On April 11, Swarthmore’s Student Government Organization (SGO) announced the winners of its presidential election: Annie Liu ’28 was elected president, with Chloe Lee ’28 as vice president. Liu and Lee sat down with The Phoenix on April 14, just days after their win. A transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity, is below.
Ellen Stewart ’27: How are you feeling about winning the election? What are you most excited for as the upcoming SGO president and vice president?
Annie Liu ’28: I’m really excited and also grateful for the student body. This is a wonderful opportunity to bring a lot of initiatives that we talked about during the campaign to life and to be able to meet the student body where they are and address their needs specifically.
Chloe Lee ’28: I agree with everything that Annie said — excitement and gratitude were definitely the two biggest feelings.
It was really nice to see people’s response to our platform. I think that we were able to take what we had heard from our peers and wrap that into it, so seeing that reflected in the vote was very meaningful to us. Immediately after we got the results, we said to each other, “Okay, where are we starting?” We’re just excited to get into action.
AL: When we were tabling and a lot of people stopped to look at our initiatives, their reactions really told us what mattered most to them. That was all very enlightening.
ES: So, what made you decide to run?
AL: I’ve been on SGO for two years now, and I’ve always been under the Diversity and Inclusion Committee (DICOM). Honestly, I’ve had a great time there. It’s been amazing to build our initiatives, such as the cultural snack station, where we had different snacks from all over the world, and more recently, a collaboration with the Nationalities Service Center on an immigrant survivor “trauma-informed support” campus workshop. Building stuff like that with people within SGO, as well as collaborating with these affinity groups around campus, just made my work at SGO feel very meaningful.
I know that a lot of people don’t really know what SGO actually does, and I do think that was honestly one of the reasons why I wanted to run: to really show what we’re doing now and also to ensure that [students] have the space to tell us what they want from us, and seeing that really happen through what we do as a collective together here at SGO.
CL: This was my first year serving in SGO, and I was originally elected through an internal election. It was really because I’ve been in different leadership positions around campus through clubs, but I wanted to try my hand at student government. Like Annie was saying, there is a bit of mystery when it comes to SGO and its efficacy in general. I wanted to take this past semester to really figure out exactly what happens in the meetings. I was really excited when Annie contacted me about joining the ticket, because I think that it’s just such a great opportunity to take advantage of the potential that SGO has. We’ve both seen that there’s so much opportunity there, and we want to make the most of it. I was very happy to see that we align on everything. It’s been a great partnership.
ES: How would you define your roles as SGO president and vice president?
AL: My role as SGO president is really not only overseeing the running of SGO internally, but more importantly, focusing on the student body and building a connection between it and the administration. That, I feel, is really important, especially with several disciplinary cases unfolding right now. Currently, we’re working on a student handbook initiative that works to address issues with students getting pulled into the judiciary process because of the zines that they were distributing and how that really relates to free speech restrictions on campus, as well as student expression.
We’re looking to see what the code of conduct really is and how we can propose certain appeals to it to the administration after gathering feedback from not only students on SGO, but the student body more broadly. I think that encompasses the general role SGO is trying to play: expressing student interests to the people that are in power to make change happen.
CL: Through the past two years that we’ve been on campus, [even though] it’s been a short time, we’ve seen that there’s a disconnect between the students’ interests and the administration. As SGO President and VP, we are in a very unique position to have that direct contact with the administration and be able to bring those interests to the table.
We are very passionate about putting our money where our mouth is — essentially making sure that we’re delivering on what we’re saying to the best of our abilities. Also, making sure that we are truly serving as advocates for the student body, turning ideas into actionable items, and creating change that will last long after we end our term.
ES: What’s one thing that’s both important and achievable during your term that you would want to make sure gets done?
AL: There’s the initiative that we just mentioned for the Student Handbook, which would mainly be a longer-term process as we begin opening more of these conversations with the administration. As for whether or not that truly happens, a lot of that honestly depends on how responsive the administration is going to be, but we’re really hoping to be able to get that conversation started and have a consistent stream of conversation, even after we end our term. But [as for] more actual items that we see coming to life within the next year, we have an initiative to create a retroactive pass/fail option, which I feel is something where we can attempt to make change through having more discussions with our Academic Affairs Committee as well as the administration.
CL: Something that we’re really excited about is with the Student Activities fund. SGO is, in theory, supposed to work very closely with [the Student Budgeting Committee (SBC)]. I think due to busy schedules, sometimes it’s hard to fully carry that through. But we understand that the [Student Activities Fund (SAF)] is not fully used, even though our budget has been continuously increasing throughout the past years. Even if SBC allocates all the money to the clubs that the clubs request, it’s only using a small percentage of the SAF and that means that the rest of the money is being used however the administration wants.
I’m not too sure on the exact details of who gets to control that money, but what we do know is that it doesn’t always reflect student interests. Something that we want to propose is creating a grant system where we basically incentivize clubs to get involved in social justice and give back to the community by applying to start social justice initiatives. To use that leftover money from the SAF, they would have to basically fill out some sort of application to propose some sort of event or project or something that they would do that would be giving back to the community. We just think that this would be a great way to uphold the activist spirit of Swarthmore, because we don’t think activism should be limited to the activist groups that we have on campus. All people should be engaging in giving back to the community.
ES: You mentioned that you were tabling throughout your campaign, and you’ve also been president- and VP-elect for a few days now. Have students come up to you and voiced areas of concern that they want you to address? If they have, could you name a few that have come up?
CL: I think it’s the first two [issues] that Annie mentioned: definitely free speech is something that’s been a very pressing issue in the past semesters, and then the retroactive pass/fail is something that’s a little bit more fun. I think that, especially since it’s finals season right now, people are feeling the pressure of their grades. Having the option to retroactively pass/fail would be so nice, if we get that to happen. We’re hopeful because we looked through the reasoning of the curricular committee as for why they decided to not have retroactive pass/fail, and we have things to talk back about, because we feel like what they’re saying is antithetical to the goals that they were trying to accomplish by not allowing retroactive pass/fail to happen.
AL: I agree. I also agree that retroactive pass/fail has been one of the bigger things that students have noticed, especially since, [with] academics at Swarthmore, there’s always a lot going on, and it really applies to everyone in the student body.
ES: This year’s presidential election had voter turnout of only around 12%. How do you plan to get students more involved in the work and mission of SGO on campus?
AL: I would like to highlight that with this year’s turnout, there has been an increase from the past few years. We’re gradually trying to get things better. But, we did mention on our platform that we wanted to have polls that we would send out, as well as more documentation of our meetings that we do for this semester.
Specifically, we’re trying to move our meetings to the Shane Lounge to garner more student attention. But honestly, I feel like just engaging with the student body more on social media through forums, polls, surveys, referendums, as well as maybe getting The Phoenix to come into some of our meetings and document things, would be great. Maybe even a newsletter of some sort. We’re still working it out, but we’re really hoping that we’ll be able to engage more of the student body as well as get to know more about student voices and what they want.
An additional thing that I noticed while working with DICOM is that a lot of what DICOM did was collaborate with these affinity groups around campus to help host their events and give them some additional support. I feel like, in that sense, [some of the activities we did] really aligned to some of those groups. So I feel like just increasing the collaboration between SGO and different student orgs around campus would be a good way to get the message around as to what SGO is doing and how people can give their input to us for more.
CL: I definitely feel like it’s a “What came first, chicken versus the egg?” kind of situation. I’m not quite sure if the lack of student engagement comes from disillusionment about the idea that SGO isn’t able to do much, or if SGO isn’t able to do much because we don’t have much backing from the student body. We’re trying to tackle both of those sides and hopefully come to a happy middle, where we are able to foster more engagement. Something that we really emphasized was meeting the students where they’re at. I think that the responsibility shouldn’t be on students to come find us wherever we are. We should be directly going to people and asking them exactly what they want to see from us. And we really tried to do that by tabling with our flyers — just directly going to the hub of students and talking to them.
I really do hope that people know that even though we are now elected to these positions of power, our positions as students, friends, coworkers — all of that — hasn’t changed. While our ability to create change has changed, what we stand for and our values haven’t, so we hope that [students] still feel as comfortable to come to us and feel that we have an open door.
ES: Annie, you joined SGO last year as part of the People’s Slate. Do you think the Slate has accomplished what they set out to do, and are you going to continue any of those goals into the next academic year as president?
AL: A lot of the ideology that supported the Slate and what we were then platforming does really align with what Chloe and I are planning to do next year. I don’t want to go too in depth into this. I feel like there were a lot of people within the People’s Slate, and a lot of these people came from different standpoints of certain issues and were associated with different student groups or organizations. They came together for a common platform, which is great for diverse perspectives. I think the main issue that occurred was that there was less engagement than expected coming from within the People’s Slate, and it was more difficult to come to a common ground on tangible things that we could try to achieve.
When we were initially discussing certain initiatives to be built or applied on campus, Chloe had a lot of these different perspectives from all these affinity groups that she was in, and I had my perspectives from DICOM and working deeper within the SGO community. When we were discussing goals as well as some tangible things that we could possibly be doing, [we made sure] that we were really aligned on those facts.
I do think that the ideology of the People’s Slate is really essential to the functioning of SGO, but we’re hoping that with our candidacy we can bring some of those ideologies to life by actually targeting them towards more tangible initiatives.
ES: You’ve been alluding to this question sort of throughout the interview, but how would you address concerns that it seems impossible for students to make meaningful change on campus in student government positions?
AL: Well, this also goes towards the dilemma that Chloe mentioned between the chicken and the egg and which started at first. Honestly, I think this is a longer-term issue that we need to be consistently looking at: what we as SGO can bring to the student body, and how we can meet them where they’re at. The question is how we can get the student body to expel this disillusionment that is currently there — this idea that SGO can’t really do much.
I feel like, at least for now, the way that we can address that is, as I previously mentioned, collaborating with more student groups around campus. I feel like the student groups around campus have very clear goals on what they set out to do, and they have very diverse viewpoints as well. I think that by talking, by holding more conversations with those people, we not only get a better understanding of what certain groups around campus might want, but also spread the word that we’re really trying to engage more with the student body and get more of the student body to come to us with certain concerns that they might have. We need to make it a two-way effort to increase communication and transparency.
CL: I think this is a hard question because I don’t want to invalidate people’s disillusionment towards SGO. I think historically, that is the way it has been — it’s just felt like the terms go by, and not much has seemingly changed. But I also think at the same time, as soon as we bow down to that and decide that SGO isn’t effective, that’s when it truly loses its power. What Annie and I want to do is to go back to the community and just build up as much people power as we can. I truly, truly believe in the value of people power and just how effective we can be as a student body. We have such a rich history of student activism, and I’d really like to see that brought back. I think that really making SGO’s interests align with the student body’s interests is a way for us to foster that engagement.
I think that there have been times when SGO can be seen as either this mediator between the administration and the student body, or even leaning more towards the administration and not being super assertive in what they want for the student body. We want to turn that on its head and really serve as a voice of the people.
I also think that specifically as Asian American women, we have expectations put on us to put our heads down and not rock the boat as much. But I think that we’re ready to turn that on its head and really dismantle that as well.
ES: Any final thoughts for students as we transition from this term into next year?
AL: Worthstock is coming up, so get excited for that.
Please engage. We’re holding elections for the executive board [of SGO], but also senators themselves. This is a really great chance for those not only interested in what SGO is doing to join in and run, but also for those who really align with what we’re doing and our goals and initiatives to join us and run.CL: I think it’s going to take time for us to be able to convince the student body that their voices do matter and that SGO is effective, but I hope that the student body is able to see how genuinely passionate Annie and I are about this new era. And I just want them to know, if they ever need anything, or ever want something to be changed, they can come talk to us. But if they don’t come talk to us, we’ll also come find them and talk to them, and we will meet them where they are.
