The leaders of the Student Government, Graduate Leadership Council and Student Bar Association selected Matt Simpson, Marc Tomik and Rachel Weiner as their three nominees for student trustee, according to former SG President Ashley Mushnick.
Simpson, who was also a finalist for the position when the Trusteeship Committee selected the first student trustee last fall, is a graduate student in the Washington College of Law and the School of International Service. Tomik is a senior in the School of Public Affairs. Weiner is a third-year student in WCL and a 2005 graduate from SPA.
The Trusteeship Committee of AU's board of trustees will decide who to recommend as the student trustee after they evaluate the nominees. The United Methodist Church's General Board of Higher Education and Ministry would then need to vote to approve the selected nominee before the board of trustees could give their final approval. The Trusteeship Committee is expected to interview the three nominees in June. The entire process should be completed in time for the new student trustee to be seated at the board's September meeting, said SG President Joe Vidulich, a senior in SPA.
Mushnick said 10 people applied for the position, which the board of trustees agreed to implement last May as part of their governance reform plan. Mushnick, former GLC Executive Chair Wade Murphy and former SBA President Jon Feere helped select nominees during the first student trustee search last fall. The Trusteeship Committee selected Rebecca Geller, then a third-year student in the WCL, as student trustee in November. Geller was not formally approved by the entire board until their winter meetings on February 22 and 23, The Eagle previously reported.
Mushnick said the current selection process should not take as long to complete. "The process should occur more quickly this time since we've already had one go-around," she said in an e-mail. "At least we hope so!"
The student leaders had difficulty finding only one person who could represent all three of the university's student constituencies, Mushnick said.
"When we picked our three top candidates, we decided not to rank them because we could not come to a consensus about how one person was more qualified than the other," she said in the e-mail. "It really shed light on the need for there to be more than one student trustee on the board, just like the faculty have."
Mushnick had previously expressed her opposition to the board's decision to only include one non-voting student trustee. On June 13, 2006, she sent a letter to then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, criticizing what she viewed as inadequacies in the adopted reform plan and referenced a student-formulated alternative plan that included the installation of three full-voting student trustees, The Eagle previously reported.
Although Geller's main duties as student trustee ended after the board's spring meeting concluded May 18, current student leaders want to see her continue to represent students in some capacity before a new student trustee is selected. Vidulich said he, GLC Executive Chair Edgar Meza and SBA President Karim Marshall want Geller to sit in on any special board meetings on the presidential search.
"If the board has a special meeting between now and September to make a decision on the presidential search, there would otherwise not be a student trustee there," he said. "We're afraid that the board will have such a special meeting and the student representative might not have been decided yet, but we still want to have a student representative be there in one form or another. So if we have Rebecca Geller sit in, they don't have to rush that decision process"
