Next Tuesday, the student body will elect a new Duke Student Government president, executive vice president and Student Organization and Funding Committee chair. The Chronicle's Alex Griffith sat down with SOFC chair candidate Sanford Morton, a sophomore, to discuss his goals for SOFC and his personal experience.
The Chronicle: Why are you interested in becoming the SOFC chair?
Sanford Morton: There’s a couple reasons. I’ve been on the committee for two years now, and every week I’ve found myself enjoying the committee meetings. I think the discussions we have are extremely beneficial and for me personally, I gain a lot of insight into how groups function on campus. It’s been a really cool thing to learn about what initiatives people are taking on campus, so from that perspective it’s been a big personal thing for me.
From another perspective, over the years, I’ve also had a lot of friends reach out to me and a lot of them have been trying to apply [for SOFC funding] as new groups, so they’ve been asking questions about funding, and I’ve found myself starting to meet with people outside of SOFC meetings. The committee is a vector in which I can meet people and facilitate things they are passionate about, so I think SOFC is a great opportunity to meet all of these people and as chair, I’ll be there to support them and will be the first person they’re going to as the face of the committee.
TC: This is the second year of that SOFC chair has been a position elected by the student body. How do you envision the interaction between the SOFC chair and the students?
SM: The SOFC chair and the student body in the past have been extremely separate things. Every time I talk to my friends who haven’t heard of SOFC before, they’re confused, don’t really know what it is and wonder why they’re voting for it.
The public election has made SOFC more of a public-facing entity, and from that perspective, a lot of interactions with groups are personal interactions and discuss how the committee can serve their needs best, instead of it being a faceless conversation where groups walk in [to the meeting], submit a budget and arbitrarily get back a response about how much money they’re going to get.
TC: Since all Duke students are voting for SOFC chair, what do you want students to be familiar with about SOFC?
SM: One of the biggest misconceptions about SOFC is that we’re just a board of people who arbitrarily make funding decisions, and what I would like people to know is that it’s actually a group of really diverse and passionate people.
I’m from Texas, so my high school was a big football school, and for four years I watched all the funding in our school get sent to the football program and not extracurricular activities. [SOFC is] interested in making it as equitable as possible, and we all have backgrounds in scenarios where things weren’t equitable, and we want that to not be the case on Duke’s campus.
It’s nice that we’re arguing about which diverse groups are and aren’t getting funding on campus, instead of having to fight for there even being diversity on campus.
TC: What are your personal goals which you’d work to accomplish if elected?
SM: My first initiative is that I want to speed up the efficiency of these meetings. The meetings are inefficient and are scheduled inefficiently where people show up too early and late. We’re implementing a new software that will revamp the way we do funding, and right now we’re beta testing it, but this software will hopefully be implemented for the entire funding process, and my goal will be to leverage that software to its maximum capabilities to make the process really efficient.
[Another goal is to] not require groups to come in to represent themselves on some funding occasions. If events are under a certain threshold of cost, we don’t need to ask them questions. It’s a personal goal to remove the events that don’t need to be discussed in a lengthy way, and I think for student leaders this is going to be a big deal because lots of people complain about having to show up for meetings to fight for money when their event is something that would typically end up getting funding without question.
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