Boston University Student Government Senate Chair Stephen Chang and Judicial Commissioner Louis Vitti both resigned from their positions Friday, writing in separate statements addressed to the student body on the SG website.
Chang said he is resigning due to the distribution of “offensive” posts from an archive of his blog, which he described as “written in anger,” and that he “never thought … would be made public.” The blog posts, published between January and February 2014, were shared by a Twitter user @BUSenateDiscrim on Thursday night, in response to two SG Executive Board members’ removal from office Monday.
“Resignation is the best path forward for myself, and the student body. What I wrote was wrong,” Chang wrote in the statement.
Chang, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been involved in SG since 2012 when he started as a judicial commissioner. He was initially elected Senate Chair in the fall of 2014 when former chair Tyler Fields, a senior in CAS, stepped down from office due to his plans to study abroad the following semester. Chang was then elected for the second time as Senate Chair in Spring 2015 and has continued serving the position until now.
“I would like to say that I do not believe the things I said during this period of my life,” he wrote in the statement. “I apologize for what I wrote and the terms I used. I understand how offensive those terms could be.”
Senate voted to remove Vice President of Finance Kimberly Barzola and VP of Internal Affairs Marwa Sayed from office Monday following an impeachment trial due to failure to fulfill their constitutionally mandated tasks.
Vitti, a junior in the Questrom School of Business, said he is resigning as current issues within SG following the impeachment of two Executive Board members had added “a lot of work,” making him unable to “handle the current situation properly because of time constraints,” he said in the statement.
Vitti added the situation “must be handled by someone who has the time and means to do so.”
Vitti also wrote his resignation was due to “very personal issues” regarding to his mother’s health condition and that he would like to spend his “little extra time” reflecting and praying.