Duke Democrats endorses Sunder, opposes 40 Percent Plan

Duke Democrats endorses Lavanya Sunder for DSG president. After meeting with all three presidential candidates, we believe that all of them bring plenty to the table. Will Giles and Rence Nemeh both bring in a fresh outside perspective and some good ideas, and we believe that all three candidates have the campus connections outside of DSG to stay in touch with the interests of the student body, but we’re most confident in Lavanya Sunder’s experience and her ability to turn ideas into policy.

We oppose The 40 Percent Plan because it is an example of an initiative where the politics are much better than the actual, inequitable policy. It’s a beautiful thing to see democracy in its purest form in action, and it certainly highlights issues with transparency in both SOFC funding and DSG as a whole. We don’t believe, however, that this is the right way to address the problem. Instead, it creates an unfair distribution of funds for organizations. Large organizations, organizations with resources and organizations with pre-existing clout would be in the best position to claim the 40 percent money, whether they need it or not. For clubs that lose out on that money, they’re suddenly competing for a piece of a much smaller pie, even though SOFC gets more funding requests than it has funding available without taking out nearly half its budget. We heard arguments both ways as to whether Duke Democrats would benefit or suffer from The 40 Percent Plan, but we believe that’s less important than the fact that The 40 Percent Plan distorts the funding process and would not be beneficial to Duke as a whole.

Jordan DeLoatch, Trinity ’15
President, Duke Democrats