Student Association President Audai Shakour narrowly escaped impeachment at Tuesday night’s SA Senate meeting in the Marvin Center.
Despite Sen. Chris Rotella (CCAS-U), a sophomore, drafting a document outlining 11 reasons to impeach Shakour, not enough senators supported the document for the charges to be carried out.
For Shakour to have been impeached by the Senate, 10 senators would have had to sign the document; Rotella said seven signed. Senators held an executive session in which they discussed the impeachment without the presence of members of the press.
Shakour, a senior, spent more than two hours reading a prepared speech and answering questions from senators in an emotion-charged SA meeting, which attracted a higher-than-average audience to the fourth floor of the Marvin Center. Shakour continued to call the sexual harassment allegations leveled against him by a female colleague untrue.
“The impeachment (legislation) is unfortunate, but I don’t feel I did anything out of the bylaws,” Shakour said during the question-and-answer session.
“When impeachment comes, we will deal with it,” Shakour said during the session, which occurred before it became apparent that Rotella could not muster enough votes for Shakour’s impeachment. “I believe impeachment is another storm we can weather.”
Ten signatures would begin a process in which Shakour would defend himself against impeachment charges in a formal hearing presided over by the chief of the SA Student Court, Katherine Baxter, a graduate student. After the hearing, if two-thirds of the Senate found Shakour guilty of any one of the charges, he would be removed from office.
Senators who signed the document include Rotella, senior Ben Traverse (CCAS-U), sophomore Casey Rose (CCAS-U), sophomore Marc Abanto (CCAS-U), sophomore Nick D’Addario (CCAS-U) and first year non-voting freshman senator Nicole Capp. One other senator also signed the document but was unavailable for comment.
While 11 total articles of impeachment were outlined in the document, Shakour said neither sexual harassment charges nor any of the other articles of impeachment warrant removal from office.
Rotella added that if Shakour is found guilty of sexual harassment by Student Judicial Services, the minimum University sanction for the charge is disciplinary probation. If Shakour is charged with disciplinary probation, he would be automatically become ineligible to serve as SA president according to University guidelines.
Charges of impeachment include failure by Shakour to nominate students to fill vacancies within the SA; inappropriately signing expenditure approval forms over the summer; failure to ensure the payments of SA office assistants; not keeping consistent office hours or posting office hours; mismanagement of contracts; showing negligence in the conduct of the office of the president; and the inability to successfully execute the duties of president.
Some senators said it would be premature to hold impeachment trials before the University has made a ruling on Shakour’s charges of sexual harassment. An SJS hearing is scheduled for Friday afternoon, and a verdict isn’t expected until after Thanksgiving break.
“We need to see some serious fault that brings this issue to the forefront,” said Benjamin Chait, a first-year non-voting senator. “I believe we need to wait until SJS runs its course.”
-Michael Barnett and Brandon Butler contributed to this report.
