​Vote Adair, Weisman and Soren on Tuesday

Tomorrow and Wednesday, students will elect the next president and executive vice president of Duke Student Government, along with the next chairperson of the Student Organization Funding Committee. Per what we have written on several past occasions, it is our hope that the results of this election will reflect a student body that wants DSG to work through student voices, prioritize projects instead of launching in a million different directions and make students feel like they are being heard on campus.

President

Based on her truly refreshing campaign rhetoric and bottom-up approach to student government, we offer our fullest endorsement to Annie Adair for DSG president on her platform of strong reform. Adair cares about listening to students in a way no recent candidate has and further has pointedly committed herself to reforming DSG to be more proactive and more intentional with student interests. Adair went above and beyond in her appointed role as Chief of Staff to gain the experiences and knowledge to lead DSG’s many parts. She further promises to leverage DSG’s influence to get more students talking to administration and to give DSG a big picture vision beyond those projects. Adair is the leader for the entire campus who promises best to change how student government exists on campus.

We feel Tara Bansal continues an unfortunate trend among DSG candidates to present an over-extended platform. Though she boasts an impressive resume of her own projects, we are concerned that certain items like the new curriculum’s Duke Experience class featured in her platform are more accurately products of much longer-term and team-based efforts spearheaded by faculty and administrators. Her vision is well-articulated, but her attention seems more directed to putting DSG leaders at the table with the provost and administrators than students themselves. John Guarco presented a well-developed platform of specific campus issues including improvements to student conduct but ultimately failed to impress without a broader vision for students.

Executive Vice President

Both candidates shared the opinion that DSG needs to address internal dissent from senators and VPs with respect to the Senate’s culture and structure, and we eagerly endorse Ilana Weisman. Her understanding of the choice between top-down direction and bottom-up motivation for DSG’s work resonated with us. Her work as VP of Equity and Outreach has given her the institutional knowledge to stay abreast of a range of campus issues, making her the best bet for reminding DSG of its "raison d’ètre". We applaud John Turanchik’s vision of focusing DSG on bigger issues and especially liked his idea to mitigate institutional turnover by transitioning long-term projects over the years, but we ultimately felt Ilana had more passion to put behind commanding the Senate’s respect and keeping student government close to its mission.

SOFC Chair

The two candidates for SOFC chair communicated similar platforms of transparency through better communication with students and improved public relations efforts. Ultimately we endorse Alexa Soren for SOFC chair after careful consideration of what separates the two very qualified candidates. Soren’s most compelling qualities were her plans for changing how DSG and the SOFC communicate and her understanding of how SOFC can shape our social culture through new groups and improvements the existing auditing system. Gwen Geng did well to focus on being accessible to students in face-to-face interactions and will hopefully be able to implement her proposed vice chair for student affairs no matter the election result.