Opening Statements Aaron Short: I was always interested in the UA. Coming to Penn, I wanted to make a difference, at least to do my small part to make a difference. I think I've been able to do that the past couple of years, and I've enjoyed the experience I've had on the UA. I've met a lot of cool people. But I think that the way the leadership has been run the past few years, I think there are some changes to be made and I'd like to embrace those changes.
I'm the student activist and student advocate candidate: I'd be an advocate for student issues and an activist on the UA that would help push the UA to be a more activist body. I want to see the UA respond more readily to student group concerns and student concerns than we have in the past.
While the students have been disaffected by the UA and having a chair who cares about a variety of different issues in all sorts of perspectives and on all sorts of different kinds of students would be a great benefit to the UA and to the leadership and to the student body, and I feel that I embody that most.
I think that through my leadership we would be be able to bring the UA back in focus towards our constituents and this past year we focused a lot on ourselves much to the detriment of our constituents, and there have been concerns out there and we've just been ignoring them.
We need to go out and we need to get branches of communication, not just with our other peer student group or other peer student government organizations, but among all sorts of leaders and communities, whether they're athletes, or women, performing arts groups, or SAC groups, or religious groups or any combination of those. I think we need to respect the leaders that are out there and we need to establish more communications and more open channels of response and of communication so that we can be a more effective body and more in touch with our students and with our student peers.
I think that my involvement on campus for the past three years has made me the best candidate. In terms of establishing all kinds of open channels, I've worked with a variety of different types of student leaders, and I feel that my background can at least help set up a precedent and help set a tone for the top of the UA to consider everyone to be a part of the student government family and not just the UA. I'm the student's chair. I'm running for all the students out there who need the UA's help to make life on campus better for them and for their organizations. I've received a lot of support in the past few years and I think it's time, it's important to give something back and the best way to do that is to direct the student government to be more activist and to advocate under issues, always, in place of our own interests and in place of our own personal agendas. So that's my response. Thank you.
Seth Schreiberg: There's a saying in Chicago about the Cubs: they say wait til next year. I sense a general frustration that I'm sure you'll hear on part of all three of us tonight -- that the body wasn't what it could have been. There's a lot open and a lot of promise of what we can do. Last semester, I was at the point of ultimate frustration where I almost quit. Over Christmas break I talked to my parents and they said: "When you're a part of something you don't just quit because things were going bad. You have to really make sure it's something you care about and you want to make it better and you want to fix it." And being that they're my parents, I listened. And being the little bitch that I am, I said "Well, how can I make the UA better?" I think that I've figured out how to take the UA not back where it has been, not where it was this year, to unprecedented heights and I think there are two main ways to do that that I'd like to briefly touch on. One is management, and the other is involvement. Management starts at the top, with exec. The executive committee needs to have expanded roles less based on their title. The exec board is five members who have lots of power and lots of decision-making authority, and there's no reason that the chair is the ultimate arbiter of everything. Everything should be at least an attempt at a consensus from the exec, but obviously there are majority issues involved there, too. It involves not being beholdened to the idea that the vice chair is solely responsible for internal issues or the treasurer is solely responsible for budget issues, but five people working together with the committee chairs to make sure that everyone is working as hard as they can to better the body. The committee chairs, they need to be more managers. The committee chairs often have great ideas, and they want to pursue them, but when you're committee chair, you're managing seven people who all have their own ideas, too. If you get too tied down to what you're doing and what your interests are you run the risks of saying to those other seven members 'Well, wait, what about us?' Committee chairs who are managers are very much involved in what everyone is doing, and they make the body better and bring seven other people in along with them. I look back on Ethan Kay as my mentor in that sense. He was my student life committee chair my first year on the UA, and he made sure that we were always working on issues and we were always on top of things, and the Stud[ent] life [committee] rocked the house! We were dominant that year, and Aaron and I, the alum of that committee, and I'm very proud of what we did two years ago. Then, the other part of management is steering and Coop, which is a program that not too many people know about and hasn't been implemented and hasn't been effective so far. Steering needs to be a more collaborative group and more cooperative group than they are. We need to have weekly steering meetings, not monthly. We need the input of all the student government branches. It's not about stepping on people's toes, it's about saying "what can we do together? What can the UA and SAC do to help student groups? What can the UA and SCUE do to pursue academic interests, which we have been very bad at the past few years." It's also about getting other groups involved around campus which have been traditionally part of Steering. That includes the Minority Coalition, the IFC, Panhel. I would expand it to include LGBT, because they have definitely been underrepresented. I think that would take me into delegations, which is obviously been a central component of this thing, into involvement of everybody. We need to bring everybody together for a common purpose. It involves social events, it involves learning how to respect each other for their opinions, working together for a common understanding, to make sure we know where each other are coming from. Not that we need to agree all the time, but that we can sit at a meeting and we can discuss things without resorting to pettiness and without commenting on personal agendas, like Aaron mentioned, which has been a problem. We need to remember that we are working for everyone and not just for ourselves. If we do that to involving everyone, to involving individual members, to getting committee chairs more involved, to getting exec more involved, I think there will be no shortage of issues to deal with and no shortage of potential that we can reach. We need to be more progressive, we need to be more activist. We cannot be the status quo, which is where we have been. We need to challenge what goes on on this campus and make changes. There is no reason that we cannot do almost everything that we want to do.
Matthew Lattman: I want to try to walk you through my vision for how I believe our body should function. First, let me discuss a project that I believe that I should work on to better facilitate the rest of the UA. The Trustees of the University have established that the UA has a right to request any document from any administrator. Do we act on this? No. If we asked an administrator to follow through on this, would it happen? Probably not. Projects that I have attempted to work on this year have been stifled simply for the lack of knowledge and the lack of ability for me to receive good information. By forcing the administration to act in good faith, I will help the UA to act as better representatives. In doing so, I will allow for us to work more effectively on harder, important issues such as tuition, financial aid, undergraduate resources and campus improvements. Secondly, we are a constantly evolving body as a student body. As a result, the needs of such a student body changes from year to year. Our committee system has become old and outdated, and as a result, needs to be repaired. It must be strong enough to ensure accountability but must not exist purely for the sake of existing. I would love to replace the West Philadelphia committee, of which I was chair this year, with a standing pluralism committee, replace Communications with a true external relations committee and at the same time, redefine the roles of the Student Life and Facilities committees. The pluralism committee would be charged with the issues of diversity involving gender, religion, race, sexuality, culture, views and anything else that we can think of that people have issues with between different groups. The external relations committee would work to present the UA to the student body, present Penn to other student governments and present the administrators to the students. Lastly, student life would add on educational components, such as grad student unionization and increasing our relationship with such bodies such as SCUE, while facilities would take on such issues such as dining currently in the student life domain. Such a structure would serve to truly mobilize us on the issues that will face this campus over the next year. Lastly, I will work to make the UA more accessible. One should not feel as if the chair is the only person who can be spoken with on the UA. We are all representatives. We need to increase our presence within our own academic schools, while at the same time seek out groups underrepresented on this campus. However, few of these -- if any at all -- will be my projects. These will truly be the UA's projects. A professor once said to me that the mark of a true leader is that they find success in the production of their group, not in their personal achievement. I want all of the UA to stand up as leaders and I'm not afraid to help them do so.
Daily Pennsylvanian: What do you hope to accomplish this year as chair? Be specific. Schreiberg: "Specifically, it's a framework I want to set in place that hasn't been there before. It's a framework of cooperation, collaboration and involvement. It means that you get members who get alienated and isolated and confused by what goes on to care about the UA. You get people to treat the body seriously. And then when you get people within the UA to treat the body more seriously, you will accomplish things that will then make the people outside the UA treat us more seriously. It involves working with other groups a lot more than we do. We need to implement COOP effectively. We need to get liaisons to other student groups. We need to work with people. We are not the only voice of students on campus and it would be foolish to think of ourselves that way. Specific issues that I know will come up next year -- working on Sports Club Council funding yet again. I was the treasurer, I worked on SAC exec, it needs to happen. There needs to be a change in the way sports clubs are funded because they are eating away at the limited resources of SAC. Performing arts, again an issue -- it always will be. There was more money granted to performing arts this year, but it will never be enough because performing arts will always continue to expand and space will always continue to be an issue. I know that study abroad has not been resolved yet. I'd like to work on that to get tuition -- if not set differently -- at least get the translation of grades fixed. It's terrible that we do things differently than most of the other Ivy League schools. I'd like to look into the drug policy recently changed by Yale, whereas now I think there's a precedent set for us expanding our drug policy to allow Penn to grant money to those who lose federal money because of drug convictions. I think that we should look into SCUE-related issues, such as extending the drop period. We should continue to look into the Penn Shuttle and how to improve it, not only their scope and range and time, but also their tendency to hit students. I think there's also changes that can be made to New Student Orientation to get freshmen more acclimated to a lot of the mental health issues that happen within the first few months of college. I know Aaron and I did a lot of work last year with getting peer health educators involved in NSO, and I think we should continue that.
Lattman: Since there's only 90 seconds, I'll try to just cover four things real quick. One of them is that I believe we have a problem connecting with the other five branches of student government. The one that I'd like to highlight is SCUE. SCUE is a body that does very effective work within the College of Arts and Sciences. However, due to the way that they're currently structured, they have I believe three Wharton reps, two Engineers and maybe one Nurse. They're not currently representing the undergraduate needs of the students in those three schools, and I would work very closely with Jacob to make sure that those students in those schools know that there is SCUE that they can go to and have help with their educational issues. Secondly, we learned recently that there would be a Pottruck fee increase added, which was $200. Now at this point, there's not much that we can do about it. However, the issue brings something up. We were originally told that we would be able to have access to the documents. We were told that the fee would be $150. It started out as $75, went to $150 and is now $200, and we've never seen a document. We were told every time that we asked for them that we'll get it, we'll get it, we'll get it, and we've never gotten it. Again, the Trustees have told us that we can have these documents. I will work to make sure that we have access to everything that we need to become effective members. We're 33 people without a staff, and we need to have as much access to documents as we possibly can in order to work effectively. Thirdly, I believe that religious groups on this campus are underrepresented, and I will work hard to enact some sort of mechanism to separate the cultural aspects of the groups from the religious aspects of the groups so that we can effectively support those cultural aspects and what they bring in. And the last thing is that, again, I touched on the committee reorganization structure in my opening. I think that as our student body evolved, we have to constantly look for new ways to allow issues to be brought into our current committee structure and effectively dealt with within the current structure without having to create an ad hoc committee every six months.
Short: I think there are two general things that the UA exec board needs to work on right in the beginning of the year, one of which is to set the tone for the rest of the year, sort of establish what the philosophy is of the UA, and what the theory is and what the purpose is of the UA in terms of improving campus life and undergraduate life on campus. We need to do this in the beginning of the year, and after that, after we've established what the purpose is of the UA in terms of representing students, we draw from that some of the main areas of improving student life on campus, whether it has to do with housing or health or athletics or Greek life or religious life or anything like that, and from there the issues can follow and we can assign particular types of areas, particular types of fields into our committee structure. So I'd like to start by establishing a new framework at the beginning of the year. I think the second greatest challenge -- these are the two challenges -- is to get the UA to work together really well. We have an extremely diverse group of people coming in. It's an older body than we've had in the past, so there are going to be people with lots of different experiences coming in, and it'll be a very big challenge to get this group to work together. As for some of the big issues that we'll probably be facing, the Civilian Review Board is, I think, the top priority of the UA right now. We really need to follow that through and hopefully change some strategy with that. Also, comprehensive financial aid proposals -- I'd really like to see some major financial aid changes before I graduate here, because it's so important to me and for some many other people here. Reevaluating Student Health Service and improving quality of Student Health and integrating mental health, including that new group Open Minds in with the rest of the health communities and with New Student Orientation. Assuring that there is adequate space for performing arts groups and minority resource centers -- that's going to be coming up near the end of the year next year. Also, following through on the dining proposal, following through on our inputs to the college house and high rise renovations, which are exceedingly important for upperclassmen and Super Block, and expanding external relations with other Philadelphia area colleges and with other colleges around the Ivy League so we can keep generating ideas and improvements for the way that we work our structure and for the way that we approach issues.
