Ale Murat Elected As StuCo President; StuCo Voted Twice Against Co-Presidency

By the 144th Executive Board and News Editors

A Note from The Exonian’s 144th Executive Board: 

On election day, upper and runoff candidate Aaron Joy alerted Elections Committee coheads to an instance of negative campaigning on an Academy student’s Instagram story, ​​characterizing it as an attack on personhood. The 2021-22 StuCo Executive Board (Exec) has never shared the textual component of the Instagram story in full. At the Wednesday emergency meeting, StuCo Exec chose to refer to the Instagram story as “a social media post that invoked a racist attack on a candidate’s character.” 

We believe that publishing the Instagram story verbatim is necessary to fulfill The Exonian’s mission to report with accuracy and to drive positive change. On the afternoon of Wednesday, Feb. 23, however, we heard from the Deans’ Office, StuCo advisors, and 2021-22 StuCo Exec, who all cautioned The Exonian against publishing the Instagram story out of concern for the potential impact on the student who posted the story as well as the runoff candidates involved. 

The Exonian has always prioritized the unbiased presentation of facts. In the context of this article, we continue to believe that publishing the complete Instagram story would fulfill this commitment. That being said, out of consideration for fellow members of the Academy, we have chosen not to publish the Instagram story. Nevertheless, we hope that this article encourages more informed and respectful public discourse surrounding the election, the runoff candidates, and the student body’s decision to elect upper Ale Murat as the new StuCo president. 

On Friday, Feb. 18, Student Council (StuCo) announced upper Ale Murat as the newly elected StuCo president per the student body’s votes totalled on election day Tuesday, Feb. 15. Murat won a majority vote over runoff candidate, upper Aaron Joy. In all, 68 percent of Academy students turned out to vote. 

Murat joins uppers vice president Grace Puchalski and co-secretary Nate Puchalski, as well as lower co-secretary Kevin Treehan to serve on the 2022-23 StuCo Executive Board (Exec). Class representative elections, normally held at least three weeks after StuCo Exec elections, will be postponed to March 29 after spring break. 

The delay in announcing election results was a consequence of extensive discussions addressing the effects of negative campaigning. On election day, Joy alerted Elections Committee coheads and uppers Tucker Gibbs and Will Durawa to an instance of negative campaigning on an Academy student’s Instagram story, ​​characterizing it as an attack on personhood.

Considering the potential impact on voting behavior, the current StuCo Exec Board and Elections Committee decided to leave the Tuesday election ballots uncounted while considering alternatives to determining the new StuCo president. 

On Wednesday, Feb. 16, StuCo faculty advisors as well as Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Stephanie Bramlett and Dean of Multicultural Affairs Sherry Hernandez engaged in a series of discussions with students that gave rise to the possibility of a co-presidency. StuCo Exec’s and the Elections Committee coheads’ individual conversations with Joy and Murat then confirmed that both candidates were open to co-presidency. According to Gibbs, the discussions “suggested to us [Elections Committee] that co-presidency was the best solution that balanced the satisfaction of all parties involved and the vote of the student body, given that holding a new election was out of the question.”

Durawa and Gibbs pointed to the StuCo presidential election of 2017 as a precedent of “opting for co-presidency when there were questions about election fairness due to extenuating circumstances.” In the spring of 2017, election fraud was discovered to have taken place. As a result, then-StuCo faculty advisors Carol Cahalane and Laura Marshall expanded 2017-18 StuCo Exec to accommodate all candidates who ran as the class of 2017 had already graduated. This included the 2017-18 presidential runoff candidates Menat Bahnasy and Jackson Parell as co-presidents.

The Elections Committee coheads then outlined the two possible paths to declaring co-presidency: “One way is to go through StuCo and declare a state of emergency, which would allow for specific otherwise-unconstitutional actions to take place, since co-presidents are not found in the letter of the StuCo Constitution. Or we could present the case to Principal Rawson, who theoretically has the implied constitutional authority to overrule the constitution and declare that co-presidency is permissible under the circumstances. However, we did not want to go down the second route because that would go against the wishes of StuCo and by extension the student body, who voted twice against co-presidency.” Gibbs said. “It should be noted that this is the first time we’re using the state of emergency clause, written last year by [alum] Phil Horrigan, to declare co-presidents when the [2020-21 presidential] election resulted in an exact tie, a constitutional gray area because there is nothing written in the Constitution about exact ties.”

At the StuCo emergency meeting on Wednesday evening, senior and current StuCo co-secretary Kiesse Nanor presented the motion to declare a state of emergency to announce co-presidency. The motion, which required a two-thirds majority to pass, fell to a majority abstention vote. 

“I think it’s understandable that [the motion fell through],” Durawa said. “We weren’t able to provide a lot of information, and I don’t think the student body felt that they could make an informed decision.” 

“We thought people didn’t fully understand what we were trying to do and that’s why so many people abstained. But it was encouraging, because that meant there were people who could still be swayed to what we thought was the best way forward,” Gibbs added. “But as we saw on Thursday, that wasn’t the case. Most of the votes broke against the state of emergency motion.”

Indeed, when StuCo hosted a second emergency meeting on Thursday evening, the same motion failed, as not enough students were in favor to reach the two-thirds threshold. The meeting was longer than the first and many more non-voting members of the school community were present. 

“I think we came at it knowing what we wanted the outcome to be, and that we needed to convince people of that. The meeting got fairly hostile very quickly, both for Exec and [the Elections Committee]. We were disappointed with both the outcome and the conduct of all the students involved. I think it could have been done a bit better,” Gibbs said.

Current Student Council President senior Siona Jain shared similar thoughts. “Even though it’s not going to change the election culture, I think co-presidency was ultimately the best option for a fair election,” she said. “​​I think Exeter should permanently move to co-presidency. I feel like ultimately you get more things done with co-leadership and you have more perspectives brought to important conversations.”

Joy said he was a bit surprised by the student Council’s vote, given the earlier support for co-presidents by the Exec Board, Elections Committee, and both candidates. 

“The consensus was that Tuesday’s election results would not be accurate and would not be a fair representation,” Joy said. “It’s also important to recognize that both council meetings saw this election as deeply problematic. It came down to what the best solution would be to address the unfair election, be it co-presidents, no presidents, that Principal Rawson intervenes, etcetera. For instance, to my knowledge, some students abstained or voted against co-presidents because they thought that Principal Rawson would be the best decision maker. A no vote for co-presidents was not equivalent to condoning the use of Tuesday’s results.”

Durawa talked about his thoughts regarding the meeting. “It’s nice to know that people feel so passionately about StuCo that they’re willing to come on a Thursday evening and share their opinions. I think we were confident that the option of co-presidents was the best way forward. But ultimately we’re accountable to the student representatives. And if students do not want us to go forward with something, it’s our job to listen to that,” Durawa said. 

“Usually, election disputes are resolved between StuCo Exec and Elections Committee coheads exclusively. In this case, the council was granted the power to recommend electoral matters as this instance of co-presidency involved declaring a state of emergency. It’s not really our place to completely go against what the student body is saying. We do value their opinions and we work towards a balance between respecting our high school democracy and our Academy values,” Gibbs said.

The current StuCo Exec and Elections Committee coheads did not involve Principal William Rawson while making the final decision for elections. According to an email on Feb. 18 sent on behalf of the Elections Committee, “in the absence of authority to take other action, the Elections Committee [coheads] learned the results from the advisers of Tuesday’s election to name the next Student Council president.” 

Rawson expressed his thoughts on this year’s election in an interview with The Exonian: “It is distressing that an election process that should bring students together as a community seemingly had the opposite effect, took several days to resolve, and left some feeling hurt and bruised.” Rawson charged the 2022-23 StuCo with “examining the culture of the election process and reforming it to align more closely with school values and more effectively ensure fairness of results.” 

“I would like to see an election process that is characterized by positive rather than negative campaigning, much like the way in which this year’s two candidates spoke at the debate, and where all concerned parties have confidence that the election process was conducted fairly. Reforms should be aimed at ensuring the fairness of the election process as well as avoiding negative behavior,” Rawson added.

Dean of Students Russell Weatherspoon agreed. “What I assume that StuCo will soon try to do is to lay out and investigate the kinds of things that people who participate in the election process do that are problematic or unfair,” Weatherspoon said. “The email that StuCo Elections sent, for instance, as I understand it, says that a candidate is responsible for everything that a supporter says. This was included presumably in response to issues StuCo has witnessed in past years. It would be interesting to see how StuCo addresses this.”

Weatherspoon added that informed and respectful conversations among the general student body will be crucial in the process of identifying the issues in election culture. “Some students of color, for instance, have commented that there is an expectation that when they run for a role like this, they can pretty much expect that certain remarks will be made, that it’s just part of the terrain. If that’s true, that’s something we want to change,” Weatherspoon added.

Jain, who also experienced negativity during her election campaign, agreed that the elections process is in need of reform and was happy the candidate came forward, which started conversations with advisors and in council for a solution. The situation was brought to Bramlett and Hernandez as well. 

Murat detailed the action that has been taken by Exec so far: “What the current executive board is doing [is that] they met with Dr. Bramlett and Dean Hernandez on how we can sort of start going about this conversation,” she said. “Personally I would like to hear lots of different opinions, not only from me, but from council in general to kind of go forth with what policies we want to put in place. I think that starting off, we need to be more clear on what campaigning rules are and like what is allowed and not allowed because so a lot of the things are vague.”

“I think that people need to understand, and obviously as soon as I go in and there’s a change of board, we’re gonna set the tone that racism on campus is not gonna be tolerated by no standard whatsoever. And that should have already been how Exeter should function. But sadly that’s not the case. When you go into elections, you kind of go in thinking that you’re gonna hear a lot of bad things said about you and all that, and I think that we need to change that rhetoric,” Murat continued. “Hopefully this won’t happen in the future, but let’s say next election, there was another racially charged post against a candidate, that post [should] be reported immediately to student council and elections committee. And, obviously we’re going to start working on policies to put in place on how we respond to these concerns that arise and how we respond to these posts, so that way candidates don’t have to feel like they’re going into this and they’re going to have their identity attacked.”

At the moment, Murat doesn’t have a specific policy in mind. “I think this will have to be a team effort, and we are going to have to have a lot of people come in from outside to help us figure this out,” she added.

Durawa and Gibbs believe that their continued work in constitutional reform will support Rawson’s vision. Among the many structural changes the revised StuCo Constitution would enact, the constitutional focus group led by Durawa and Gibbs considered “eliminating the presidential runoff election to eliminate the one-on-one tension and negative campaign that comes from support of one candidate over another,” Gibbs said. 

“I think by now everyone recognizes there are serious problems with how we structure elections and how election decisions are reached. With that in the public eye, StuCo will definitely invest more time and attention to constitutional reform,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs also highlighted the importance of faculty advisors in this work: “Advisors carry with them institutional memory and an adult perspective, which are crucial to having these conversations about election processes,” he said.

Students who attended the emergency meetings shared differing views on the co-presidency solution and the ultimate choice of adopting the Tuesday runoff vote. 

Senior class president Bona Yoo, a StuCo presidential runoff candidate last year, expressed that she was unsettled by some of the sentiments voiced in the two StuCo emergency meetings. Speaking about the second of the two meetings, Yoo said, “It got ugly. Fast. And I think people’s emotions were high. I think people were very scared of something like the last election happening again, where the toxicity became very overwhelming.”

Jain also commented on what was said at the meeting: “I’m honestly quite a bit disappointed in the remarks made at council, those being that this is not going to do anything to fix racism and therefore we shouldn’t take this step,” she continued. “I disagree with that because I think that in general, if you were gonna make a candidate feel more included and feel as though they have a fair election experience, that effort is something that we should take, even if it won’t ultimately fix the election culture. I know that during my election, my opponent and I proposed co-presidency because of how toxic the election experience was for the both of us. It was shot down for constitutional reasons last year, but this year we had a ‘State of Emergency’ amendment that could make co-presidency possible. I’m disappointed that Council didn’t vote in favor of co-presidency.”

The Instagram story, characterized as an attack on personhood by Joy, was not endorsed or made on behalf of either runoff candidate.

Senior Daniel Zhang felt that the conversation at the Thursday emergency meeting failed to consider the nuances of how an attack on personhood affects different students of color at the Academy. “The main reason why I went to StuCo was in order to make points about the attack on personhood and how we as a community should respond to attacks on personhood. The only thing that I wanted to advance was that this attack on personhood on the candidate was not exceptional. It happens all the time—in casual dining hall conversations, dorm talks, in our subconscious—that the candidate in question was somehow less authentically committed. And therefore treating what happened with the Instagram story as an exceptional event is disingenuous,” Zhang said, noting his satisfaction with the final election decision.

“I was of the impression that many students believed the decision to move forward with co-presidents was a moral decision that demonstrated empathy to the candidates. While I wholeheartedly agree that our first priority in deciding this matter should be respect for what the candidates are experiencing and grave attention to the attack on personhood, I feel that, as an Asian identifying student, the question of positionality was ignored by various StuCo members,” Zhang said. 

“Every student of color has a different and deeply personal relationship with attacks on personhood. This is a natural consequence of belonging to a diverse community. I was upset by the categorical language used to describe some Asian students in that room, who not only deeply empathize with what the candidates were going through, but have experienced the exact same thing the candidate was going through,” Zhang added. “To hear that people describe Asian students [who care about and understand what the candidate is going through but are not in favor of co-presidency as the immediate solution] as ignoring the attack on personhood seems to trivialize or ignore their personal experiences and seems to refuse to accept that a student can very fully recognize the impact of the attack in question and still advocate for a solution other than co-presidency.”

Yoo shared her thoughts on this year’s election process overall. “There’s still a trend that we’re seeing that people don’t really hesitate to make evaluative comments on candidates or their character on social media. And that gets demoralizing for both candidates,” she said. Yoo believes that people should carefully consider their words before criticizing candidates, as sometimes, she said, “we forget that, at the end of the day, we’re high schoolers.” 

“Last year we had an ugly election, and Student Council and the Executive Board made a promise to sit down and have a conversation to see what constructive changes could be made to the election process itself. But I don’t think we’ve done that yet,” Yoo said. “For next year we really need to sit down and come up with actual rules or courses of action that can be applicable to situations like these, in hopes of avoiding them.”

On Monday, Feb. 21, an anonymous “Concerned Student” started a petition named “DEI Action at Exeter” on Change.org. The petition calls for a correction of the election outcomes, an appointment of co-presidents by Principal Rawson, and more “attention to injustice across campus.” As of Feb. 23, the petition has accrued 76 anonymous student signatures. Joy shared that he did not start the petition, but knows the student who did. 

“It was another student who was just really concerned about the proceedings, who recognized that [Laura] Marshall’s email on behalf of the Elections Committee made clear that results were unfair, that this election shed light on an issue bigger than the elections itself,” Joy said. “Something deeply problematic was said. The petition demonstrates the need for broader conversation, and there’s student support in that regard.”

“I think to determine whether something is fair or not, the context must be examined,” Joy spoke on the proposition for co-presidency. “A deeply problematic social media post that accessed hundreds of students was made, and it fed into an unfortunately widely held anti-Asian stereotype. It’s not the type of rhetoric that’s taught to be rejected. It’s the type that’s very easily internalized and could have influenced votes,” Joy said. 

When asked how he would approach resolving the long-term issue of election culture, Joy mentioned the need for action, saying, “It starts with having serious campus wide conversations surrounding Anti-Asian stereotyping, and stereotyping against any group for that matter, and we must go from there.” 

“Since that Instagram story has moved through the community, I’ve witnessed the tangible and intangible ways in which it’s damaged me when I see how others take the story and talk about it. At a school which deeply values equity and inclusion, we have the tools to rectify the situation — at least partially. And it’s important that we do so,” Joy said.