Board crisis at KASEUR

KASEUR, the umbrella organisation for multicultural student associations, is going through turbulent times. In 2017 the university announced it would no longer enter into any discussions with KASEUR, following its dissatisfaction with the manner of communication. That decision produced a crisis in the KASEUR board.

KASEUR represents the interests of aprroximately ten student associations, ranging from the ARIA-Afghan student association to the Surinamese SSA. Under normal circumstances there would be monthly meetings with the university’s Executive Board. But in May 2017 the Executive Board suspended these meetings, stating that the relationship with the foundation’s board “has been seriously damaged in recent years”.

This incident caused disquiet among the associations. They initially retained confidence in the KASEUR board under the chairmanship of student Germain Fraser, but that changed during a meeting between the associations and KASEUR about the crisis. In that meeting, the associations felt the board failed to respond adequately to questions about the crisis, causing the board to walk out of the meeting. This motivated the associations to withdraw their confidence in the board and to dismiss it.

But Fraser’s board was not prepared to accept this decision. According to Fraser it was an unlawful decision, as it was taken outside an official meeting. He states that he decided to keep the board in place while at the same time terminating the KASEUR membership of all the associations.

In the meantime, the associations appointed Stefan Peterfi, from the East European association EESA, as interim-chairman, leading to a situation with two competing boards.

While Fraser’s board continued to refuse to stand down, Peterfi began looking for new board members from November 2017. Meanwhile the associations also received confirmation from a civil-law notary and a lawyer that the dismissal of Fraser and other board members had been lawful.

It took some time before a completely new board could be found, and it was March 2018 before it took up office officially. It was headed by the former chairwoman of the Association of Students of African Heritage, Jennifer Onyenze. She hoped to start ‘with a clean slate’ and to repair the relationship with the university. But the old board refused to hand over the key to the boardroom, or to allow access to the bank accounts.

Onyenze wanted to reform KASEUR, giving more power to the associations, so that there could be no recurrence of last year’s soap opera.

However, there was an unexpected twist to the plot in July 2018: Onyenze’s board – which started so enthusiastically – decided to stand down. The stated reason was a lack of time to tackle all the grievance procedures which Fraser’s board had initiated. Fraser regained control as a consequence of the board’s resignation. Responding to the new situation, Fraser has stated he wants to repair both the relationship with the university and with the associations which he had dismissed. At the same time Onyenze says she has not given up and is hatching an alternative plan with her fellow board members.

In the summer of 2018, work is quietly being done on a successor to KASEUR. In September the Erasmus Multicultural Associations (EMA) finally saw the light of day. The university withdrew its formal recognition of KASEUR, and the ten KASEUR member associations all left and joined EMA.