When Duke Student Government President Jordan Giordano addressed the Sept. 17 DSG weekly meeting, he began his discussion of whether to cut funds from student groups with a warning: "The following," he said, "is off the record."
When this portion of the meeting was removed from the official minutes that had been publicly available on the DSG Web site, Executive Vice President Sunny Kantha, a senior, explained that the information had been, at first, accidentally kept in the minutes.
"If we say off the record, it means off the record," he said.
And when The Chronicle obtained the results of the Sept. 15 referendum the night of the election-10 hours before DSG informed the student body-it was unable to print them.
The information was, again, off the record.
DSG last week adopted a new policy of communicating with students through self-contained mediums such as blast e-mails and biweekly newsletters-methods, Giordano said, that are more "direct" than those used by previous administrations.
"In the past, Duke Student Government has relied on other means of communication that do not communicate directly to students, but we believe direct communication is best," Giordano wrote in a statement posted on the DSG Web site. "Our bylaws require notification of referendums and amendments in student publications-thus our original notification through that medium; however, based on student feedback from my September 12th e-mail, direct blast e-mail will continue to be our means of communication."
Giordano, a senior, agreed to be interviewed for this story only by e-mail.
Several past DSG leaders, however, sharply criticized the shift away from second-degree news sources.
"If you're any government, and you don't like what the newspaper has to say so you withhold information from the wider public, you have a serious problem," said former DSG president Elliott Wolf, Trinity '08. "If a student asks you a question, whether they're from The Chronicle or not, and answering doesn't interfere what you're trying to accomplish on behalf of the students, you answer it-period. Outside of extenuating circumstances, like confidentiality agreements surrounding Board of Trustee meetings, if a student asked me a question, I answered it."
Going off the record
Kantha said the practice of going off the record during the public weekly meetings gives DSG leadership a chance to discuss policy that needs to be ironed-out with senators before the public can chime in.
He added that the off-the-record portions of the meeting slipped into the unedited version of the minutes-which are posted each week on the DSG Web site-unintentionally.
"In the future, anything we say off the record won't be in the minutes," he said.
Former DSG president Paul Slattery, Trinity '08, said the weekly meetings are an "open and public space" and that he would "never bother" to go off the record in order to scratch a conversation from the official minutes.
"What the f- happens if [Jordan] just says at the start of the meeting 'This is off the record'? Does the meeting disappear?" he said. "Basically you could edit the meeting to make it look like whatever you want it to look like."
The original version of the minutes appeared online with a record of Giordano's unveiling of "Plan B"-the reaction to the failure of the referendum that would cut from some student organizations in order to fund others. The unedited version of the minutes-no longer available on the DSG Web site-had left intact lines that specified where the cuts could occur, and included notes such as, "Publications like Journal of Public Affairs etc., may have to cut them."
Senior Andrew Tutt, editor of the Journal of Public Affairs and a former candidate for DSG president who ran against Giordano, said he believes the re-editing of the public minutes is "unprecedented." He added that it was "suspicious" to attempt to hide such information if, as Tutt says, the editors of the publications were not contacted by DSG prior to Giordano's preliminary suggestion to discuss that their funds be cut.
"The Journal of Public Affairs sits right at the edge of being able to print-you go with what you can," said Tutt, former DSG Webmaster. "All the publications are already so cash-strapped-that's why you don't see high-quality publications on campus."
Giordano said DSG has begun to evaluate spending, and that during the meeting, he targeted publications after evaluating how they are funded at other schools.
"At other universities, publications are not funded through the student activities fee since they have greater 'university value' than value for specifically undergraduate students," he wrote in an e-mail.
Selling the referendum
DSG also applied its new policy of communicating with students through direct methods in its treatment of the results of the Sept. 17 election. Sophomore Andrew Brown, vice president for Durham and regional affairs, said that although Giordano did not prohibit anyone from informing The Chronicle of the results as soon as they were confirmed-the practice by which students were notified during previous elections-Brown said the representatives present to tabulate votes were aware of the protocol at play.
"We left the room with the understanding that there would be a blast e-mail in the morning," he said.
Wolf, however, said he has found blast e-mails to be ineffective because few students read them.
Kantha confirmed that it was Giordano's decision not to reveal the results until the following day.
Wolf, who indicated that he had been following the elections, said Giordano's decision to delay the release of the information was misguided.
"All Jordan accomplished by withholding the information was to make the election look very sketchy, as if it were rigged-it made Jordan look stupid and it made the whole organization look corrupt," Wolf said.
The newly founded bi-weekly DSG newsletter will provide students with updates on each committee's legislation and contributions from members of the executive board, said sophomore Wonnie Song, public relations director of publications and director of the newsletter. But like the e-mail sent following the election, the newsletters will receive no contributions from outside DSG, Song said.
Even as DSG embraces blast e-mails and stacks their own newsprint next to the campus paper, several senators and executive board members stressed the inherent problems of having an adversarial relationship between DSG and The Chronicle.
"Anyone that goes to this school knows that Jordan doesn't have the best relationship with The Chronicle," said senior Lauren Maisel, vice president for student affairs. "I want to improve that relationship."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.