On Wednesday and Thursday of next week, the Washington University student body will vote on who it wants to control Student Union for the next year.
In addition to choosing upcoming senators, voting on new constitutional amendments, and deciding which student groups will receive block funding, students will be able to vote for some of the most powerful student positions at the university.
Eleven students will be running for the four SU executive officer positions, including President, Vice President, Treasurer, and Secretary. All of the candidates are members of slates.
Listed alphabetically, the three slates in the election this semester are 1 Campus, True., and Voices. True. and Voices have candidates running for all four positions, and 1 Campus has three candidates running for President, Vice President, and Treasurer. In several press releases sent to Student Life, each slate emphasized the experience of their candidates and their specific concerns for the upcoming school year.
1 Campus
1 Campus includes presidential candidate Corey Harris, a senior, and Ben Smilowitz and Geoff Daush, a sophomore and a freshman running for Vice President and Treasurer respectively.
The slate emphasizes improving communication as one of its primary goals. In particular, it wants to increase communication between the various branches of SU. The group also wants to focus on increasing student awareness of SU activities and resources, as well as to efficiently address student complaints and concerns.
One such method for providing communication would be a Student Union e-mail list. Currently, the administration does not allow any one group, even SU, access to the e-mail addresses of the entire student body. 1 Campus hopes to get access to all students’ e-mail addresses, so that it can send students information regarding important SU activities and decisions.
Another promise of the slate’s platform is to provide students with notification of the application periods of student committees on campus, as well as information on the decisions made by these committees. This effort is made in an attempt to provide better student representation in administrative decisions.
“Mainly on the agenda is to try as much as possible to make Student Union representative,” said Harris. “I know particularly in the last two semesters a lot of issues have come up concerning university-wide decisions that have been made on essentially sub-committees of the student community. [We want to] make sure that whatever decisions are made there are actually representative decisions, and I think that one way to do that is to make sure that Student Union itself is involved in that decision making.”
True.
True. includes candidates Justin Ragner, Jason Green, Emily Reinhart, and Cindy Chang.
The group places some of its highest concern on fostering “a diverse environment in which students feel they have a vested interest in the success of [SU].”
“Student Union is becoming more visible, especially this year,” said Ragner. “Now that we’re visible, we want to take that to the next step and have students take a more active role in Student Union.”
True. also wants to increase communication at the university. As described in a list of goals prepared by the slate, it wants to increase the flow of information between student and the administration regarding campus concerns.
“We want to be involved in every step of the process and give students a chance to be involved in every step of the process,” says the slate’s platform.
The slate also wishes to improve student representation and to serve “as an accessible and visible resource to the campus community.”
“We feel that Student Union is visible, but we don’t want people to recognize Student Union as just a cash cow or a place to go make copies to advertise their events, but more as a resource, a source of advice and a way to bring a wide range of student groups together through co-sponsorships,” added Ragner.
Voices
Voices is made up of Reggie Binford, Yoni Cohen, Justin Friedlander, and Katherine Macarthur. They also place focus on increasing diversity, noting in particular a desire to increase diversity amongst the faculty.
As with other slates, Voices wishes to increase SU publicity to increase involvement, as well as to improve student representation through communication.
“The first thing that we want to do is increase the dialogue between the executives, the senate, and the student body specifically,” said Cohen. “A lot of the other things we want to do stem off that idea.”
The groups also expressed several desires on which other slates have not put as much focus.
One of the slate’s concerns is to increase the representation of those students who live off campus, through an organization that will represent such students much as CS40 represents those who live on-campus.
“We want to have an off-campus council which would be another government for off-campus students to express their concerns,” said Cohen. “The university has recognized the need to have a government on campus, through the CS40, but there has been no recognition for specifically off campus.”
Binford also noted that, while such a group would not be limited to those students who live in the off-campus housing owned by WU, the group would still focus on ensuring that apartments owned by the university would be properly managed.
The group pointed to parental job connections as being another concern, hoping to increase resources for students around the St. Louis area, so more graduating seniors will have opportunities in the surrounding area.