines, snuffing his voice out of the election. Tess Romine, a freshman majoring in political communication, said her mother mailed her ballot from Florida to D.C. in October, but she received it just two days before Election Day,
which was too late for her vote to be counted because of Florida’s mail-in deadline at 7 p.m. Nov. 8. “It’s embarrassing and incredibly frustrating,” Romine said. “And of course, I didn’t get the results that I wanted in Florida, and there is like a tiny part of me that’s wondering, ‘If me and maybe some of my other friends had gotten our ballots, would the results be different?’”