Associate Student Government Parliamentarian Will Upton submitted his resignation in front of the ASG Senate on Wednesday evening. Although Upton, a Weinberg senior, cited personal reasons for his resignation, a recent e-mail sent out by ASG President Neal Sales-Griffin to ASG senators exposed deep disagreements present within the ASG executive board.
According to the e-mail, during a closed executive board meeting on Sunday, Sales-Griffin and Upton openly disagreed on emergency legislation in front of Senate. The proposal would have moved back the election of ASG clerk, parliamentarian and senate speaker from the first week of Spring Quarter to the third week, when the rest of the ASG executive elections take place.
During the Sunday meeting, the e-mail said, “there were threats made by our Parliamentarian, William Upton, to not let the legislation pass through the Rules Committee for the purpose of not allowing this legislation to pass in time for this year’s elections.”
Sales-Griffin also revealed in the e-mail that Upton was the author of the now-defunct blog ImpeachASG, which presented a mix of serious grievances and satirical predictions about the overthrow of the current ASG. Sales-Griffin called the blog an example of Upton’s “cloak and dagger tactics.”
In his resignation speech on Wednesday, Upton defended his opinion on the emergency legislation and expressed his disapproval of Sales-Griffin’s disclosure of information from a closed meeting.
“I resign from my position as parliamentarian not in disgrace but in disgust,” Upton said. “The manner of President Neal Sales-Griffin is unbecoming of a student government president. On several occasions this quarter, he has seen fit to drag issues out of the executive board, a closed committee, and spilled them onto the Senate floor. For him, all politics is personal.”
Upton also responded to the revelation of his authorship of the blog.
“I understand it might have struck a nerve among members of exec and other members within ASG,” he said. “Please understand that the content of this blog was a mix of what I saw as humorous satire and some pertinent points I felt should be voiced in some manner.”
But Upton denounced the disclosure of his involvement in ImpeachASG as a “political move” on Sales-Griffin’s part to discredit him.
“The tipping point was even before the e-mail went out last night. Originally I was planning on being very cordial in my resignation speech and actually speaking very fondly of Neal,” Upton said in an interview after his resignation. “Mostly it’s for personal reasons that I resigned, but after the e-mail that was sent out last night to the entirety of ASG Senate, I felt that at that point I had to defend myself.”
For Sales-Griffin, disclosing that information was part of “a warning shout-out for people considering compromising their integrity to move forward their own selfish endeavors.”
“We have to work for the students here, we can’t be subject to any of these games,” Sales-Griffin added.
Beyond his personal issues and complaints about the way Sales-Griffin handled their recent disagreements, Upton denounced in his resignation speech a “tyranny of the majority” and a “vitriolic backlash against the dissent” within the organization’s executive board.
But Upton called the almost four years he spent as part of ASG “some of the best [time] in my life,” and said his divergence with Sales-Griffin didn’t necessarily mean he disapproved of everything the current administration had done.
“In all honesty, with as much gripe I had with Neal, I’d say it’s definitely progressed at this point in time,” he said. “I don’t know yet whether or not Neal has helped the organization, but let me tell you, I don’t believe he has hurt it.”