Student Senate officially announced the resignation of Liaison Eliza Diop, College junior and senior class vice president-elect, on Sunday after weeks of investigation and discussion regarding a series of unprecedentedly high pay periods for the two-time senator. Following an audit of all senator timecards conducted by the Office of the Student Treasurer, Senate has requested that Diop return the funds for inappropriately billed hours for which she has already received compensation, amounting to $700.

Diop, who served as senate secretary last year and assumed her position as liaison at the beginning of this semester, maintains that her timecard discrepancies are the result of ambiguous guidelines regarding which activities are billable under the Senate bylaws.

The audit by OST revealed that Diop filed 126.5 hours deemed illegitimate from this semester alone. In the process of auditing the timecards, Senate and OST also discovered that Diop had made edits to old timecard records, cutting out hours from the official record for which she had already received compensation.

Though Diop has characterized the ambiguity relating to billable activities as a “systemic problem” within Senate payroll, the audit revealed that the next highest number of inappropriately billed hours was seven from Senior Tani Colbert-Sangree.

Jeremiah Hays, College senior, has worked for OST for three years as the office assistant. His duties include transferring student senator timecards from electronic to physical form and walking them to the payroll office. Though his official duties do not involve examining the timecards to ensure their validity, Hays said he has twice raised a “red flag” regarding what he perceived to be unreasonably high numbers of timecard hours. Both instances, he said, occurred this semester on Diop’s timecard.

Diop said that her understanding of billable activities under Student Senate bylaws was largely informed by conversations she had with previous senators when she joined Senate last year.

“Even this semester, up until two weeks ago when the first timecard was looked at, I’d been billing the same types of hours,” said Diop. “I was never asked about it up until when the treasurer decided to do [his] job, and then the issue came out and it exploded into something that I think could’ve been caught even last year.”

Diop justified her exceptionally high number of reported hours during this period by referencing her work in response to bias-incidents and events on March 4.

“A lot of the work that I did was just in relation to the bias events, in terms of working with the working groups, writing the list of demands with a lot of student organizations and working on a solidarity event for next year,” Diop said. “And those are all seen as not technically Senate business, which, according to the wording in our bylaws, can be seen, but according to working as liaison to the Student Senate, that was just something that I put in line as my job.”

Hays said that although the Honor Code by which senators report their hours might be abused at times, this incident was exceptional.

“In the [self-reporting hours] system, … I assume there’s slight exaggeration on the part of senators, but this was the most blatant exaggeration that I had ever seen and it was every pay period,” Hays said.

A.D. Hogan, former Student Senate liaison and current senior class president, said that the issue regarding payroll is individual rather than systemic.

“She’s saying that this is a systemic issue with Student Senate and it’s just not. … She’s blaming it all on the system and the fact that someone didn’t check her sooner,” said Hogan. “For me, ignorance is never an excuse as liaison and you can’t be an ignorant leader of something.”

That notwithstanding, Senate’s letter to the Review in last week’s issue framed the compensation issues as a systemic problem; additionally, in Senate plenary minutes, Senator Sara Vaadia, College sophomore, took a similar stance, noting that the bylaws were indeed vague.

As a response to these concerns, Senate formed a Compensation Task Force, comprised of Vaadia, Condon, Diop and other Senators. After reviewing the bylaws, the Task Force determined that the bylaws were, in fact, clear in their message.

“Initially, I thought that the bylaws were a little vague, but when we examined them more closely in the Compensation Task Force, I realized that they weren’t vague. We didn’t really make any changes to that section of the bylaws,” Condon said.

Diop holds that the situation regarding her hours could have been avoided had OST addressed the problem with her sooner.

“I started out as a senator last year, and at that time my understanding of the bylaws were that for things like compensation, I could be paid for the work that I was doing that was closely in line with my platform, which at that time was working with specific student groups and getting their agendas pulled through with the administration, helping them navigate the system more in terms of getting more things done,” Diop said.

“So all of that year, I put things like that on my timecard. … And I was never put into question by any of that. That’s why I remained under the same understanding.”

After reviewing Diop’s first timecard, which reported 74.5 hours for a single two-week pay period, Hays spoke with student treasurer James Foust, senate operations manager Steven Bii and senate treasurer Peter Arden in order to address the issue.

“The first pay period of this semester, [Diop] booked over 70 hours, which is the highest I’ve ever seen. I was in the office with James and … we talked about it,” Hays said. “We decided that, as [it was] the first timecard of the semester, and that there were pretty unique circumstances [involving bias incidents], we let it be,” Hays said.

Foust said that he was also in support of waiting to address the issue.

“March 4 was the Monday that was the second week of this pay period; on March 4 I believe she had billed 17 hours for that day, and on the ensuing days just lots and lots of hours for the student coalition working group and things like that, which, are probably not something she should be billing for or getting paid for, but at the time and in the moment, I thought that it wasn’t my place, and it wasn’t the right [time] to challenge her or try to call into question the work she was doing,” Foust said.

Foust admitted that in retrospect, he wishes he had spoken to Diop sooner. Nevertheless, Diop’s subsequent timecards continued to include unusually high hours, including a timecard for 65 hours for one pay period — including 50 hours in a single week. But it was not until she submitted a timecard reporting 77.5 hours that Arden and Bii approached Foust to discuss the issue. Foust subsequently halted payment and decided to speak directly with Diop concerning her timecards.

According to the Office of the Student Treasurer, former Student Senate liaison College senior Ilyssa Meyer averaged a little under 16.5 hours per pay period during the spring of last year, while Hogan averaged 26.3 per pay period.

Bii then sat down with senators in order to clarify the activities that were billable under Student Senate bylaws.

While Diop claims that the student treasurer failed to inform her of the timecard discrepancies before the issue “exploded,” Foust said that he gave her a number of opportunities throughout the process to resolve the payment discrepancies, but was unsuccessful in convincing Diop to lower her billed hours.

In the April 21 Senate plenary minutes, Arden addressed senators directly regarding Diop’s hours and his efforts to resolve the issue with her.

“You have to obey the bylaws, especially if you have been reminded. We talked to Eli, came to Senate and talked about this, and then we agreed that some of what you had been paid for was not part of Senate work,” Arden said. “You then refused to remove the inappropriate billings. Exaggeration of hours is not a misunderstanding; students pay us with their money. We need to be accountable.”

Intra-senate e-mails and plenary minutes, made public by Senate on its website earlier this week, revealed that some senators saw Diop’s role within compensation reform discussions as “obstructionist.”

According to the plenary minutes, College senior Charlotte Landes, senator and SFC co-chair, confronted Diop on her claim that she was not made aware of her timecard discrepancies before it was brought to the senate floor.

“[You were] approached about trying to find out what you should and should not have been paid for and then subtracting what was inappropriate. You rejected that. You seemed to think that everything you’d been paid for was approved by the bylaws and required compensation,” Landes said.

“If this was all a big misunderstanding, why can’t we find a solution that is fair and equitable? We’re not trying to remove you, we’re trying to figure out a way to fix this, but there’s been a lot of resistance from you which seems to indicate that this is not a misunderstanding.”

Foust reiterated that Diop’s actions have made it increasingly difficult to view the timecard discrepancies as a result of confusion on the rules.

“At first I really, truly believed that it was just a huge misunderstanding because I’ve worked a lot with Eli and she’s does great work,” Foust said. “But then you look at a timecard with someone billing 50 hours for a week and you look at the way that she has put up roadblocks to trying to reform the compensation, and argued vehemently that we should not go back and look at everyone’s timecards… that we should [not] be auditing or trying to identify what hours were overbilled — taking all of that in sum makes it difficult, at least for me, to rationalize why she would’ve behaved that way if it was a pure misunderstanding.”

Hays added, “I think the only way you could see it as a pure misunderstanding is if you hadn’t seen the timecards yourself.”

Immediately after submitting her resignation letter, Diop sent an e-mail to OST on Sunday in which she requested to be paid for the final pay period, stating, “Since I am not on Senate anymore, and the proposal that will be voted on will not apply to me, I wanted clarify that I will be paid for the last time card of my pay period, which would be today.”

This elicited a negative responses from Foust, who responded by saying, “The proposal to deduct hours determined to be illegitimate was passed prior to the announcement of your resignation. … Frankly, I’m disturbed that you would try to exploit a (dubious) procedural technicality in order to receive additional payment from the student body.”

Senate emails contain a number of conversations of a relatively combative nature — the result, according to Diop, of senators letting their emotions influence a process that should be regarded as strictly procedural.

“When my legitimacy was put into question, … that made me very uncomfortable,” she said. “Because I felt like that was moving the conversation from, in my mind, what the conversation actually was to how people were perceiving it to be. … It had a sharp and damaging effect on senator conduct,” she said.

Others involved, including senators and members of OST, have repeatedly stated that the issue was never intended as a personal attack on Diop, and that they respect and appreciate the work she does as an organizer.

“What I would like to see is you accept your fate. Apologize. Stop obstructing productive discussions and get back to doing the good work you have been and will do in your career at Oberlin and beyond,” Colbert-Sangree wrote at the end of a particularly contentious e-mail thread between himself, Diop and other senators.

According to Hogan — who spoke with Diop prior to her resignation — and current student senators, Diop was to be censured and her seat as a student senator was to be put to a vote prior to her resignation and aside from her timecard discrepancies as a result of her letter to the editor in last week’s issue of the Review. Student Senate bylaws explicitly prohibit Diop from speaking on behalf of Senate or from her position as Student Senate liaison without the express consent of the greater Senate body.

“I felt it was necessary for the liaison to resign because of the letter that she wrote to the Review and how it was so clearly a breach of bylaws,” Hogan said. “Regardless of the hours, she actually would’ve been censured for that.”

In an effort to prevent a similar circumstance from arising in the future, Student Senate has approved changes to their bylaws, capping the number of billable hours per pay period at 40, with compensation for additional hours at the discretion of the larger Senate body.

Colbert-Sangree, Foust and Senator Tim Patch, College senior, will join Senator Brandt Rental, College junior, in refusing payment for the last pay-period of the year in response to this oversight. Other members of Senate are considering foregoing payment, according to individual capability.