This year’s Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) elections will take place online between May 18th and May 29th, the union has announced, with an external election company hired to “facilitate” the process.
Nominations for the GSU’s two-person sabbatical team – consisting of a president and vice-president – will open on May 11th and close on May 15th, the GSU said on Facebook today.
The GSU will use Mi-Voice, a UK-based online elections company, “to ensure that the election is completely secure and fair in these unprecedented times”, the GSU said.
Two hustings will take place during the campaign. Colin Wilt, the GSU’s oversight officer, told The University Times today that it’s likely there will be one video hustings and one write-in hustings.
The results of the election, he said, are likely to be announced on May 30th.
Last year, President Shaz Oye and Vice-President Gisèle Scanlon were elected on a ticket to the union’s two paid positions.
But the second semester of 2020 has not been a quiet one for the GSU. In February, The University Times revealed that casual staff working in the College – a cohort that includes many postgraduate students – were facing teaching pay cuts of nearly 20 per cent.
The episode occurred after a HR document proposing the pay cuts passed through Finance Committee on November 18th without objection.
The following day, nearly 80 students protested outside a meeting of Finance Committee, calling for the cuts to be reversed.
College subsequently rowed back on the pay cuts, and Oye defended her role in the controversy in an interview with this newspaper.
She said the proposal was hidden in hundreds of pages of documents and not flagged as an issue with significant implications for students.
Oye also criticised Trinity for a lack of “transparency” in how it circulates committee documents – something members have frequently criticised College for in the past – and stated: “I’m human. I missed it.”
Later that week, divisions in the GSU became public after Scanlon rebuked her president at a town hall meeting after she was unable to state how much PhD students get per hour on their stipend.
“Why don’t you know this?”, she asked, adding: “It’s extremely important for you to know that stuff.”
Oye hit back days later at what she called Scanlon’s “spurious accusation”.
“It was quite clear that the PhDs who were there were themselves confused as to what they themselves were being paid per hour”, she told The University Times.
She added: “I thought therefore the accusation by anyone, any accusation by anyone, that – it was just a spurious accusation, it seemed to me. That’s all I can say about it.”
“I don’t understand why that accusation came forward in the way in which it did at that meeting. I am struggling with that.”
