Tension at the end of a tumultuous year for Binghamton University’s student government led to an argument that campus police were dispatched to investigate late last night.
Nearly four hours into a weekly Assembly meeting, three members of the Assembly and two Student Association executive board members moved outside a meeting room in the University Union and entered into an argument that four of the five involved said also included physical contact and racial slurs.
Binghamton’s New York State University Police responded after receiving a disorderly conduct call at 11:44 p.m. Monday from a 63-year-old female whom police believe is a University employee. No arrests were made and the case is closed, police said today.
An election for next year’s Assembly chair and a dragging, hot environment led to the argument. The meeting, which began at 8 p.m. and was held in University Union Room 252, was moving slower than usual by the time Assembly rep Elahd Bar-Shai was elected chair for the 2009-10 school year over incumbent Josh Berk, 14 votes to 11. Andrew Leavy received one vote.
Outside the meeting, witnesses said a screaming match quickly escalated in about a five-minute span that left one person involved kicking a wall in frustration.
Rod Alzmann, Yadin Herzel and Mike Lombardi, who are Assembly reps, and Aaron Butler and Alice Liou, the SA’s vice president for programming and finance respectively, offered different pictures of the incident but all said that they were involved in it along with Assembly rep Mike Lombardi. Pipe Dream was unable to reach Lombardi by the time of print.
The supporters broke into two camps over support of Bar-Shai: Alzmann, Herzel and Lombardi who favored him; Butler and Liou, who were in opposition.
After the vote, Bar-Shai supporters said they left the room. Their absences dropped the Assembly below quorum, Berk said, and prevented further business from being conducted.
Butler, who is a friend of Berk’s, went outside to tell the reps to rejoin the meeting because he said he wanted it to proceed.
Herzel said that the vital part of the meeting to him was the election.
“We finished what was important and it was getting pretty late,” Herzel said. “We wanted to go for awhile but we wanted the chair election to be over.”
Both camps blamed the other for physical contact during the argument. Bar-Shai’s camp accused Liou of calling Lombardi “whitey.” Liou couldn’t be reached for further comment.
All four participants in the argument who spoke to Pipe Dream said that Lombardi told Liou, who is Asian-American, to “go eat a dog.”
After the meeting, SA President Matt Landau said that the publication Bar-Shai’s camp shares ties with, the Binghamton Review, was to blame.
Review Editor in Chief Adam Shamah, an Assembly rep who was not involved in the altercation, said that although Alzmann, Lombardi and Yerzel share a similar ideology with the conservative monthly he runs, and have contributed to the paper, the Review was not to blame.