Web MasterOn the basis of interviews conducted Sunday, the Student Life editorial board endorses the following Student Union Executive Council candidates: Justin Ranger, President; Yoni Cohen, Vice President; Emily Reinhart, Treasurer; and Cindy Chang, Secretary. This is the assemblage of candidates that will best integrate activism and expertise into a single SU Executive Council.
This endorsement represents the best Student Union Executive Council that could emerge from four individual elections. It comes from a perspective that sees SU executives as a unit, as opposed to a group of individuals. In this way, certain individual strengths become more important in certain positions.
There, are, however four individual executive elections on Wednesday; and when each race is viewed separately, choosing the best candidate becomes very difficult. Every candidate displayed strengths and weaknesses; it was the peculiar combinations of these that determined which candidates were most suitable.
It seems best to highlight these strengths and weaknesses by placing the candidates in dialogue with each other. This should also serve as a guide to what students should look for in their SU leaders next year.
The choice for President is easily reduced to two: Corey Harris and Justin Ragner. Reggie Binford did little to make clear that he would contribute anything to the position that Ragner or Harris could not.
Corey Harris exemplified the fiery activism that will be crucial next year in adding a new dimension to SU. Harris’ proposed approach, however, especially with regard to university administrators, is simply belligerent. This should worry voters. SU’s relationship with administrators will collapse if it is represented by an ideologue, and this will ironically subvert SU’s role in actively representing students’ interests.
Ragner, with an activist Vice President by his side, emerges as the best choice for President because of his calm grasp of the minutiae of the internal world of SU. His light conservatism reflects three years of trial-and-error experience in student government that will prove invaluable in a figurehead position next year. With Ragner, students at least know that SU will not fall apart, and the efficiency of its processes will improve.
And this is all students need in an SU President as long as Yoni Cohen is working alongside him. Cohen’s interview was by far the most impressive of all the candidates for all positions. He is indispensable next year in SU. He is a creative, freethinking activist who at the same time understands the value of sound processes and constitutional frameworks. His understanding of many facets of SU reflected both theoretical aptitude and detail-oriented sobriety.
Cohen showed that he will be able to work effectively under the president, while still taking initiative. This clearly distinguished him from Jason Green, who conceived of his role mostly in terms of receiving the directives of the president. Green’s realism about average students’ narrow interests, and his emphasis on the personal side of management should be emulated by whoever emerges as the next SU Vice President.
Like his presidential running mate Corey Harris and his treasurer running mate Geoff Daush, vice presidential candidate Ben Smilowitz doesn’t fit well at the top of an organization like SU and does not emerge as appropriate for his position. His breed of activism, like Harris’, works much better in a peripheral group that does not have so many other mundane responsibilities. And his only value lies in this activism. Smilowitz understands the benefits of leading by example and the role of awareness in promoting activism, but his style has a tragic twist: he works as an individual, and would likely alienate the people he is managing because he supposes that his example alone will make an organization function well.
Treasurer candidate Emily Reinhart, much like her presidential running mate Justin Ragner, proves the best choice for her position because of her easy familiarity with her position and the successes of this year’s treasurer. She would do well, however, to take a lesson from Justin Friedlander’s stress on looking at student groups’ futures as well as to their pasts, as well as his concern over how much SU spends on itself.
Secretarial candidate Katherine MacArthur’s G.W. Bush-like stress on working in SU from the perspective of “the outsider” in order to better integrate SU with the student body impressed the editorial board, but her unfamiliarity with a detailed approach to her work as secretary and her ignorance of the secretary’s role in activism precluded her as a viable candidate. While Cindy Chang should take the “outsider’ lesson from MacArthur and think harder about the secretary’s role in getting the opinions of the Executive Council into the community, her sound knowledge of the responsbilities of her position make her the best Secretarial candidate.
The editorial board, then, endorses the Ragner/Cohen/Reinhart/Chang team, but would like to emphasize the fact that what is most missing from SU right now is innovation and activism. All students should vote, and they should vote for the candidates that will most effectively work for their interest.