Associated Students of Portland State University President Harris Foster and a student government committee have begun filling executive staff positions amid concerns of cronyism within the hiring process.
ASPSU hiring process raises ethical questions
Associated Students of Portland State University President Harris Foster and a student government committee have begun filling executive staff positions amid concerns of cronyism within the hiring process.
The Vanguard spoke to several student government members who had complaints about the process but wished to remain anonymous.
“During the campaign [Foster] told certain people that they didn’t have to compete for their positions,” one student government member said. “It does raise ethical issues about cronyism.”
Foster was elected in May along with vice presidential running mate Yesenia Silva-Hernandez in a weakly contested campaign with only one challenger, James Au. Foster and Silva-Hernandez received 287 of the 569 votes cast.
Portland State’s enrollment sits at 29,703 for the 2012–13 school year. The 569 votes cast in the ASPSU election represent a *3 percent voter turnout, down from last year’s 9.3 percent turnout. The ASPSU constitution does not include any rules for the student government hiring process. According to Foster, he and his administration placed an emphasis on being open to scrutiny while interviewing for the positions.
“We wanted to have a more transparent process,” Foster said. Foster convened a hiring committee comprising Silva-Hernandez, former University Affairs Director Thomas Worth, former Legislative Affairs Director Dave Coburn and Oregon Student Association Campus Organizer for PSU Courtney Helstein.
“It was a deliberative process involving people that I…trust,” Foster said of the committee. The deadline for applications was May 22. For the staff positions, Foster and his hiring committee interviewed the applicants and then deliberated as a group, choosing what Foster said was the most qualified applicant for each. Executive cabinet positions required nominations and senate approval.
Discussing the applicant pool, Foster said, “I wanted to leave it up to the committee because some of the people were my friends, some of the people were Yesenia’s friends [and] some of the people were Tom’s friends. I wanted an objective voice.”
But several members of student government have alleged that Harris pledged future cabinet and staff positions to campaign aides well before the election.
“He promised positions to people before he was elected,” said a student government member. “He didn’t have the authority to appoint anyone yet.”
When asked whether he ever explicitly offered jobs to staffers before the election, Foster responded that “the only [person] I said that to was Donovan Powell. I said it jokingly, but I seriously considered him for the position.”
Foster said that he and Powell, whom Foster called a “good friend,” talked before the election, and that Foster encouraged Powell to apply for the publications director position. Powell was named the publications director after an interview process that included one other candidate; the publications director was one of several positions to which only two or three candidates applied.
“We knew right off the bat we wanted him,” Foster said. “[Powell] is the definition of the best publications advisor that ASPSU could have.”
Foster said that Powell’s competition for the publications director job lacked the critical computer programming experience that Powell had, making Powell the stronger candidate. Powell did not respond to the Vanguard’s requests for comment.
Ellie McConnell, ASPSU’s former student life director, added that ASPSU reached out to find more applicants for the open positions.
“We put up flyers and posted that we were hiring on Facebook,” McConnell said. Foster admitted that he weighed a campaign staff member’s contribution to the race when he sought applicants for vacant staff positions.
“When getting someone to run with you, you don’t promise them things—but when you have someone running with you, there’s a political thing,” Foster said. “They need to think they have some buy-in.”
It’s not unusual for a newly elected politician to reward the staff members and volunteers who helped put him or her in office, according to Butch Oxendine, the president of the American Student Government Association.
“Let’s just look at national, state [and] local elections,” he said. “The president of the U.S. picks his Cabinet. They’re ultimately approved [by Congress], but the president chooses people…Is that unethical? I don’t know.”
According to Oxendine, the question is not whether a student body president should be allowed to promise a friend a job but whether “student government is going to be just like it was in the past.”
The insular nature of the hiring process at Portland State may simply be symptomatic of the lack of interest in student government on campus.
“At public universities, the average turnout is 10 percent,” Oxendine said, referring to Portland State’s *3 percent turnout rate for last month’s election. Oxendine called the ASPSU election turnout “terrible.”
“It says that people outside of a select few don’t care,” Oxendine said. “If I’m the president, I want to try and open that up. I want to say, ‘Student government’s not just cronies, not just a clique of nerdy kids who all they do is run for office.’ No, you want to represent the student body.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated on June 5 to correct several titles of former student government members and the voter turnout percentage.
Hey I’m Dave Coburn and I want you to Know that on the publish date of this article i was not an ASPSU officer the current nominee for legislative affairs director is Eric Noll, please be sure that you attribute the right titles to the right people, I am a previous legislative affairs director, a previous chief justice, a previous justice, a previous senator and a previous intern. I am not currently an officer of ASPSU. Currently I am a senior political science major about to graduate. Also I miss the high quality writing of Allie Clark.
This ASPSU hiring process wasn’t any different from any other hiring process.
““It was a deliberative process involving people that I…trust””
This is not how we use ellipses. Learn to journalism.
If you want to write an article about potential ethical problems in ASPSU hiring process, fine–> there have been a plethora of problems in the past. But to discuss whether or not Donovan Powell was hired on the merits while omitting the fact that he was hired as Publications Director under two other ASPSU Presidential Administrations is completely irresponsible.
Hey I’m Donovan Powell, and I was a little dismayed to see this article only because I never received any type of communication from any Vanguard Staff in the ASPSU Pubs email, my personal email, nor by phone. I sincerely hope that whomever was responsible for getting in touch with me only tired to get a hold of me in person and couldn’t find me, or did not have the correct contact info. In any case, I’d like to echo the comments made by my colleagues. After being part of the team that created the position of Publications Director, I then held that position in the next two administrations. I am honored and elated to be holding the position for a third time. During the conversation that Harris refers to in which he jokingly commented in promising me a position, he also made it very clear to me that there were no 100% guarantees and made sure I understood that they [Harris and Yesenia] were using the same hiring process for every position.
Simultaneously, it is distressing to see hearsay be the primary evidence for an article concerning the ethics of a process for which everyone was hired. Yes it sucks that there is no process laid out for hiring. Instead, the focus should really be flipped on how ethical BOTH administrations tried to be by working together to create any sort of hiring process at all and aim for objectivity. Harris could’ve hired me on his first day of office without any process. Did he? No. Processes were created and then followed.
The fact that I’ve known and become friends with Harris since he started as an intern in ASPSU is also a moot point anyway, mainly because I’ve been friends with James Au since I first started in ASPSU as a Senator a year prior to meeting Harris.
And finally to address Oxendine, there are valid ethical questions to consider when it comes to campaign staff and the hiring that follows. But these arguments don’t apply to my hiring situation at all. I wasn’t a member of Harris’s Campaign Staff, nor was I a member of James’s Campaign Staff. It would’ve been fantastic to be a part of either campaign or both as I do love the process and the design work therein, except for that I came down with HMV and was hospitalized by the end of Winter Quarter with an enlarged spleen, thus unable to complete that quarter academically. I was in no position to even think about campaigns or elections until well after both campaigns were underway and I was once again in ASPSU.
I hope this clarifies any confusion on the matter. I wonder, were I to have been contacted and mentioned everything prior, if this article would’ve been written on cronyism at all? It just doesn’t make sense that one joke of flattery manifests into chaotic ethics, cronyism, and an ignorance of some good that was done in transitioning ASPSU. I hope we can work better at making sure more information is gathered before undue claims are made, I think it will save us all some time in the long run 🙂
My name is Eric Noll and I was recently hired by the Foster/Hernandez administration and confirmed by the Senate on June 7th. As an incoming member of the 2013-2014 Executive Cabinet and recently a candidate in the hiring process described in this article, I disagree with the accusations and intent of this article.
I applied for the position of Legislative Affairs Director as a student transferring to PSU this coming fall from Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon. I was no where close to being on the campaign staff for Harris and Yesenia and believe that the hiring process was conducted properly. No promises were made to me and I had not met Harris until I walked in for my interview on May 24th.
That being said, this article bases their assertions on conjecture from an anonymous source, not fact-based evidence. I will also echo what my colleagues wrote in the comments sections below the article.