An open letter to the president-elect regarding his cabinet-to-be
Dear Pete,
Congratulations on your election to be Duke Student Government president next year. You will have your work cut out for you. As you know from two years of service on the executive board, the vice presidents you will lead will be your closest advisors. You will rely on them for most of your policy advice. They will have meetings with administrators and will help manage legislation in the Senate. Obviously, a challenge for you will be to mold their diverse ambitions into a coherent agenda for students and for the University.
But the executive board members shouldn’t be the only people to whom you turn to for advice. You should also build a cabinet you can trust and use well.
Previous DSG presidents have never really convened their cabinets, relying too heavily on their chiefs of staff to produce oft-unspecified results. This is a broken model. As you well know, you will have several constitutionally specified officers and a couple others whose offices are established in the DSG bylaws. In your platform, you also promised to create additional cabinet liaisons for LGBT life, women’s life, religious life, multicultural life and greek life.
I would encourage you not to make these promised appointments. Instead of farming out your communication with important constituencies about important issues to your subordinates, instead of making a single person responsible for “their” issues, you should prioritize personal consultation with these constituencies by pledging yourself to meet regularly with interested students and stakeholders.
Appointing someone special to deal with these identity groups sends the wrong signal. Instead of implementing a system that further encourages the perception of issues important to these groups as “their” issues, not really of concern to the rest of us, you should instead embrace them as core to your mission as president. If you can communicate, if you make the commitment, then you will not need a special liaison. Having a delegate take these meetings seems to say they are inconveniencies.
An alternative system would be for you to convene a “President’s Council,” which would include the presidents of all the major student groups and chaired by you, to provide advice and feedback during the year on issues like the implementation of the house model and the renovation of the West Union building.
You should also take care to use the cabinet you appoint. The positions should not simply be lines on resumes. They ought to make meaningful contributions to the student body. In consultation with your chief of staff, I urge you to establish an agenda for your cabinet. Hold monthly meetings—chaired by you—and insist on monthly reports from the various departments. When you make your semester presentations to the Senate, you should include a segment on the activities of the cabinet. If you intend to continue current DSG President Mike Lefevre’s push to make DSG a service provider, the responsibility for services should be assigned to your cabinet.
One member of your cabinet matters more to your policymaking than the rest. I don’t know if you have already chosen your chief of staff, but a few words about this important position are in order. You’ve witnessed the performance during the past two years of exemplary chiefs of staff: Mike Lefevre and Andrew Schreiber. A good chief of staff must be focused on good service to the presidency. Your chief of staff should complement you, having strengths where you are weaker. For instance, your chief of staff might have strong policy experience in academics. Your chief of staff ought to be able to tell you when you have a bad idea and ought to be able to privately critique your performance so you can improve. Finally, your chief of staff must be a capable administrator, able to run the cabinet, help you stand vis-a-vis with the administration and fully participate as a member of the executive board.
Pete, you have an opportunity to assemble a team as your cabinet that can act as a force multiplier for your government. Those who you appoint can become part of the wider legacy of advocacy for and service to the student body that you aspire to have at the end of your term a year from now. Try not to hand out positions as spoils. Good luck.
Gregory Morrison is a Trinity senior and the former Executive Vice President of DSG. His column runs every Tuesday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.