Each year during Student Association elections, candidates are keen to single out campus concerns, but proposed solutions fail to account for current reform already happening. The Hatchet fact-checked the platforms for candidates running for the SA presidential and executive vice presidential spots and found that some proposals are outdated, some are out-of-touch and some are just wrong.
Student organizations
A hot topic this election season has been a potential reform of the SA’s finances and funding procedures. All eight candidates expressed in their platforms frustration with the inefficiency of the current system.
Presidential candidates Jeremy Iloulian, Will Thompson and Benjamin Pincus are calling for changes to the current student organization funding process, which was revamped this year to give groups greater leeway in their budgets.
While Iloulian and Thompson suggested hiring student staff to focus on speeding up the reimbursement of student organizations’ out-of-pocket expenses, Pincus wants each campus group – there are more than 400 groups – to receive more detailed explanations about their funding
allotment from the SA Finance Committee, which would further lengthen the process.
The ability to streamline the backlogged financial process may be out of the SA’s reach, Associate Dean of Students Tim Miller said. Incomplete and incorrect forms filled out by student organizations cause delays, he said, adding that the necessity of original receipts and signatures prevents the process from fully digitizing and becoming faster.
The University’s student organizations “create a large number of expenditure forms throughout the year,” Miller said. “There is one person in the SA that must approve all of these expenditures and check all of the paperwork submitted by students.”
That one person is Nupur Moondra, the SA vice president of financial affairs. Moondra declined to comment on specific candidates’ platforms.
Presidential contenders Ashwin Narla and Iloulian want graduate students to have more freedom running events with alcohol. Iloulian called for a lower ratio of mandatory Responsible Alcohol Management-certified sober monitors to attendees at events with alcohol – proposing a 40-to-one ratio instead of the current 20-to-one. This fall, law students already tested a new policy requiring one RAM-trained person to 50 attendees, as part of the University’s broad reassessment of graduate student alcohol policies.
All three executive vice president candidates – Ben Leighton, Austin Brewster and Abby Bergren – focused in their platforms on the campus disconnect between undergraduate and graduate student populations, in addition to the historically detached relationship between graduate groups and the SA. The candidates said they want to offer more events appealing to graduate students, with Bergren citing this year’s SA-coordinated beer garden at Fall Fest as an example.
Brewster said he would encourage student organizations that are similar across class levels to learn about each other so they can collaborate on programming.
“Events that will appeal to both groups will get them involved and interacting with one another,” Brewster said.
The SA has been criticized in the past for stepping into programming territory, like Executive Vice President Ted Costigan’s work on the GW Speaker Series and former SA President Vishal Aswani’s coordination of the Unity Ball in 2008.
Leighton also wants GW’s student organizations to collaborate on programming to host “loud, more effective events.” He is a few months behind in this call to action, as Dean of Students Peter Konwerski and Miller announced in September that the University would be pushing groups to partner up on events this year.
Opportunities outside the classroom
Three of the candidates raised academic-related concerns, including the availability of tutoring support and research grants for undergraduates.
Narla proposed the creation of a center for educational support, “to offer tutoring and research services, an archive for scholarships, as well as a site for monthly talks where professors give lectures on a broad range of topics” – all services that already exist on campus.
Through programs like the GW Tutoring Initiative, the Language Center, the Writing Center, Ask a Librarian and Eckles’ range of resources, students can access tutoring, research and writing help – and, in most cases, at no cost.
Thompson’s platform calls for an expanded number of research grants and fellowships to be awarded to students, claiming that only two programs – the Luther Rice and the George Gamow Fellowships – exist.
The Center for Undergraduate Fellowships and Research’s website displays 29 grant opportunities as well as hundreds of fellowships that are awarded University-wide and on the national level.
Paul Hoyt-O’Connor, director of the center, estimates that GW’s three primary internal grant programs – the Rice, Gamow and the Provost’s Undergraduate Research Fellowships – have awarded more than $190,000 in their history, and school-based and department-based research grants have reached more than $500,000.
Brewster proposed an online community service network that would allow students to continue volunteering over the summer. On GW’s existing Volunteer Match website, which is run by the Office of Community Service, students can search by zip code to find service opportunities from “community partners” hand-picked by University staff.
Campus safety and security
John Bennett said he would create a “triage” system that assigns priorities to 4-RIDE passengers to encourage proper use of a service intended for emergency situations.
“In theory, the triage method is a good idea, but practically speaking I don’t believe it can be effectively implemented,” Senior Associate Vice President for Safety and Security Darrell Darnell said.
Darnell warned that it would hold up calls and delay drivers from picking up other students. He added that “triage” would not be compatible with the 4-RIDE’s new online dispatching system.
“And quite frankly, we have no way of verifying if a person really does have a priority need for pick-up,” Darnell said.
Thompson wants to call attention to pedestrian safety – an issue that has already been targeted by the SA this year. He proposed adding speed bumps at 21st and H streets, a heavy-traffic intersection near Gelman Library.
Sen. Danica Brown, U-At Large, has met with GW safety officials to talk about this issue. Earlier this semester, they applied for a D.C. Department of Transportation assessment of the intersection. But the agency said adjustments to campus, such as adding speed bumps, would be put on hold until construction of the Science and Engineering Hall is complete in 2015.
Thompson said he would also seek out repairs for GW’s Blue Light emergency phones, many of which he said have been broken for more than a year.
“It is unacceptable that our University has gone months without addressing this issue,” reads Thompson’s platform.
The University has already begun replacing more than half of the phones, upgrading them with newer technology and adding cameras and speakers. The repairs are scheduled to be completed when UPD moves into its new headquarters in the Academic Center this summer.
