The Student Government Association president can’t do everything. 

But the role’s most critical function is to connect students and administrators. The SGA president gets face time with the top officials and trustees of GW in a way that most of the student body doesn’t. Of the three candidates running for the SGA’s top post this year, we believe Ethan Lynne knows best to seize that opportunity. 

Lynne, who served as SGA vice president this past term, told The Hatchet’s editorial board that he spent the past year learning to which leaders he should take student issues and what’s actually feasible for a SGA president to accomplish. We urge students to cast their ballots for him in this year’s SGA presidential contest.

We can’t expect anyone to immediately grasp how to navigate the jungle of GW bureaucracy, but the job of the SGA president is to be that navigator. They meet with the Board of Trustees and speak to power players who control the big and the small at GW, from speech policies to the dining hall menu. Lynne is more ready than any other candidate to step into that role on day one. He said he’s had a year to learn whether a particular issue is best addressed by Provost Christopher Bracey or Dean of Students Colette Coleman. He also recognizes that he can’t make lofty promises of vast change that would come only from him, instead seeking to involve institutional leaders.

We weren’t just encouraged by Lynne’s past — we also liked his ideas for the future. Though Lynne’s platform is somewhat sparse, the ideas he laid out when we spoke with him were the best blend of realistic but meaningful policies. He said he thought his platform for vice president last year was overambitious, including proposals to create new GW apps and revamp Lerner Health and Wellness Center. Last year’s editorial board declined to endorse him for that exact reason. This year, he said he tried to focus only on resolving issues he knew were within the SGA’s purview and could be realistically accomplished within one term. We think his grounded view is a promising sign of his ability to deliver on his goals next year.

We view Lynne’s proposals as the strongest of the presidential candidates, too. Take his reason for running for the governing body’s top post: his misdiagnosis at the Student Health Center that led to him walking around with a ruptured appendix for a week. As a result, Lynne wants to create a student advisory board to explore broader reforms to the center, while in the meantime expanding the center’s drop-in hours past 5 p.m. Maybe longer health center hours aren’t the most exciting topic, but they’re a change that would dramatically ease the day-to-day lives of students and demonstrate Lynne’s focus on student well-being and personal attachment to executing the promises he makes.

Similarly, the editorial board deems Lynne’s stance on the arming of GW Police Department as the right idea with feasible solutions. He said arming can’t continue as it’s been going so he wants to halt the arming process and ensure students made up “the majority” of the search committee for a new GWPD chief and allow student access to the department’s firearm training simulator. Our editorial board has in the past called on GW to involve students more in this process, and we’re glad Lynne sees the issue the same way. His position also demonstrates his knowledge of GW — he was the only candidate to mention the training simulator in our interviews. That’s what we want from our SGA president.

In our conversation with him, Lynne didn’t seem like a politician, and that’s a good thing. He was candid, willing to admit areas where he went wrong this past year, like when he canceled a town hall after the 2024 election, and he was happy to scold GW for its faults. We hope that forthright attitude will make students feel like Lynne is their president, not another member of the administration.

Questions around speech have been a constant during Lynne’s tenure as SGA vice president, from last spring’s pro-Palestinian encampment in University Yard that started his first week on the job, to the SGA pulling out of participating in an anti-Trump rally this week. Lynne said his initial response to the encampment — where students accused him and Fitzgerald of inaction before he condemned the use of police force a week later — wasn’t on the ball. He explained that he doesn’t think limits on the speech of student organizations make sense and viewed those restrictions as antithetical to organizations’ purpose as outlets for student expression. He wants to create an SGA cabinet position focused on free speech and to remove the U-Yard fences. The editorial board has less confidence than Lynne that the University will remove the fences anytime soon, but we commend that he acknowledges past mistakes on the thorny issues and has charted a better path forward.

On the subject of transparency, Lynne faced charges from the Joint Elections Commission for campaigning in restricted areas. He explained that those rule violations came from a first-time campaign staffer who was unclear on the exact rules of what counted as an “academic space.” We deemed the infraction was minor, and his forthright response assuaged any of our lingering ethics concerns.

We admired former SGA senator and third-place finisher in last year’s presidential election Dan Saleem for his outspoken defense of free speech, including his desire to involve students in conversations with officials about defining speech. But we weren’t sold on his other policies, like his proposal to install GWPD officers on the Mount Vernon Campus, without clear evidence of wrongdoing on the Vern that would require more than the campus’ current security presence. We’re concerned that unnecessarily expanding GWPD in the midst of battered student trust in the department wouldn’t serve anyone, and Saleem’s responses to questions about the roots of his policies didn’t assuage those worries.

We also felt Saleem’s nearly 30-page platform was overstuffed, featuring proposals like a 24/7 SGA hotline staffed partly by students studying abroad to continued GW dining reforms. We believe it’s better for a SGA president to focus on achieving well-informed and tailored victories than risk biting off more than they can chew.

As the only SGA outsider in the presidential race, GW College Democrats President Emily-Anne Santiago had the right focus in her conversation with us: students. She said she wanted to give them more autonomy in every facet of college life, making them feel “loved, heard and seen.” But it’s possible to be too much of an outsider. Some of Santiago’s proposals, like a fixed-tuition program and adding Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods onto GWorld — given the former has declined since 2007 and the latter banned partnering with university meal plans — were outside the scope of what an SGA president can actually do. Santiago also heavily focused on the national political arena in our conversation with her, which is ever-pertinent, but, in our view, shouldn’t always fall at the forefront of an SGA president’s mind.

We aren’t quite as hopeful as Lynne that everything in his platform can get done in the next 12 months. We have a hard time seeing how he’d create 24/7 facilities in Lerner or the dining halls, for example, and even he admitted that coming to a compromise on the role of generative artificial intelligence will be tricky. Plus, as great as promising more money for student organizations is, we’re not sure that’s a realistic proposal with higher education funding in free fall.

But Lynne said he knows better than anyone how to get things done for GW students. We agree.