Cultural Diversity Board (CDB) Director Shelby Cerise has decided to resign at the conclusion of the school year after alleged unfair treatment by Student Life, Colorado Mesa University’s student involvement department.
The decision comes after some last-minute decisions concerning the finalists for the Associated Student Government’s annual awards — the “Mav Awards.”
CDB had been nominated for the organization of the year, and as director, Cerise had been nominated for organization leader of the year.
CDB and Cerise were removed from the finalist list chosen by the Fee Allocation Committee (FAC) — a subcommittee of the student government whose members are student-nominated — with no formal notice or explanation given to the members of FAC.
The winners of the Mav Awards will now be decided by an unknown group of administrators and student government officials.
“I’ve been scrutinized since the first week of my freshman year and ever since then, it’s just kind of been a track record of ‘behind the back’ kind of things,” Cerise said.
More recently, Cerise discovered CDB had been taken out of the running for the finalists of the Mav Awards by Manager of Student Life Operations Julienne Stump and two student government officials. CDB was replaced by CMU TV.
“The media board that they replaced my organization with is the organization who won it last year,” Cerise said, “and it’s kind of been an unspoken rule that we try to spread out the org[anization] of the year and club of the year to different people so it affects a larger scope of people.”
According to Manager of Student Life Operations Julienne Stump, the rearrangement of the Mav Awards finalists had to do with not only the number of nominations but also the quality of the descriptions.
According to Stump, some alleged clubs and organizations had good descriptions of specific achievements, while others said things like “This person kicks butt in their club.”
The Criterion has requested documentation from Student Life and the student government to substantiate these claims but has yet to receive them. During Wednesday’s ASG meeting, ASG Director of External Affairs Chrystina Meador told senators that she did not expect the documents to be released to the public.
“The whole thing was kind of weird,” FAC Chair Jake Wellborn said. “FAC is a committee I run. It’s like a subcommittee of ASG. And we usually just deal with bills, but this year we chose the top three people for each Mav Award.”
Stump said that it was more her decision than anyone else’s, but that Meador was also in the meeting, as was ASG Vice President Gabby Gile.
“A bunch of student leaders picked their top three from the pool for each [category] and then I looked at the top three and I made some changes based on the descriptions, number of nominations, and my input,” Stump said.
For this reason, Stump said, CDB was passed on the list by CMU TV.
Cerise said that some organizations, like Horizon Magazine, only received one nomination form while others had more — while still making it to the finalist list.
Cerise said CMU TV’s two nominations came both from members of the organization — these documents have not been released by Student Life or ASG.
Cerise said FAC originally made their decision based on what they had seen out of the nominees, rather than the number of nominations because those can be done by encouraging friends to vote for them.
“Me and a few others kind of went through the list and made some changes,” Stump said. “But it wasn’t because someone didn’t deserve it. It’s just, I wanted my input to be recognized.”
“Julie and Chrystina decided their opinions were more valid than a group of 11 people that voted,” Cerise said.
FAC is comprised of Wellborn, Cerise, Samantha Gaasch, Ethan Ball, Ethan Lovelace, Colton Rupple, Jay Shearrow, Jeffrey Vella, Joseph Azar and Joshua Lindsey.
Cerise is on the committee with Wellborn but left the room when FAC discussed her nomination. Some other FAC members nominated for awards also left. In her absence, the remaining FAC members chose Cerise and CDB to be finalists for awards.
“I guess the people running this didn’t agree with some of our decisions,” Wellborn said. “So they changed some stuff around and they happened to take her out of org[anization] leader of the year and they took CDB out of the org[anization] of the year.”
Wellborn didn’t think it was a personal attack on Cerise. He said he thought she was just the person that ended up being removed. At the same time, Wellborn acknowledged a perceived history of unfairness to Cerise.
“I think she’s just been screwed over a few times,” Wellborn said. “And that was just the final straw.”
Cerise cited firing and hiring decisions that she felt have been biased against her throughout her time at Student Life organizations.
In an email to The Criterion, Stump later recounted the process as more official, that professional staff had the final say in the student-run organization’s decisions.
“The first part of the process was a group of student leaders who met following an FAC meeting choosing their top candidates, and the second part was professional staff,” Stump wrote in an email. “Once my input (on behalf of Shane and Gail) was applied, then the top three nominees was considered final.”
Stump also described the finalists as a “working document” and “not considered complete” until professional staff gave the final word.
FAC members were not aware that their decisions would be revised by professional staff and were expecting to have the final word.
Student Life staff did not take part in the decision-making process for last year’s Mav Awards, according to last year’s Director of External Affairs Carly Hanley.
Meador said that CDB had been in the running for the top three, but that, during the second meeting involving Stump, Gile, and herself, CMU TV moved ahead of CDB because they “had fewer nominations than some of the other ones that were nominated.”
“CMU TV was originally not part of that top three,” Meador said, “and I talked to Jake [Wellborn] about, you know, troubleshooting me through that. They had multiple nominations, why wouldn’t you include them over a group that’s had one? And his reasoning was that they won last year, and that just wasn’t criteria that, as the director of external—and kind of supposed to oversee this process—that wasn’t criteria that I wanted included. Like, if they grow, then let them be recognized for their great efforts.”
Nevertheless, Cerise said that she feels a constant bias in Student Life that continually harms her and her organization.
“The people up for ‘Maverick of the Year’ are the current ASG president, next year’s ASG president, and the chief of staff of ASG, and these are ASG awards that are going out,” she said. “So, it’s a measure of a million different ways to say that there’s always a bias.”
The revised list of Maverick of the Year finalists now includes ASG President Ben Linzey, ASG President-elect Beau Flores and ASG Chief of Staff Bryce Reedy.
Alec Williams contributed to this report.
