OU’s Undergraduate Student Congress voted unanimously to nominate four students to the search committee tasked with finding OU president David Boren’s successor in its Oct. 3 meeting.
Student Government Association president J.D. Baker presented the four nominees for congressional approval after OU’s Board of Regents informed him in an Oct. 2 memo that he must present a list of names by Oct. 9.
That left Baker roughly 24 hours, he said, to select nominees before SGA’s Oct. 3 meeting, since he said he was unaware that it would be his responsibility to name student nominees until he received the memo. Baker was not technically required to receive congressional approval, said Undergraduate Student Congress Chair Kaylee Rains-Saucedo, although he said he felt it was important to do so.
The nominees, chosen by Baker alone, are all involved in student government. The choices are Rains-Saucedo, SGA Vice President Cameron Burleson, Graduate Student Senate Chair Carrie Pavlowsky and Student Bar Association President Mackenzie Coplan.
Baker said he chose these nominees because they had already been “vetted” by the student body, since they serve in elected positions.
“I really appreciate Congress and their questions on this,” Baker said following the meeting. “It’s important, and so we really want to be transparent on this and make sure students understand why this process is happening, what it is, and the way we’re going about it.”
While Baker nominated two undergraduate students and two graduate students, only one of each will be chosen for the committee along with one student from OU’s Health Sciences Center. Each student member will have a one-third vote on the committee.
“It was a tough decision — okay, we’ve got a week, what are we going to do? So I thought about our top leaders, the ones who had been elected by their peers,” Baker said. “I believe these students are highly respected and they’ve been equipped to make larger official decisions.”
Many within Congress were unhappy by the short timespan given to the student body to nominate candidates. Social sciences representative Dan Williams called the short time span “disgusting” and said the Regents were treating SGA as a “rubber stamp.”
“Many of my constituents are upset about this,” Williams said. “They frequently come to me with their concerns, but I’ve never seen them come out in such numbers over an issue.”
Rains-Saucedo, one of the four nominees and chair of Congress, said she had concerns about the process but still understood the need for timeliness.
“If it was up to me I would absolutely love a different process, but at the end of the day this is not an SGA position — this is a nomination by SGA, which is something J.D. didn’t even have to do,” Rains-Saucedo said. “Would I have loved the Regents to give us more time? Absolutely, but I also know this process needs to get started and I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity for student voices to be heard.”
Rains-Saucedo said if chosen by the Regents, she would be in a unique position to take into account student concerns during the search committee process. Rains-Saucedo also said if chosen she would be able to help keep the student body informed of what’s happening within the search committee.
Congress members also voted unanimously during the meeting to allocate funding for different organizations, as well as correct a clerical error on a previously passed piece of legislation.
