Incoming Duke Student Government President Keizra Mecklai and Executive Vice President John Guarco are looking forward to engaging the student body in campus projects this Fall.
Mecklai, a senior, and Guarco, a junior, take the seats of outgoing President Lavanya Sunder and Executive Vice President Abhi Sanka, both seniors. Mecklai ran on a platform founded on her previous role as vice president of equity and outreach, but also plans to focus on general student body involvement with DSG.
“I’m really excited to use my role as president and to help my executive board make their committees as well-functioning as possible,” Mecklai said. “We also want to make sure we keep transparency of student interests in mind."
The lack of interest in DSG among the general student body is a challenge faced by the new Senate, both Mecklai and Guarco noted.
The voter turnout was much lower this March compared to recent years. In 2014, 58 percent of the student body voted in the presidential election, but only about 30 percent of the student body did in 2015. The vice presidential election saw a 36 percent voter turnout, and class officer elections drew only 23 percent. Outside of DSG, only 38 percent of students submitted ballots in February’s Young Trustee election, a large decrease from the 53 percent that did so last year.
Guarco and Mecklai have several ideas to increase interaction between DSG and students.
“One idea that we have to connect the executive board with senators is creating DSG representatives to go to residential houses and connect to first-years,” Guarco said. “This is an idea Keizra and I discussed during a meeting with the Duke Political Union to increase transparency.”
Following up on a key tenet of her campaign, Mecklai added that she plans to engage students in ranking various DSG projects in order of importance.
“The biggest difference will just be making sure that everything is grounded in student interests, so spending a lot of our time thinking about what students’ priorities are,” Mecklai said. “I’m excited about trying to bring together house council presidents in the Fall to get them to think about and maybe rank potential projects to really tell us what they want to see.”
Guarco—who presides over DSG Senate meetings and serves as a resource for senators—also noted that DSG will try to reach out to students directly even before asking for their input on which projects they want to see prioritized.
"We’re also considering creating an idea board outside of the DSG office and Marketplace so students can input their ideas for what they want DSG to do,” Guarco said. “Hopefully those ideas can be transferred to senators so we can have a more efficient environment for creating policy.”
Other issues brought up frequently in last year’s Senate included poor attendance by some senators. Attendance was also a key issue in a recent DSG vote to restructure and reduce the size of the Senate, though the proposal did not pass.
“I plan on reintroducing some bylaw changes which include some stricter attendance rules to make sure senators are kept accountable for their attendance and their service to students,” Guarco said.
Guarco also mentioned an idea which would further increase collaboration between DSG and the study body—a program he called “pitch-a-proposal.”
“The basic idea is that we’re creating a fund for innovative projects that will act as a social entrepreneurship fund for students who have ideas to improve campus through whatever means, and we’ll subsidize whichever ideas we think are the best,” he explained.
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