The following are excerpts from an interview conducted by The Daily Pennsylvanian editorial board on Monday with Matthew Lattman, Seth Schreiberg and Aaron Short, three candidates for the position of Undergraduate Assembly chairman. At the time of the interview, Ethan Kay had not yet declared his intention to run.
Opening statements
Aaron Short: 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.
Seth Schreiberg: 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.
Matthew Lattman: We need to increase our presence within our own academic schools, while at the same time seek out groups underrepresented on this campus.
Daily Pennsylvanian: What do you hope to accomplish this year as chair?
Schreiberg: 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.
Lattman: I believe we have a problem connecting with the other five branches of student government. The one that I'd like to highlight is [the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education].
Short: ...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.
DP: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the UA in the coming year?
Lattman: We have a really dynamic group of people for next year and I think that some of the biggest challenges are going to be to try to shape this group of people coming from different backgrounds and different positions with very different goals for the UA to work together to really accomplish good things.
Short: There are personal agendas that are going to be coming up already and I can sort of see the factions developing early, and I think we really need to prevent that from happening too much....
Schreiberg: We need to respect each other. We can't have debates, we can't have discussions, we can't pursue anything if people don't respect each other. That's a challenge I look forward to facing.
DP: What kind of relationship should the UA have with the University administration?
Schreiberg: Too often, we go in too willing to compromise, too willing to find out, what will they give us? And then we ask for that in return and we chalk it up as some major accomplishment when really we just did what they were going to do anyway.
Lattman: For years, the UA has been considered spineless when it comes to the administration and that's something that I think all three of us agree needs to change.
Short: I think that we need to keep the professionalism and the dignity and respect that we have with administrators so we can keep what has been a good relationship flourishing.
DP: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this year's UA.
Lattman: I think one of our weaknesses was that we weren't really able to bring about anything more than deliberation, and I think that that starts with the chair.... When you have eight freshmen coming in every year..., they should not be stifled, and often we stifle those eight freshman leaders.
Short: We never really addressed what our purpose was and why we were here. We just sort of picked issues and said, OK, we'll deal with issues on a case-by-case basis. I don't think that's the best way of leading and of using the UA to the best of its abilities.
Schreiberg: The main weakness... is that we don't have much to show in accomplishments for this year. ...We didn't finish strong this year -- we didn't even start strong, and I don't think we were ever as strong as we could have been throughout the year.
DP: Outgoing chairwoman Dana Hork expressed a desire to focus on "smaller, tangible" things. Has the UA done so, and is this a good strategy?
Short: My strategy would be different. I would try to establish a larger philosophy so we get our general purpose and from that extract the proposals, big or small, that we can try to achieve our goals that way.
Schreiberg: I see baby projects or small issues as the fuel of the engine. It gets people going, it gets things moving, it gets people motivated, it gets them involved in the UA -- it's like, hey, I got something done.
Lattman: Again, the key is research, and unless people are willing to do the research, we won't be able to fight big battles. So yes, small projects are necessary for individual members but we must all work together to research things properly to fight the big battles.
DP: How do you explain the high turnover in this year's UA and the dissatisfaction expressed by a number of former members? How would you deal with the problems that led to this dissatisfaction?
Schreiberg: It's because we didn't accomplish much. We had a structure that wasn't conducive to accomplishing goals. We had a body that wasn't encouraged to act and we had a talented pool of members that in large part went to waste.
Lattman: I think another reason that a lot of members chose not to run again was that we had a lack of respect at the meetings, and again, one of the major things that I think would improve the respect at the meetings is a clear focus on parliamentary procedure.
Short: I think it just wasn't a fun place to be on Sunday night.... A lot of people wanted to work more in their class board system because they found that event planning was something they wanted to do instead of being yelled at....
DP: What are your thoughts on the accusation that the UA is hesitant to deal with issues relating to race?
Lattman: I think that yes, it does make people uncomfortable to deal with such highly-charged issues of race. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't deal with them.
Short: I think that this stems from a larger problem where we might see race and race relations as just a minority issue, and I think that's dangerous for us to do.
Schreiberg: The chair last year said it would be a priority of hers to make minority issues prominent on the agenda, and she did not do that. She was resistant to it. That will not happen again next year if I'm chair.
DP: What would you say to people who feel the UA is a shallow and ineffective body?
Short: Our problem is that we're too reflective and possibly too deep and too inactive. So those would be some of the changes that I would like to make, is to try to get the UA to be more activist.
Schreiberg: ...We haven't reached our potential in any way, but we aren't wholly ineffective. When we tackle issues with research, with well-thought-out arguments, with a lot of support from the body, with respect for each other, with support from other groups across campus, we will be effective.
Lattman: We've moved away from being shallow. ... As far as the ineffective claims, I think we, while we're not wholly ineffective, I think that we're guilty of not thinking outside the box.
DP: What stands in the way of students effecting change on campus? Is this merely a problem with the structure of student government, or is it an indication of wider student apathy?
Schreiberg: I think students will care when we give them reason to care.... We're here for four years, and if you're an administrator thinking in terms of 10 years or 15 years or 20 years and you have students who are going to bitch for four years and then leave, then it's very easy to dismiss us.
Lattman: The reason I think why there is apathy and people feel the UA doesn't do anything is because we're coming up with the same things every year. We're wasting our time and we're wasting the students' time.
Short: The more people who feel active, who feel a part of the student government family, the more likely that they're going to feel ownership in student government and in Penn itself.
DP: What would you bring to this position that is unique in comparison to the other candidates for this position?
Lattman: I feel that I would bring that to the UA as chair. I feel that, again, it's important that we treat the UA as 33 individual leaders rather than one chair and 32 subsidiaries.... I'm not a politician, I don't pretend to be....
Short: I think that I'm beginning to realize that I'm not running just for myself but I'm running for many other people and many other different communities on campus.... My broad involvement in a variety of different areas on campus, outside of the UA, has given me outside perspective....
Schreiberg: I'm a hard worker in that sense. I'm dedicated to doing the job right. But I'm also a dreamer. I also believe in doing things in such a different manner to sort of get away from the politicking that goes on. ... We're students. We can be accessible, we can have a good time, and we can do great things....
