Candidates want more minority representation in student govt.

College freshman Chris Cruz wants to be the first Latino class president. And he’s not the only freshman hoping to boost the representation of a specific group.

When the Nominations and Elections Committee surveyed the 55 freshmen running for positions on the Undergraduate Assembly and Class of 2013 Board, a third of the 33 respondents self-identified as white, 42 percent identified as Asian, 6 percent as black and 12 percent as being of two or more races.

Since the NEC has not asked candidates to identify racial background in the past, NEC Vice Chairwoman for elections and Wharton senior Patricia Liu explained, she can’t draw any comparisons to past years’ elections.

Still, College junior Janice Dow, chairwoman of the United Minorities Council, believes these statistics are promising.

“Every year, the turnout [of minority students] gets bigger and better,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Cruz, who is running for both the UA and Class Board president, said Latinos are underrepresented. He did not know of any other Latino students running for Class Board or UA positions.

Latino underrepresentation “has been a concern for the Latino Coalition,” Latino Coalition Chairman and College junior Cris Barrios said. “We hold informational sessions with student government to get more people to apply.”

Wharton freshman Dennis Johnson, who self-identifies as black and is running for Wharton Class Chairman and the UA, said he knows of only two other black students running.

“I want to give [black students at Penn] another voice,” he said. “This is an opportunity to push for what we need on campus.” He emphasized that black students make up 9 percent of Penn’s undergraduate body.

UMOJA Chairman and College junior Ryan Jobson said Penn’s black community has had a good success rate in terms of representation on student government, but a lot of black students find other platforms for discussing political issues on campus.

“None of us are interested in diversity through tokenism — we are more interested in seeing diversity in perspective,” he added. “It’s not about the numbers.”

More women are running for class board positions this year than last year, although fewer are running for UA positions. Last year, 10 out of 27 freshman class board candidates were women. None, however, ran for president. Ten out of 34 UA candidates were female.

This year, 19 out of 42 freshmen running for class board are women, as are eight out of 28 candidates for UA.

“Half of the Class Board presidential candidates are female, a rather significant fact considering that for the past eight election cycles the race has been dominated and won by males,” Liu wrote in an e-mail.

“Sometimes freshmen get a little intimidated by the enormity of the school,” said College senior Rosa Cui, the Penn Consortium of Undergraduate Women chairwoman. She added that freshman women might be more likely to run if they see women on the UA or Class Board.

Wharton freshman Laura Bilder, running for Wharton representative, said the elections should be an equal playing field.

“The lack of girls in student government inspired a lot of us to run,” she said.

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