Freshmen WSA elections: always a puzzle who to vote for. Fifteen candidates, all who have been on campus less than two weeks formulating campaign platforms with so little experience to go on. If you are anything like me, you read the fifteen short statements and found them all quite similar. As a freshman voter, you may (or may not) have been frustrated in that you could not judge the platforms in any more than a very general way. As a Wesleyan senior and three year WSA member, I have taken the liberty to review the 15 statements and e-mail all of the freshman candidates some additional questions with the goal of providing you with some insight and information to then go and vote with. In my e-mail to the candidates, I did nothing to indicate the purpose of my questioning (A copy of the e-mail can be found on my facebook notes for those of you who are interested). It is worth noting that I do not know any of the candidates personally, so this Wespeak is entirely based on what was written (or not written) in the e-mails and statements.
I’ll first provide a bit of background on the WSA and my “grading” criteria and then I’ll make some recommendations. Skip to the end if you care little for the process.
As I see it, one of the most basic difficulties faced by the WSA is filling the 37 seats with people who are interested in spending a large amount of time on this commitment. In the past there has been an extremely high turnover rate. For my service during my Sophomore and Junior years, over 50 percent of the people who were on my subcommittee had quit before the year was over. I don’t have a statistic for the assembly at large, though it is certainly up there. So, in considering which of the freshman candidates were most qualified, I put politics aside and rather looked to see which people I thought would find the work exciting enough, that they would be in it for the long run and more than willing to put the numerous hours in. A “typical” WSA week for me has involved a variety of meetings, preparation for meetings, and research. For example: Sunday afternoon—prep for evening meeting (30 min), evening assembly meeting (2-3+ hours), early week—go over finances of NYTimes readership program, Midweek—meet with Deans, students, Times representative about program, End of week—research competing proposal from CDIGIX looking to replace RUCKUS (free music service) on campus. As you can see, not only are there meetings to attend, but there is a large amount of work to be done on one’s own. So, back to the question of who really wants to do this kind of thing?
Off the bat, I did not hear a response to my e-mail from four of the candidates (to be fair, they only had 20 hours to get back to me). Those people were: Eric Spierer, Ingrid Perl, Nick Turner, and Allison Quantz. I had previously assigned a grade to the 15 candidate write-ups and these four individuals were all in the bottom 50 percent. Some candidates went from a bad initial grade to a good final one after reading their e-mail. Take this information as you will. Beyond that, I have a short list of candidates I feel the WSA should not be without. Those people are: JULES ZHAO, J LUCAS HIDALGO, GIANNA PALMER, and COLLEEN CARPENTER. These are candidates who have clearly demonstrated initiative and want to be on the WSA. From “walking around to all the dorms…talking about issues” (Zhao) to reading the WSA’s cut and dry Midyear report (Hidalgo), to speaking with numerous WSA members (Palmer), these are people who are not running casually. Beyond these four I would also recommend MIKE PERNICK and ESTHER BURSON.
In voting for up to nine candidates, I think you will do well in choosing any of the 15 options. In my mind there wasn’t a single candidate that clearly would be unable to handle the WSA’s duties, so after hopefully voting for the aforementioned people, choose whomever else you think will serve you well.
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