Year: Junior
Major: Political communication
Hometown: Ashland, Virginia
Student organizations/campus activities: Undergraduate Admissions Fellow, former Residence Hall Association president of Shenkman and Thurston halls
Prior SGA experience: Vice president, CCAS undergraduate senator, Financial Service and Allocations Committee chair, Physical Facilities and Urban Affairs Committee clerk
Favorite D.C. restaurant: Barcelona Wine Bar
Go-to GW study spot: Media and Public Affairs building, fifth floor
Who is your role model: My dad
Ideal walk-up song: “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC
GW Deli order: Bacon, egg and cheese on an everything bagel
Up until late October, Ethan Lynne hadn’t planned on running for Student Government Association president.
Lynne said he always thought he was a better fit for the vice presidency’s “operational” role in overseeing the SGA Senate and allocating student organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, instead of the president’s student advocacy role. But he said he changed his mind in October after Student Health Center physicians failed to diagnose his appendicitis, leaving him hours from sepsis days later and requiring a monthslong recovery from surgery — an ordeal that he said “opened [his] eyes” to gaps in campus health care that he wanted to address as SGA president.
“I realized pretty quickly that it is very hard to find a student here that has not had a negative experience with the Student Health Center,” Lynne said. “Quite literally, everyone that I’ve talked to has had some sort of story.”
Lynne said if elected, he would “hit the ground running” by commissioning an anonymized survey to identify patterns in student experiences with the SHC and forming a “student advisory board” to provide regular feedback to SHC leadership.
He said he plans to build on his work as SGA vice president, noting that he’s gotten “a lot done,” including pushing the University to recognize Election Day as a GW holiday, creating a mobile option for GWorld cards and expanding dining hall hours — all issues he campaigned on last spring.
If elected, Lynne said he’ll work with dining services officials to implement a 24/7 dining option for students at one of GW’s three dining halls.
Lynne said he’ll also collaborate with GW’s IT department to create a web page streamlining all the links for reporting problems at GW to ease the process of voicing and fixing issues.
The page would include links for FixIt requests, reporting a professor’s conduct to the Office of Ethics, Compliance and Risk and providing feedback on University policies before their rollout, like officials’ proposed changes to discrimination and campus protest policies, he said
“The opportunities are endless with that as well, and that that’s something that a lot of GW students would take advantage of,” Lynne said.
Lynne pleaded guilty late last month to five counts of violations for campaigning in restricted zones after an authorized agent — a student he approved to conduct campaign activities on his behalf — collected campaign signatures for him in Phillips Hall, a violation of Joint Elections Commission regulations.
Lynne’s five penalty points, one short of disqualification, will appear next to his name on the official SGA election ballot.
He centered his vice presidential campaign last spring on bolstering funding for student organizations after noticing groups struggled to hold events last academic year due to funding constraints — a policy point he has continued in his presidential campaign this cycle.
Lynne said he’s made progress on the goal by meeting with officials, like Chief Financial Officer Bruno Fernandes this year, and he sees a “light at the end of the tunnel” for increasing student organization funding in the next year. He said he still needs official approval from trustees and the Division for Student Affairs before GW could allocate the SGA a larger budget to distribute to student groups.
“I worry about whether or not they’d be able to be accomplished if someone that hasn’t been doing the work on them steps into that role,” Lynne said. “That’s part of the reason why I’m running is to really also see through, finally, a lot of these big initiatives and big changes for students.”
Lynne said GW’s high price point is one of the “biggest injustices” students face, so he plans to “centralize” GW’s “outdated” GWay scholarship portal in an effort to aggregate all available scholarships in one place as well as expand the number of University-wide and school-specific merit scholarships.
Undergraduate tuition will rise by 3.5 percent next academic year, bringing the tuition cost to just under $70,000.
“We need to be prioritizing special scholarships like that, merit scholarships, because while tuition is still rising, we can still work to secure additional scholarship money,” Lynne said.
Lynne said his experience on the SGA, including now as vice president and a Columbian College of Arts & Sciences undergraduate senator his sophomore year, distinguishes him from other candidates, as he’s learned how to build relationships with administrators and escalate issues that students face.
“I love GW,” Lynne said. “I think there’s definitely a lot more work to be done here, and I would spend every single day, if I were to be elected to this position, putting the interests of students as my number one priority and always working for them.”
