During his two years in the Duke Student Government legislature, Trinity sophomore Sean Young has been extremely busy, always working on at least one project and sending out mass e-mails to his colleagues.
"He's very active," said Jeremy Huff, DSG vice president for community interaction. "He's almost at this frenzied level of action that I can't keep up with."
And it's this theme of action that drives Young's second campaign for the vice presidency. "[The issues are] so intangible and being on the committee for two years, I see our approach as very vague sometimes, and we don't have a concrete and systematic way of solving problems...," he said.
He cites his past work to offer some suggestions for explicit improvements to the campus community. For example, Young said he facilitated community interaction last fall by having members of 10 widely different student groups participate in a Habitat for Humanity project.
Right now he's helping coordinate Duke students to participate in an American Cancer Society project and promoting a campus-wide online calendar.
Although much of his work has concentrated in service activities, Young said he sees a limit to the logic of community work. "People have a stereotype of Durham that it somehow desperately needs our community service...," he said. "I think the biggest challenge for me as vice president for community interaction would be to devise new ways of helping Duke-Durham relations."
On race relations, Young says action is more important than discussion, explaining that students are disgusted with dialogue. "They just heard 'diversity' and 'race relations' so much, they don't want to hear it anymore," he said. As an example of more concrete action, he cited a report he submitted to the administration as a way of following up on the community interaction committee's race forums.
Young also has a unique vision for making the InterCommunity Council a more effective group. Because members are so busy, Young said he will make meetings less mandatory, allowing group representatives to skip meetings when the agenda does not concern them.
Huff said this idea takes a "shortsighted" view of ICC members' interests in a given topic. "I don't think it's good," Huff said. "I think part of the benefit of ICC is having a lot of different perspectives at the table."
Young sees himself as an unusually active leader, in contrast to what he sees around him. "A lot of the people at Duke are people who like to look for a really, really, really, really long time, when they promised to leap."
Young also plans to focus on training underclassmen to be leaders on campus.
Huff, a Trinity senior, said Young will have to work on being a more assertive leader, but several of Young's colleagues say he is ready right now.
"He's always very helpful," said Trinity sophomore Patty Chen, whom Young is assisting to coordinate a fall carnival that will showcase artwork from the Durham community. "Even when he's not in a leadership position, he sort of takes a leadership role."
Lucy Stringer contributed to this story.
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