It is not often you see two students readily undermine everything they and their organizations have accomplished in four years in less than two weeks. Instead of relishing in the honor of helping resurrect our two student-run residential organizations, these two student leaders’ legacies are now tarnished by fraud, harassment and abuse of power.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Residence Halls Association (RHA) and National Residence Hall Honorary (NRHH), two student organizations under Residential Education (ResEd), worked hard to rebuild themselves by hosting community events and advocating for students living on campus.
Their accomplishments included hosting the University of California, Riverside’s (UCR) first Regional Leadership Conference in over 20 years, recruiting students to perform community service and creating other memorable ResEd programs. It was not surprising that UCR’s RHA and NRHH won Regional Building Blocks in 2023 and 2025, an award given to the most improved RHA and NRHH, under the Pacific Affiliate of College University Residence Halls (PACURH) — the regional organization overseeing RHA and NRHH.
All that changed in March 2025, however. Before this, Student Leadership — made up of RHA, NRHH and Campus Apartments Resident Association (CARA) — was made aware of an incoming budget cut and voted to merge positions in the organizations to minimize the impact. In mid-March, ResEd and Housing Services revealed that the cut was severe, as the total budget went from $200,000 to $35,000 due to low funds. Because of the alleged short notice and poor communication, Student Leadership was outraged.
The Presidents of RHA and NRHH of the 2024-2025 academic year worked to convince their respective cabinets to fight the cuts. However, instead of transparency or using more acceptable tactics, they twisted words and deceived their cabinets to believe that ResEd was making the cabinet applicants “homeless” and were “unwilling to communicate.”
In reality, it is actually the RHA President’s fault if their members have no housing. Instead of warning their members to apply for housing when the portal opened, so they would have a backup plan if they were not elected, the President of RHA assured them that he would get them elected by any means.
To fix his mistakes, the RHA President chose to focus on ResEd’s missteps rather than his own. However, his claims of homeless members were never proven, and most of the members had secured ResEd staff positions and assigned housing. To further push the lie, the RHA President claimed he would also be homeless and would live in his HexHome prototype, a large school project he pitched for a new housing design. At this point, the RHA President had been re-elected and had guaranteed housing.
It gets worse. Although the presidents told the RHA and NRHH cabinets that they would create a referendum to work with ResEd for implementation, the referendum was actually a list of impossible demands that only helped the RHA president. One such demand was an additional meal plan for the RHA president, even though he had already been awarded 100 percent compensated housing next year (valued at almost $16,000). There was no mention of compensation for other positions in the referendum.
In fact, the NRHH and RHA presidents planned to drastically cut or provide no compensation for cabinets despite unchanged workloads. Instead of supporting their cabinets, the RHA president pitched to have his friend, the NRHH president, be awarded $18,000 of the alleged $35,000 budget.
This compensation was also contingent on the alleged plan that the RHA president would get the NRHH President re-elected by using RHA’s larger voting pool to outvote NRHH members in the merged election. Rather than splitting the $35,000 fairly across the three Student Leadership organizations, they essentially aimed to award a singular position more than half the budget.
Fed up, the NRHH cabinet voted to no longer merge with RHA. However, this didn’t stop the Presidents of RHA and NRHH. They started to become more forceful with their plans, creating a meeting on April 27, 2025 which purposefully excluded the entire NRHH cabinet — except the NRHH President — to announce that RHA and NRHH are now merged again, before proceeding with budget planning.
By this point, the presidents had explicitly overstepped their authority and violated the NRHH constitution, which requires the vote of the cabinet to authorize the merger. The NRHH cabinet then moved to impeach their president in a hearing scheduled on May 5, 2025.
Instead of redeeming themselves, the presidents dug themselves into a deeper hole. In less than 24 hours, they contacted many non-NRHH affiliated students to forge documents for invalid NRHH memberships to help acquit the NRHH President. The presidents, along with the recruited students, then committed numerous offenses, including pushing for invalid membership inductions, fraudulent Of-The-Month submissions (OTMs) and forged community service hours.
The NRHH President conducted inductions outside the constitutionally required banquet timeline and without the approval of the NRHH cabinet. These false inductees never attended any NRHH meetings and wanted to join five weeks before the end of the academic year. Coincidentally, this was a couple of days before the president’s impeachment hearing.
Another offense was the fake OTMs, which are award nominations to recognize a person, organization or program for their service. Members are required to submit a minimum of three OTMs to be inducted. It is estimated that over 30 OTMs were used for these invalid inductions, where many impersonated others or allegedly used Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Many of these OTMs included false information, such as non-existent programs or mentioning responsibilities cabinet members did not have, like repairing HVACs. All these submitted documents are publicly available to every school in PACURH and the National Association of College University Residence Halls (NACURH), which oversees PACURH.
Lastly, hours of community service were faked and submitted to NRHH to prove eligibility of these incoming members, as 15 hours of community service must be completed before being inducted.
Overall, the student conduct violations by the two presidents and everyone helping them include: Standards of Conduct 102.02 Dishonesty for the fake OTMs and community service and Standards of Conduct 102.28 for violation of California Penal Code 529 False impersonation to help the NRHH president keep their 100 percent discount ($1,697/month) and a free meal plan while potentially gaining the $18,000 compensation next year. However, with how fast new misconduct cases arise, we are unable to keep this list updated with everything the presidents have done.
All of this was to stop what was essentially inevitable: the NRHH President’s impeachment. If his impeachment was not justifiable, it would not have been easy to convince two-thirds of the voting members. The president’s inactivity in OTMs, community service, mandatory training and helping out at NRHH programs for the whole year was not the reason the cabinet was motivated to impeach him. It was the effort to suppress NRHH’s voice that was the final straw. Furthermore, these proven violations allowed for the NRHH President’s immediate termination by a legitimate cabinet vote.
Now, will RHA cabinet members follow suit and stop their president? This is not to say that the RHA President did not work hard, and accomplish things like the Jeremy Zucker concert and the HexHomes project. However, we challenge RHA cabinet members to fight against these attacks on student democracy. Their president was reportedly working on impeaching RHA cabinet members for suspected whistleblowing, which would terminate their rent compensation.
In addition, the RHA President allegedly planned to use all the friends, family and coworkers who helped out in the fraudulent documentation of memberships and OTMs as scapegoats, where they will face the brunt of the consequences for the RHA President’s ploys. As a student government that promotes student advocacy above all else, RHA should consider advocating for itself.
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