ALANA Leadership Awards
This year marks the first ever ALANA Leadership Awards Ceremony. According to the event’s Facebook page, “The Inaugural ALANA Leadership Awards is designed to recognize contributions made by student leaders, organizations and staff all across campus.” The awards ceremony will take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday in the Aula.
Nominations for the Awards were due on Monday and were presented to Director of the ALANA Center Luz Bergos-Lopez. Any student involved in the ALANA Center or any of the race-affinity student organizations could be nominated. One award, the ALANA Distinguished Service Award, will be given only to a senior and a Vassar employee.
The awards ceremony will include a catered dinner and will feature keynote speaker Assistant General Counsel (Vice President) at Johnson & Johnson Tracy Elise Poole ‘82. The event is co-sponsored by several student organizations including MEChA and ASA.
VSA Elections
Elections for next year’s VSA began on Tuesday, April 15. Voting began at noon as was expected, according to an email released a day earlier by the Board of Elections. This also marked the time at which all campaigning for VSA positions by candidates had to end.
Voting closed 53 minutes later, after the Board of Elections circulated another email explaining that the voting system was experiencing technical difficulties.
At 1:40 pm, voting opened again after all previous votes had been cleared. Students who had already voted now had to re-enter their selections into the system.
According to an email from the Board of Elections, “The system was overloaded with write-ins from previous elections that were never cleared, which resulted [in] many candidates’ names and statements [not showing] up in the initial voting form. For this reason, we decided the only way to ensure a fair election would be to clear the system and begin again.”
—Noble Ingram, News Editor