Smart Alec | Elections gone overBoard

“University politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small,” Henry Kissinger said. How true this is of our Class Board elections, which contain more vitriol throwing than an Agatha Christie novel.

Class Board elections have little intrinsic value as exercises in democracy and deter each Class Board from fulfilling its mission to bring the class together. Non-presidential Class Board elections should be discontinued.

Elections for Class Board are now almost invariably ugly affairs. Take our recent Class Board elections, which were especially scintillating. Amid accusations of corruption, fraud and malice, a simpler question ought to have been asked: Why couldn’t all of the dedicated, passionate candidates have earned seats on the Board?

It’s not as if Class Board members vote — like most Penn groups, they run by consensus. More importantly, in the eyes of the Class Board presidents, elections really mean very little in determining who is finally “on” the Boards or not.

Wharton freshman and newly elected 2014 Class President Spencer Penn declared that many of the people who lost elections who nonetheless “had a sincere desire to make Penn fun” would be allowed to come to Board meetings and participate, despite just losing their election. All three other Class Board presidents likewise agreed that interested students would be able to take part in some way in the event-planning process. Indeed, in the recent past, the Boards have begun appointing whoever they like to Board positions functionally equal to the elected positions (such as a “vice president of creative marketing”). Even people who lose elections, it seems, can be brought back on.

It would be madness to demand that the Boards get rid of these appointments — this is how they’re adapting and improving to meet the challenges of the times. But once you accept the “anyone can participate” principle, exclusive elections become impossible to justify. To put it simply: the reason for democratic elections — for the voters to shape policy by selecting officials — simply doesn’t apply to the Class Boards. The class president, which has a significant coordinating and representative role, could be said to need a democratic mandate, but this cannot be said of the rest of the Board.

Here’s an alternative model, based on the petition system of Brown University’s student government. There could be a system where all you would have to do to be on the Class Board is collect signatures from say 10 percent of your class, but the presidency would stay contested. Then, all the people who’ve petitioned their way onto the Board would work with the president to allocate roles and responsibilities based on however that Class Board saw fit.

Petitioning would forge links with the class and establish a coherent “membership” of each Board, and would be a non-stressful and non-adversarial way to take part in class planning, substantially increasing the size of each Board and with that, its capacity to plan even more events for the class. The Board could recruit for the whole year, and the system would give each class the flexibility to design its own internal structure as that class saw fit. Democracy, such as it was, would be preserved in a class presidential election.

More importantly, eliminating most elections would seek out the people College and Wharton sophomore and Class of 2013 President Jonathon Youshaei called “those hidden gems,” who detest elections but sincerely want to plan class events, and make them part of what has hitherto been an exclusive organization. Boards could recruit members as needed from schools or areas that were underrepresented.

The best part is that reform is in the hands of the Class Boards themselves, after the recent referendum gave them the power to alter their own constitutions. They have the power to make University politics less vicious and further unite their classes. They should begin now.

Alec Webley is a College senior from Melbourne, Australia. He is the former chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly. His e-mail address is webley@theDP.com. Smart Alec appears on Thursdays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.