(04/21/16 4:47pm)
The Graduate and Professional Student Government plans to vote on legislation that would give Initiatives Committee Chair Claire Riley and Public Relations Chair Aaron Deason an additional $750 in stipend payments. As previously reported, Riley is the long time girlfriend of GPSG President Anthony Greco.
During winter break Greco emailed members of the executive board to propose giving Riley and Deason a raise of up to $1,000 a piece. Greco proposed these raises under the premise that Deason and Riley had both outperformed the $2,000 their stipends have paid them so far.
“I am proposing that we at least take a portion of this stipend savings and give at least $500 to Claire and Aaron who are slated to make $4.81 and $5.14 respectively,” Greco emailed the other GPSG executives.
“I am not sure if $1,000 each is the best option, I’m recommending $500, but I am also removing myself from voting in this discussion due to any perceived conflict of interest where it be internally or externally,” Greco wrote.
Greco’s proposal to give Riley and Deason raises was unsuccessful, but Michael Ryne Horn has now drafted a bill that will be voted on by the GPSG assembly Thursday night for approval.
Horn initially declined to comment on this story via email stating, “I would like to reserve the right to preview the article before it is sent out. My words should not be mistaken to further your attacks on GPSG. I am aware that the Campus Citizen used to (sic) receive funds from GPSG and had its funds removed because your organization showed no promise. I was a member who voted to remove this funding. Your organization personal issues should not manifest themselves in issues attack GPSG and its Exec officers. Agreed?”
After The Campus Citizen declined this agreement Horn responded that he was prompted to write this bill because, “Your ridiculous publication on the compensation rates of the executive members. I for one like hard work and money. I respect both. In your publication on the executive member compensations you asked students what they thought about the compensation rates that GPSG gave. Was it made clear that they are expected to work? Other organizations that I am part of, say Engineering and Technology Student Council (ETSC), have paid positions that pay $2000 for an academic year. They work around 5 hours a week for ~30 weeks, if you do the math you are looking at $13.33/hr. Yet, the Campus Citizen seems hell bent on pointing fingers at the GPSG executive board, which has some members making down in the $4/hr rate. They could spend there time working at Taco Bell making better money for their time, but they choose to serve the graduate students of IUPUI.”
Bill 1-16 will reallocate $1,500 of the GPSG’s former VP of Grants stipend to Riley and Deason. Former VP of Grants, Austin Stanforth had to step down from his position prematurely this year.
Since any unspent money that remains on the GPSG’s books at the end of the fiscal year will be returned to IUPUI, Horn suggests the GPSG should instead split it between Riley and Deason for the work they’ve done this semester.
While this legislation mirrors the email circulated by Greco to other GPSG executives over winter break, Greco says he had no hand in drafting it.
“I did receive some questions from Ryne prior to his drafting it, but I didn't draft any aspect of it. What I suggested to the executives last fall recommended a smaller increase than Ryne's (Ryne isn't dating Claire or Aaron in case you were wondering),” Greco said via email. “I imagine they are similar in nature because many people don't think it's right to effectively compensate someone with poverty-level wages when they're working hundreds of hours.”
(02/19/16 4:08pm)
UPDATE: 2/22/16 updated to reflect that Director of Strategic Communications at IUPUI Margie Smith-Simmons has received no complaints or statements to the contrary of our reporting.
UPDATE: 8:43 p.m. 2/22/16 update made to clarify information attributed to Margi Smith-Simmons.
Over the past few weeks we've published reports about the Graduate and Professional Student Government (GPSG). Thesereports detail how student government at IUPUI has been hijacked by President Anthony Greco.
In "The Systemic Problems in IUPUI's student Government," we revealed that GPSG Secretary Maria Lesch, had hired her sister, Sarah Harlan, to be the web developer for the publication The Graduate. Sarah Harlan had no background in web development at the time of her hire, but was given the job without any other students getting the opportunity to apply.
After hiring her sister, Lesch used her position on the GPSG executive board to lobby to have her sister paid a stipend. Sarah is receiving $700 this semester as the result of her sister's efforts. This is nepotism, plain and simple.
Something we haven’t reported on yet is the other case of nepotism in the GPSG involving President Greco and his girlfriend, Claire Riley. Riley is in her second year as Initiative Committee Chair to the GPSG--an executive position that gives her a $1,500 stipend.
Riley and Greco or, as they like to be known on Facebook, "Lady-Claire Riley" and "Sir-Tony Greco" have been dating for 8 years. Claire graduated from Ball State and then came to IUPUI for graduate school. Now at IUPUI, Riley and Greco have apparently been "power coupling."
I wouldn't dispute this "power coupling" claim, because Greco, after voting to give himself a 50% raise during this past summer, will be paid $7,500 of student fees this year. Riley received $1,500 of student fees. That's definitely a power move—steering student fees into your own pockets.
President Greco tried to flex his power even more this past week by telling members of the GPSG that they are not allowed to talk to The Campus Citizen. Greco went as far as contacting GPSG members that he thought were going to talk to us just to tell them they couldn't. While Greco has immense power over who gets a paycheck from the GPSG, he doesn't actually have the power to restrict members from speaking to the media.
President Greco has also tried to discredit The Campus Citizen.
He has told several individuals that the only reason The Campus Citizen has been reporting on GPSG malfeasance is because we're upset that an unethical funding agreement from 2014 between The Campus Citizen print edition and the student government fell through.
From the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics, "deny special treatment to advertisers, donors or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage."
In the fall of 2014, The Campus Citizen was a print publication that was poorly run. We missed publication dates, didn't track records well—it was an all around struggle. This isn't a secret. In fact, I opened the 2015 Fall semester with a letter from the editor that discussed the burning heap TheCampusCitizen.com staff inherited.
The print regime made a deal with the student government agreeing that a large percentage of The Campus Citizen content would be about student government and grad students in exchange for $10,000.
President Greco would also have people believe that TheCampusCitizen.com staff is unhappy that we're not in print anymore, but that is so far from the truth it's laughable. Printing a newspaper sucks. Print is a lot of work, costs a ton of money, and has limited readership potential.
I began pushing for a greater online presence within weeks of joining The Campus Citizen. I believed that print was a waste of money and time. Why spend $500 to print 400 copies of a newspaper when we could have a website for $8 a month that reaches anyone with Internet?
The current staff’s vision for The Campus Citizen to become TheCampusCitizen.com was finally fulfilled when I took over as editor-in-chief in April of 2015. I immediately killed any and all discussions of a print edition and moved us onto the Internet.
Mark Haab became TheCampusCitizen.com's advisor in the fall of 2015. When Haab and I first met, he spent the first 15 minutes trying to convince me to have a print edition of TheCampusCitizen.com. Haab explained how he'd help ensure printing went smoothly and that we would have the funds to do it with.
I declined. I explained to him that I felt any money we might receive would be better spent on a website and equipment such as cameras, microphones, et cetera. I also wasn't interested in dealing with the headache that I knew printing would be.
It is a fact that the staff of TheCampusCitizen.com decided in April of 2015 that we would not print, that we did not want to print, and that we would be online only moving forward. During TheCampusCitizen.com's first week we reached more people than was even possible in print. Not only did we reach more people, but we did it for less than $20, or 0.2% of Greco's student-fee funded salary this year.
TheCampusCitizen.com was designed so that we would never need money from anyone. We built ourselves up so that we never have to compromise what we're doing out of a concern for funding.
But President Greco knows all of this. I told him all about it when we met for lunch over the summer to discuss a partnership between TheCampusCitizen.com and The Graduate. Then Deputy Editor, Benjamin Cooley, told Greco and Lesch that we were interested in working together, but he made it clear we wanted nothing to do with any propaganda. All parties understood if that's what The Graduate became, then we wouldn't work with them.
Cooley expressed this sentiment to the point that I worried he would offend Greco and Lesch. In hindsight, he was spot on. It was at this meeting that I told Greco and Lesch about our website provider, Squarespace, and I gave Lesch the idea to look for sponsorships as a revenue stream for The Graduate. They took both ideas and ran with them.
First, they solicited sponsorships. I discussed this in a previous article, but these sponsorships were totally unethical. For $500 The Graduate staff would write an "article" about whatever someone wanted. In case you don't want to scroll back up: yes, that violates the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics.
Then they "built" a website that is a poor imitation of TheCampusCitizen.com. That's not to say we have ownership over the templates that Squarespace offers or that our design is unique, but their site is a knockoff of ours. I wouldn't care, but it sucked seeing Cooley's hard work get ripped-off.
Cooley put in countless hours designing our website, and he did it all for free. He'll never see a dime for his work, and that's all right with him. But I think Cooley has every right to be a little sore about Sarah Harlan doing a bad impression of him and getting paid $700 for it. Wouldn't you?
(Yes, I am aware that I didn't link to their website.)
It's not surprising that Greco has pushed this narrative of my staff and I being "hurt" and seeking vengeance. It's an attempt to undermine our credibility while distracting you from what the student government is doing.
Notice that Greco hasn't said anything we’ve reported is false but rather that we're vindictive jerks and buffoons. That's because everything we've reported is true. That isn’t me backing up my own work. While there was a complaint lodged with Director of Strategic Communications Margie Smith-Simmons about an inerview, no one has challenged the accuracy of what was reported.
Greco will say whatever most benefits him in a given moment. He'll even make stuff up.
When Greco and I spoke in January, the topic of how much TheCampusCitizen.com's faculty advisor gets paid was brought up. Greco repeatedly attempted to equate TheCampusCitizen.com having an advisor and internships (that students pay to participate in) to The Graduate receiving $5,000 in funding, the backing of the student government, and the stipends they pay their friends and family.
In a last ditch effort, Greco asked me how much I thought TheCampusCitizen.com's advisor, Haab, was paid. I told him I didn't know. Unhappy with my answer, Greco attempted to back me into a corner by lying about Department of Journalism Chair Jonas Bjork.
"He [Haab] gets $20,000 in part to be your advisor," Greco lied. "I know he gets $20,000 in part to be your advisor because the department head, who your advisor works for, told me."
When asked for comment, Department of Journalism Chair Jonas Bjork said, "I have told him no such thing. We have exchanged a few emails and I can tell you that as a part-timer Mr. Haab makes nothing like that and I have never told him the sum of $20,000. So I don't know what to make of that, but it certainly has not come from me and it's not true."
There's a reason that the student government hasn't responded to our reports. There's nothing to say except that they're all true.
Have questions or comments about this article? Tweet @DavidSchroeder_ and I’ll do my best to answer them.
(01/29/16 6:08am)
The IUPUI Student Government’s lack of checks and balance have resulted in at least one potential case of nepotism, a Former Supreme Court Justice’s distrust of Supreme Court investigations, and questionable spending of student fees.
“The GPSG’s finances, there’s a whole article you could write on that.” -GPSG President Anthony Greco
I. Who controls the money?
Every year students have to pay a “General Fee” as part of the cost of attending IUPUI. This fee funds all sorts of organizations and activities across campus.
In order to receive any of these funds, organizations must present a funding request list to the General Fee Advisory Board, or GFAB. Both of IUPUI’s student body governments-the Undgraduate Student Governement (USG) and the Graduate and Professional Student Government (GPSG)-submit funding requests to this board, a board they admit could be be stacked to vote in their favor.
“In theory, not that this has happened, but in theory if [USG President] Niki [DaSilva] really wanted something to get passed, could she load that board with four people who support it?”
“Yeah, I mean absolutely,” said GPSG President Anthony Greco.
The GFAB looks at all of the funding requests and then combines them into one master list that is ranked in order of importance. These funding requests are competing against each other for a finite amount of money. Some organization may be denied funding while others could have all of their requests fulfilled.
The last GFAB was seated by four undergraduate students selected by the Undergraduate Student Government (UGS) President, four graduate students selected by the Graduate and Professional Student Government (GPSG), and four faculty members.
USG President Niki DaSilva and GPSG President Anthony Greco have both sat on the GFAB as voting members. In addition, Greco has confirmed he not only presents his own organization's funding requests to the board, but he then votes in support of those requests.
And while GPSG President Greco says he has never voted for a GPSG funding request to be “number one, two, or three,” he does acknowledge the board’s current design permits the student government to load the board in its favor.
Dean of Students Jason Spratt is the advisor to the student government and also a voting member of the General Fee Advisory Board. When asked if he saw a potential conflict of interest for student government officials to be voting members on the GFAB, Spratt said, “Yes. I think that there is the ability for one. You expect that students are going to probably vote for their [own] proposals.”
“I mean, if you really eliminate all the bias, then you won’t have anyone on the board.”- GPSG President Anthony Greco
II. Where’s the money going?
In 2015, the GPSG’s funding from the GFAB tripled from $25,000 to $75,000. That funding, plus the $19,500 the GPSG had remaining from the prior year, gave the GPSG a budget of $94,550 to start the
2015 school year.
Eight members of the GPSG are scheduled to collect 46 percent of that funding ($35,000) in the form of stipends.
“[Greco’s] personal stipend increased 50 percent in one year, he added more positions and tripled, I think, some of the value of the other stipends,” said Dental School representative Jeff Valliere. “I think it is, like I said earlier, a big maldistribution of funds to the students when their stipends are that high.”
Valliere went on to say members of the executive board got raises to their stipends without approval from the legislative branch. “They had, supposedly, a meeting in the summer.”
“Do you know who was a part of this meeting?"
Valliere continued, “I was never made aware of entirely who was there. I asked for minutes from this meeting and they could not produce them. I asked for attendance from this meeting and they could not produce them. I asked if there was quorum at the meeting, because obviously approving the budget is specified in our constitution, but none of that was ever provided.”
GPSG Financial Documents link
III. Minimal oversight, maximum gains
The GPSG allocated $23,300 for “Initiative and Events” for the 2015-2016 school year. Initiatives and events includes things like Town Halls, Elite 50, and a publication called The Graduate.
In the spring of 2015, the Graduate and Professional Student Government passed a motion that added a new duty to the GPSG’s elected secretary position. This duty required that the secretary “Maintain the GPSG Newsletter.” Maria Harlan is the GPSG Secretary.
“The paper, the name, didn’t even exist until late summer 2015. At that time Tony and I made a plan, and then I moved forward to find writers, to find people who—staff, if you want to call it that,” Harlan said when asked about the hiring process The Graduate went through. “We posted several times online that we were looking for individuals who were interested in writing or interested in editing, things like that. Sent it out in listserv emails—that was kind of the process we went through.”
After the Graduate’s first web developer resigned amicably, Harlan quickly reached out to her sister Sarah to fill the position. Sarah had no experience in web development but was hired immediately without allowing any other qualified student to apply for the position.
The GPSG has maintained that they posted help wanted ads via social media specifically for a web developer and social media person for The Graduate, but a search of the GPSG and The Graduate’s Facebook and Twitter feeds yielded no such posts. While the GPSG initially said they would produce evidence of these posts, they later said in an email, “Regarding social media, all posts there are public and are already accessible to the Citizen [sic].”
(If anyone stumbles across these posts, please feel free to drop them in the comments.)
After hiring her sister, Harlan came to an agreement with GPSG President Greco to “kind of test the waters to see if having additional paid positions for The Graduate was something that was worth it.” This agreement was put into effect when Harlan approached the Executive Board of the GPSG—a board on which she is a voting member—to request funding to turn her sister’s newly acquired position as web developer for The Graduate into a paid position with a $700/semester stipend provided by the GPSG.
When Harlan was asked if being a member of the executive board gave her some sway over where the money went, she said,“Yes and no. I mean, I’m only one vote, if that makes any sense?”
When asked about the hiring of Harlan’s sister, President Greco said, “Maria was responsible with seeking that out with, frankly, minimal oversight.”
Three members of The Graduate are set to make $2,650 in stipends this semester. That’s $650 more than the GPSG budgeted for scholarships.
IV. Newspaper, newsletter, or propaganda?
When GPSG President Greco was first asked what The Graduate was, he said, “The Graduate is a[n] in-print, on-campus, student-run newspaper geared toward graduate and professional students at IUPUI.”
While the label of “newspaper” may seem innocuous, Department of Journalism Chair Jonas Bjork said, “I think you expect certain things from a newspaper that [from] a newsletter you don’t.”
When asked if objectivity was one of the implications of labeling a publication a “newspaper,” Bjork said, “A newspaper, I think, is seen as a pure journalistic enterprise in that it is not supposed to be tied to any organization other than its publisher. A newsletter is a much wider definition. They are tied to organizations, they are tied to specific entities, in a way that newspapers are not.”
Across multiple interviews, President Greco stated The Graduate is objective in its reporting. When the articles he wrote about a health and wellness center (titled “The Pursuit of Health and Wellness Center at IUPUI” and “The Pursuit of a Health and Wellness Center Part II”) were brought to his attention as examples of bias, President Greco steadfastly denied the articles inThe Graduate were anything but objective.
“If it (this article) were a piece of advocay, it would say things like ‘we should have this’ and ‘we need this now,’” said GPSG President Anthony Greco.
An excerpt from Greco’s article at hand (emphasis added):
In light of all of this what has your student government done? For nearly a decade student government leaders have been advocating for the construction of a health and wellness center. In 2008, the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) passed legislation in support of more health and psychological services. In the fall of 2011, USG passed around a petition that received 415 signatures in support of increasing student fees to build a Health and Wellness Center. In the Spring of 2013, USG passed legislation in support of a feasibility study for a Health and Wellness Center and even worked with the Graduate and Professional Student Government (GPSG) and the General Fee Advisory Board to start putting funds aside for the feasibility study.
We now make it to the current chapter of this initiative. In the Fall of 2014 USG and GPSG began putting together a Needs Analysis where they would poll students to get empirical data regarding the usage, needs, and willingness of students to support a Health and Wellness Center. This fall you will see members of USG and GPSG all over campus with 3,000 copies of this survey making this one of the largest, if not the largest, student government surveys in IUPUI history. The importance of this survey can’t be understated. The results of the survey will be given to the IU Board of Trustees and used as part of the USG and GPSG report in October when the board meets at IUPUI. Let’s take this opportunity to spread awareness of and engage in dialogue about such an important initiative.
If you have any questions about the history of the Health and Wellness Center Initiative, the Needs Analysis, or this article, or would like to help in some way, please contact GPSG President Tony Greco (me) at gpsgpres@iupui.edu.
While those articles are clearly advocating for a political cause, one need look no further than The Graduate’s Dean Support Letter to see the facade of objectivity falling apart. The Dean Support Letter is a form soliciting sponsorships from the deans of different schools at IUPUI. There are five tiers of sponsorship with the fifth tier being the highest.
The fifth tier, or “The Dean Tier,” requires a $550-per-issue sponsorship. That may seem steep, but in exchange the dean gets “1 full page ad, 1 full page article to correlate with the ad.” To be clear, this is the GPSG and The Graduate offering to create“sponsored content” and present it as objective news to the student body.
This isn’t just evidence that The Graduate was selling articles as if they were ads. It is evidence that the GPSG and The Graduate’sstaff both knew there was greater value in paid advertisements that didn’t look like ads.
GPSG President Greco wants The Graduate to--at least in appearance--reflect journalism. Greco even went as far as to request the Department of Journalism provide an adviser and internship opportunities as recently as last December. Both requests were denied.
Whether by intentional design or through ignorant coincidence, the Graduate and Professional Student Government has effectively funded a department of propaganda under the pretense of it being an objective newspaper--a pretense that the GPSG president still maintains in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
“Frankly, I’m the one who, if you will, thought up the process.”- GPSG President Anthony Greco on the process of getting a funding request passed through the GPSG General Assembly.
V. Who you gonna call?
Student Government at IUPUI has three branches: the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch. The judicial branch is where the Supreme Court of Student Governance resides. The court is funded by the student government--the same people it’s supposed to investigate.
While Greco trusts the Supreme Court of Student Governance, the former Supreme Court Justice of Student Governance doesn’t share this confidence.
“I do trust the Supreme Court Justice that we have right now would go after them fairly...[but]if you’re paying someone to investigate you, what could they possibly give you that wouldn’t make you fire them, in principle?” said former Supreme Court Justice and potential Undergraduate Presidential candidate Mosopefoluwa “Sope” Ladapo.
“In principle, the investigation might be fine, but the reporting might be faulty,” Sope said.
‘“As a result of?”
“How the system works,” he concluded.
When asked if investigative reports generated by the Supreme Court of Student Governance should be immediately viewed as suspect, Sope said, “That’s a fear that I have.”
*Over the summer of 2015, the General Fee Advisory Board changed its composition to have four undergraduate students, two graduate students, one faculty member, and three administrators. The student presidents can still select themselves to this board.*
EDITOR’S NOTE:
The Campus Citizen took the use of “propaganda” in this story very seriously. We didn’t decide to label The Graduate as propaganda until we discovered the Dean Support Letter which contains explicit language selling “articles” in tandem with ads. Sponsored content in no way represents objective reporting of a newspaper and should always be labeled and identified as such. All of the evidence coupled with GPSG President Anthony Greco’s resolve to maintain that The Graduate doesn’t have a political agenda makes it impossible for us to refer to it as anything other than propaganda.