Gisèle Scanlon, the current vice-president of the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU), is to run unopposed for the organisation’s presidency, the body’s electoral commission confirmed last night.
Scanlon, who this year served as vice-president to incumbent Shaz Oye, will bid to replace a president she ran on a ticket with last April after a year pockmarked with acrimony and conflict.
Abhisweta Bhattacharjee and Joseph Keegan will face off in the race for vice-president – the other paid position in the GSU – after nominations closed last night at midnight.
The elections will take place online, running from May 18th to May 29th.
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 body said last week.
Two hustings will take place during the campaign. Colin Wilt, the GSU’s oversight officer, told The University Times last week 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.
Scanlon’s bid for presidency comes after she had a public falling out with Oye in February, after controversy erupted when this newspaper 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 – which Oye, as GSU president, was a member of – without objection on November 18th.
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.”
