From attacking a "sausagefest" to pictures of students urinating on Princeton's crest, this year's freshman-election campaign posters set a new bar for superficiality. And what the mildly amusing posters make abundantly clear is that Penn's freshman fall elections are focusing more on rhetoric and less on substance.
Still, Undergraduate Assembly officials don't seem worried. Instead, UA chairman Jason Karsh optimistically commented that candidates are showing their "good sense of how to market their names." Exactly.
But, last time we checked, UA members aren't elected for their marketing abilities. They're supposed to be student leaders. And the UA does a great disservice to its own credibility by suggesting that an election run purely on flashy flyers will produce student representatives capable of affecting real change.
This year's election gimmicks demonstrate that most freshmen candidates don't take their classmates seriously enough to run campaigns based on real issues. But who can blame them? After all, most freshmen have only lived on campus for less than a month when elections begin. They've barely figured out where Logan Hall is, let alone that Penn Dining sucks (which is the wildly innovative platform that many of them are running on).
Little wonder that most freshmen vote for the candidate with the most memorable name. (go Sami "Beard" Ahmed!). The UA practically begs them to.
The solution? Move future freshman elections to December to give the incoming class time to identify real opportunities for improvement at Penn. Then make them run again in April. Freshmen would lose representation for the fall, but given the nature of this campaign, does it really mater?
With a semester under their belt, the freshman class would be less receptive to candidates with catchy slogans. Instead, they would choose candidates based on the strength of their ideas, and that's exactly what the UA needs.
