Senior Ryan Todd was elected Duke's newest Young Trustee at Duke Student Government's meeting Wednesday night.
"I'm really excited, as well as surprised," Todd told The Chronicle after the meeting. "I'm especially excited for the new Central Campus. I feel like my work for Campus Council has been touching on the issues of Central Campus, and so I'm excited to really get into that and be a part of the new campus. I'm also excited to be a student voice on the Board and help the Board make more informed choices."
Junior Jordan Giordano, executive vice president of DSG and a Young Trustee Nominating Committee member, said the race was a particularly close one.
If either a voting member of DSG or the Intercommunity Council had changed their vote, the outcome may have been different, several sources said.
But senior Genevieve Cody, DSG's vice president for community interaction and chair of the YTNC, would not confirm this.
Fifty percent of the votes for the appointment are reserved for DSG members, with the other half reserved for ICC members.
At the meeting, Todd and candidates Katelyn Donnelly and Bronwyn Lewis, both seniors, presented their platforms and answered questions about their qualifications.
Todd explained that as president of Campus Council, his experience in interacting with administrators while representing students is what set him apart from the other candidates.
"Administrators have turned to me and looked to my opinion to represent the students," he said. "I think that I have shown time and again-and more often than the other candidates-that I'm capable of doing this."
Todd added that he has the greatest knowledge base of all three candidates beacuse of his wide breadth of experience with various organizations. He specifically pointed to the various cultural organizations of which he has been a part of and noted that he is the only candidate who has lived on East, West and Central campuses.
"By selecting me you will get a person who continues to give his opinion and is committed to voting on his own conscience for the University as a whole," he said.
Both Giordano and Cody said they were pleased with how the process went this year, adding that they were confident in Todd's appointment.
"He is going to be an outstanding trustee," Giordano said. "He has great experiences, and they are experiences that are representative of the student body. I'm really excited that he was selected."
In other business:
Dean of Undergraduate Education Steve Nowicki explained to senators his decision to suspend the activity of the judicial affairs task force because of ongoing litigation.
"I am disappointed that what I thought was going to be a useful and productive process has turned out-through no fault of our own-not so," he said.
Nowicki said that despite the task force's suspension, progress will certainly take place regarding judicial affairs this semester. He said he has asked the Kenan Institute for Ethics to analyze judicial practices at peer institutions, namely the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Cornell University.
"I understand that a lot of Duke students--too many Duke students-think that the institution doesn't listen to them or think that the institution doesn't care about them," Nowicki said. "That's the past, perhaps. But I care. Hundreds of Duke students have gotten to know me well over the years, and they would say that I am sincere when I say that I care.... I am ready to work on this and other affairs to try to demonstrate that there is a way to get that feedback going between students and the administration."
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