Everyone Loses in SA Elections

Friday, May 5, 2006

The results are in, and another Student Assembly election season has come and gone with no one the wiser for it. Jacqueline Loeb achieved a comfortable victory for Student Body VP. The ’07 class elected Jacob Crumbine president and Chris Fiore vice president, while the ’09 class selected Ann Rittgers and Rembert Browne. The student body also elected a slew of largely anonymous representatives to the Committee on Standards, the Organizational Adjudication Committee, the Green Key Society, and to the individual classes’ assemblies.

The surprise of the election was the victory of write-in candidate Tim Andreadis for Student Body President. In the first round of voting he received 1,025 votes, a substantial 448 ahead of second-place David Zubricki. However, this number is only about a quarter of the undergraduate population.

Andreadis’s victory is an unfortunate reflection on the misguided whims of the student population, as even a cursory look at his platform reveals. A primary focus of his campaign was bandying around a statistic, which Andreadis conjured himself, that women at Dartmouth have a 17% chance of being sexually assaulted before graduating. While this is a serious issue, fear-mongering is useless in addressing the problem. And Andreadis arrived at this number using an estimate from The Daily D, which he lambastes in the very same platform for having “low journalistic integrity” and “blatant disregard of student opinion.”

Andreadis does offer a way for SA to combat sexual assault: mapping the entire campus into zones, tabulating assaults in each, and publishing this information. This plan obscures its eerie similarity to the division of Berlin with the title “Zoning In On Responsibility.” Under this plan, it is only a matter of time before higher-assault zones become destitute slums, filled with crumbling buildings, mangy unkempt randos, and open sewers. Before we know it, East Wheelock will become a safe zone, since recent events indicate that little sex of any kind is condoned there. Signs reading, “You Are Leaving the East Wheelock Sector,” are not far behind.

The miscellany of Mr. Andreadis’ campaign points reveals fiscal irresponsibility, obligatory nods to women and minorities, and a disregard for the liberal arts. Mr. Andreadis suggests giving more money (at the expense of SA) to COSO, where it will presumably be wasted on over-programming and pizza. He also contends that, “Recruitment and retention of women and minorities in the Faculty, Administration, and Staff are despicably low. Even worse, the administration refuses to acknowledge this problem.” Mr. Andreadis must have forgotten about the Office of Pluralism and Leadership and the rest of the too-diverse-to-remember alphabet soup. On top of this, Mr. Andreadis also advocates strengthening interdisciplinary programs, which include LGBT Studies (as well as BLT Studies at Food Court). But really, the assertion that these programs “are fighting an uphill battle” is a shameful mockery.

In short, Mr. Andreadis represents much of what is wrong with the current attitudes in Dartmouth’s student body. He will propagate fear, hate, and irresponsibility in the name of social justice, whatever that is. The saving grace of his victory is that the Student Assembly is an impotent farce of representative government, as its new leader aptly demonstrates.

Everyone Loses in SA Elections

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