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BY AMELIA POSSANZA

In print | Published April 29, 2010

Last fall members of the Intercultural Center, the Black Cultural Center and some activist groups formed a coalition to provide support for specific candidates in the Student Council elections in response to a lack of competition and diversity. Members of this coalition won all of the races yesterday except for the presidential race.

During the last two elections, the coalition — alternately referred to as a campaign, a push and a movement by its members — provided support for candidates and asked community members to vote for specific candidates.

“Starting last [fall] term the IC/BCC coalition has been doing a push for people to run for Student Council to make sure that Student Council stays diverse and has the interests of the whole campus in mind,” campus life representative Watufani Poe ’13 said. Though Poe d referred to this coalition as the “IC/BCC coalition,” not everyone involved was a member of either of these groups.

An e-mail circulated earlier this week encouraged recipients to tell friends and like-minded people to vote for the coalition’s list of candidates. “We have many candidates running this semester — Amelia Mitter-Burke, Sean Thackurdeen, Ben Hattem, Anna Stitt and Lizzy Bryant — that share [a] vision and want to continue this work. We encourage you to vote for them,” the e-mail said. Amelia Mitter-Burke ’12 lost the presidential race to Simon Zhu ’11 with 220 votes to 205. Zhu said in an interview before the election ended that he was not aware of students running together as a group.

The e-mail also emphasized that spreading the word about these candidates could be enough to win the election because of typically low voter turnout.

According to professor of political science Richard M. Valelly ’75, who studies and teaches course on voting and political movements, this type of campaign strategy is known as a slate. “It’s very standard in all kinds of elections,” he said.

Ben Hattem ’12, who was elected financial policy representative, said that the coalition and their slate consisted of people who had similar ideas about the role of StuCo.

“This whole IC/BCC thing is trying to recognize that Student Council is the right avenue to voice these concerns about the ways that marginalized groups are treated on campus,” Hattem said. He added that while the college community often thinks of itself as a “melting” pot, in reality not all groups have an equal share of power.

The coalition campaigned in a similar manner this semester. According to Hattem, all five of the candidates listed in the December e-mail — Luis Peñate ’13, student events advisor; Deivid Rojas ’11, vice president; Hilary Pomerantz ’12, secretary; Sonja Spoo ’13, appointments chair; and Poe — were elected to StuCo.

Poe said that the coalition came together to bring more accurate representation to StuCo and that they are continuing to work toward that goal. “A big complaint that students have had … in the past is that StuCo is meant to represent the whole student body, but in reality it only represents one kind of student. The IC/BCC coalition is pushing so that it really represented all the students,” he said.
This year’s coalition began when IC, BCC and activist groups met to talk on April 14 about open positions and brainstorm issues that Student Council should address in the upcoming term. Hattem said he attended this meeting already knowing he wanted to run.

After the initial meeting, the coalition offered platform writing help for those who wanted it. The candidates met several times after the initial meeting and made flyers together. According to Poe, all of these things, from the large group meeting to the postering sessions, were offered to candidates in the coalition last semester as well.

Mitter-Burke said that while she was aware of the slating e-mails, she had no part in sending them.
“[The people sending the e-mails] are identifying candidates that they see as having an active stance on StuCo,” she said.

Mitter-Burke added that her candidacy was not about an individual desire to sit on StuCo. “It’s not about my agenda. That’s not why I’m interested,” she said. “StuCo shouldn’t be just about the individuals on it, but about the school community. But it also shouldn’t be about specific school communities.”

Valelly said that the coalition’s strategy is a common one. “[Slating] happens regularly in a non-partisan election … [it] is a way to tell voters that there are issues … and the way to solve that issue is to vote for that slate,” he said.

Valelly stressed that slating is not an unethical practice. “It’s pretty innocuous when you think about it.” He added that at its core the American party system is simply two well-established slates.

In fact, Valelly said that when he was in graduate school at Harvard University he ran on a radical slate for a position on the board of members of the Harvard Coop, a student bookstore run by a sales cooperative.

“We were trying to make life difficult by slating,” he said. The slate wanted to help workers unionize.
He added that until that time, elections for the board had passed quietly.

Hattem said that the desire to shake up StuCo elections began last spring when six people ran for five positions. “[The coalition] probably grew in some ways out of the NOTA campaign,” he said.

In response to the lack of competitive StuCo races, a group of students encouraged people to vote “None of the Above” in the upcoming elections through flyers, e-mails, word of mouth and the Daily Gazette discussion boards. The movement had no formal leadership and no affiliation with other campus groups.

“The NOTA letter I wrote and signed was about Student Council taking on more serious issues like class diversity, like gender diversity on campus, like student access to financial decisions, like real power over financial aid awards,” said Dan Symonds ’11, a public proponent of NOTA at the time and outgoing financial policy representative.

Although Poe is a first-year student, he heard about the NOTA campaign during Ride the Tide. “There’s a sense that [NOTA] was a reactive push and this was taking more of the active stance and making it so that we put people in those positions through elections as opposed to opposing people already running,” he said.

Symonds, however, disagreed. “The act alone of running a campaign which says, ‘We need better candidates and to do that we need to not elect these candidates,’ is entirely active,” he said.

But in looking back on the NOTA movement and the IC, BCC and activist campaigning that happened last fall, Symonds said that the latter was more effective in changing StuCo’s role on campus.

“In terms of growing a campaign, last [fall] semester was more important,” Symonds said. “If you look now, Student Council is radically different than a year ago.” He pointed to the fact that StuCo has taken “explicitly political views” on several issues.

Poe and StuCo Vice President Deivid Rojas ’11 agreed, citing StuCo’s open support of the DREAM Act and the Genderfuck day that Rojas organized the week after the party as examples of taking an active stance on campus issues.

“StuCo is trying to be a more active force. It’s been pushing its boundaries,” Rojas said.

Hattem qualified the view that StuCo has been changed for the better. “In some ways [the coalition has] been homogenizing [StuCo] a little bit because you’re getting a group of people who have more similar views. On the other hand, the view tends to be oriented towards things like StuCo being more active,” he said.

StuCo is also currently trying to both take an active stance and bring more diversity to the body through the StuCo pay initiative.

“When I was running last term and we met with the IC/BCC coalition to talk about the things we want student council to address, one of the biggest things that everyone was talking about was StuCo pay,” Poe said. He said that StuCo pay would bring about greater class diversity.

Rojas and Hattem agreed that this issue had come up several times among “IC/BCC class activists” during his time at Swarthmore. Hattem said that the coalition approached several people last semester and asked them to run for StuCo but they were unable to because of their work-study requirement.

Symonds said that while it would be a stretch to directly connect NOTA to the current push for StuCo pay, the new initiative can be seen as just one of several ways that StuCo has recently begun tackling bigger issues, such as class diversity.

StuCo has issued a survey and a referendum in order to gauge student opinion on the initiative. Yesterday’s referendum results indicated that students did not agree that StuCo members should be paid, regardless of whether they are on work study.

According to Poe, the exact details of payment would be worked out only after an agreement about whether StuCo members should be paid is reached. Funds would come from either the administration or the Student Activities Fee. StuCo members would only be paid for the hours they spend in meetings.

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