The Alliance of Happy Atheists will move into the EMU Survival Center in the coming school year, but leaders of another group criticized the decision, saying the ASUO had already offered their group the space instead.
Members of the Coalition Against Environmental Racism said both Survival Center directors and ASUO President Emma Kallaway encouraged them to apply for the office space vacated by OSPIRG in October. But neither Kallaway nor the Survival Center had the final say in the decision. Instead, the decision fell to the EMU’s Board of Directors, which gave the office to AHA instead.
Leaders from both groups gave the same reasons for their applying for space: a place to hold meetings, recruit new members and prevent groups from disappearing when students active in them graduate.
CAER, which is 16 years old, strives to fight the disproportionate effect of pollution on ethnic minorities. AHA, founded in 2009, seeks to represent non-religious students. But both said they applied hoping for a place to put their groups’ book collections and hold meetings.
The difference between their applications, CAER co-director Adrien Wilkie said, was that CAER, because of encouragement from Kallaway and the Survival Center to apply for the space, assumed that the Jan. 27 meeting at which an EMU Board subcommittee met to allocate space in the building was a formality.
“Honestly, we went into this thinking we had to apply just for bureaucracy’s sake,” she said. Neither she nor her fellow co-director skipped class to attend.
AHA’s application was far more detailed and its presentation more impressive. Committee members decided to give the space to AHA.
Student leaders reacted angrily to the decision. Former ASUO Multicultural Advocate Diego Hernandez sent an e-mail to the EMU Board calling the decision unjust.
“I personally have nothing against AHA,” he wrote. “Nor do I think this is their fault, but I also think that they do not do work that helps underrepresented and marginalized communities of color on this campus and in our community … I have never seen them do anything that has supported our communities, nor have I ever been invited to one of their programs or for that matter seen anything at all from them.”
Survival Center co-director Sara Quinn said those in the Survival Center were against the decision. Quinn said the Survival Center does not object to AHA but would have preferred CAER and felt the EMU Board did not listen to the Survival Center’s wishes.
A lack of communication was evident at other parts of the process. When CAER’s leadership tried to ask the EMU Board to reverse the decision at its Feb. 3 meeting, the board’s members refused, saying it would be unfair because nobody from AHA was present.
When asked about the dispute, AHA Vice President Greg Kirby said he had barely heard of CAER’s objections to the decision and that the group’s members had never communicated with him.
Despite the dispute, the decision is final because the EMU Board has no appeals process for decisions to allocate space.
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