Funding from the Capitations Committee for the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) will continue to be withheld, following a meeting of the outgoing and incoming Senior Deans.
An email to the committee from the office of the Senior Dean said: “In this instance, it remains clear that the GSU Board in their written decision did not consider the Graduate Students’ Union to have engaged adequately with their processes. That the GSU contests this is a matter between the GSU and the GSU Board.”
The email went on to confirm that the Senior Dean’s decision, as chair of the committee, to withhold the remainder of the union’s 2020/21 funding, would stand, “pending formal ratification of the decision at a meeting of the Capitation Committee to be held as soon as possible following the appointment by [the College] Board of the new Senior Dean”.
The outgoing Dean made the decision on July 22 following a report from the GSU Board which said that the union’s sabbatical team did not comply with the board’s investigation into a controversial EGM held in April. Earlier this week (August 3), the sabbatical team claimed that the report was “misleading” and “unfounded”. In support of this claim, the union’s president Giséle Scanlon and vice-president Abhisweta Bhattacharjee assembled a number of screenshots of the headers of emails between them and the board, but with the contents cropped out.
In response, the board said that “claims of vindication based on a list of emails lack credibility” and “if these emails are being used to call into question the Board’s report, the content of these emails should be made available by the GSU to the Capitation Committee”. The full emails have yet to be released.
Trinity News reached out to the GSU sabbatical team for comment but had not received a response at time of publication.
