This past Wednesday, University Senator Sean Ryan, CC ’17, changed his Facebook profile picture to the publicity photo of an underclassman running for CCSC (see first image below). Although he changed his profile picture back, the initial change was a direct show of openly campaigning for a student running for student council. Campaigning by students who currently hold positions in student government is against the Columbia Elections Board rules, including Facebook endorsements. When prompted to clarify, CEB stated in an email that there had been an issue regarding endorsements by current council members during a recent GSSC election. A ruling was made then that no current sitting member of the council is allowed to endorse a candidate, the logic being it is impossible to separate the individual from the position. In order to prevent such an issue from occurring again, the same ruling will apply to CCSC elections. According to CEB, the only way for an individual sitting on the class council to endorse a candidate would be for that individual to resign from the council position first.

We have reached out to Sean Ryan and the CEB for comment, and will update this post as we get more developments.

Screenshot of Sean Ryan’s profile picture change taken on Thursday

Section of the CEB constitution on current council members and campaigning

Email response from CEB