Third-year College student Abraham Axler and third-year Batten student Emily Lodge are both running for Student Council president. Axler currently serves as the incumbent Student Council president, while Lodge serves on the executive board as the vice president of organizations.
Although both candidates are active members of Student Council this year and said the body has had a successful year, they see different areas for improvement.
Axler said making Student Council entirely inclusive this year was one of its biggest successes.
“I don’t believe that representative government has a right or a role to reject someone who wants to work to solve the concerns of their community,” Axler said.
Although she thinks an inclusive council is an inherently good thing, Lodge said Student Council needs restructuring.
“I think that we had a really great idea this year with making it inclusive of all students but I don’t think that it was executed effectively,” Lodge said. “I think that there were certain committees who had way too many people than what they needed, and there was not enough for those committee members to do.”
Lodge said her first priority as Student Council president would be working with the committee chairs to restructure Student Council internally by allowing them to have discretion over their membership while maintaining two committees regarding student concerns and student outreach open to all students.
Organizational excellence will be the biggest challenge faced by Student Council in the future, Axler said, and he plans to address this through working with organizational experts across various schools at the University to learn how to best equip committee chairs to manage their committees.
Both candidates said they want to increase participation from students not in Student Council and be accessible leaders.
Lodge said her platform is summarized through the acronym “ICARE.”
Lodge said the “I” stands for innovative solutions, such as improving the ambassador system by having ambassadors walk students home. The “C” stands for collaborative innovation, such as working with the leaders of student groups around Grounds to positively shape the University’s culture.
The “A” stands for accessibility, which Lodge said she hopes to accomplish through holding widely publicized office hours and being accessible via social media. The “R” stands for restructuring Student Council, while the “E” stands for the empowerment of students. Lodge said she wants to increase polling of student opinion in order to ensure Student Council functions as an effective forum to resolve student concerns
“If our sole job is to be the voice of the student body, we need a way to know what that is,” Lodge said.
Axler’s platform focuses on increasing participation of students not in Student Council through the use of a mobile voting app.
Internally, Axler said he wants to ensure being part of Student Council will be a collaborative experience members can use to serve the University. Externally, Axler said more visibility should be implemented through office hours and more public forums at which students can speak to the issues most important to them.
“I’d like to use those [advisory] committees as leveraging points to have difficult but necessary conversations about things like, tuition, diversity, faculty hiring and the environment,” Axler said.
With regard to Axler running as an incumbent, Lodge noted she would have a learning curve as Student Council president but said she believes it is surmountable because she was able to gain a lot of institutional knowledge very quickly when she became VPO last year.
Axler said his experience and record will be an important factor in the election.
“I think the difference is, with me, you know what’s happened and you can decide whether you like it or not, but you don’t have to guess about whether I can do it,” Axler said.
Voting will take place from Feb. 19-25. Election results will be announced Feb. 26.
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