ND tickets unleash campaign
By JASON McFARLEY
News Writer
There's the serious.
Pat Hallahan and running mate Jeremy Lao want to start a "Theology on Tap" program that promotes religious discussion between students and professors at the revamped Alumni-Senior Club.
And there's the flippant.
Ryan Gagnet and John McCarthy propose a "ginormous" underground chunnel (that's channel plus tunnel) connecting Notre Dame and Saint Mary's, and the pair supports a tuition spike that would fund note-taking, beer-swilling helper monkeys for every student.
But amid the extremes, almost all of the tickets for Notre Dame student body president and vice president this year have designed platforms that reach the middle ground between the consequential and the comical. Undergraduate students next week will elect one of seven tickets: Mike Bott and Mike Kirsh, Charlie Ebersol and Lauren Meagher, Gagnet and McCarthy, Hallahan and Lao, Joe Muto and Mimi Matkowski, Matt Padberg and David Rail or Drew Updike and Eric Tarnowski.
For the presidential candidates in particular, their campaign goals provide insight into the precarious question of what student government is for – policy or programming?
Over the past several years, the Office of the Student Body President has fallen on different sides of the debate. In 2001-02, Brooke Norton was a programming president. Her office planned campus fairs and other social and cultural events, but Norton, the school's first female student body president, effected little official change and rarely took a public stand on issues that riled her constituents.
By design, Norton's successor, Libby Bishop, has been a policy president. Bishop last year ran on a platform that promised little programming and lots of tough talk with administrators. And two years ago, 2000-01 President Brian O'Donoghue fell somewhere in between, striking a balance between shaping policy and sponsoring campus activities.
The president's office, by its very nature, lends itself to influencing policy over creating programming. The student body president chairs the prominent Campus Life Council, serves as the only student member on powerful University committees and gets regular face-time with school officials.
But at the same time, few presidents can stay away from event planning. Even Bishop organized a week-long series of campus activities last fall to celebrate the 30th anniversary of coeducation at Notre Dame.
This year's candidates, for the most part, are linked by one policy initiative: reinstating in-dorm dances.
Six campaigns say they will lobby administrators and the Board of Trustees to return dances to the school's 27 residence halls. Only the Matt Padberg-David Rail ticket, whose singular focus is "more Flex Points," lacks a stance on the issue.
Five of the campaigns promise more convenient meal plans, although they differ on how to achieve the goal. And most of the candidates support public disclosure of results from Teacher Course Evaluations that students complete each semester. The Hallahan-Lao ticket is running on clearly the most policy-oriented platform. Among other goals, Hallahan, who is Bishop's chief of staff, and Lao, the sophomore class president, propose opening student government financial records to the public, increasing funding to service and spirituality projects and creating discussion-based courses on diversity.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Muto-Matkowski ticket recommends various programming to improve campus life – an academic decathlon between Notre Dame and Saint Mary's women, a Halloween costume contest and a "summer send-off" party on the last day of classes.
Along the same programming lines, Ebersol and running mate Meagher call for improved pep rallies, dinner theater in South Dining Hall and even say they can bring Top 40 bands and big-name speakers and comedians to campus.
The admitted "basically lacking all hope" ticket of Gagnet and McCarthy proposes a different sort of activity for students: escaping stringent security checkpoints across campus and, as part of ResLife punishment, helping build an Egyptian-style pyramid to replace Stepan Center. Gagnet and McCarthy join Padberg and Rail as the so-called joke tickets in this year's election.
The apparent front-runners – the tickets of Ebersol-Meagher and Hallahan-Lao – come closest to balancing the policy and programming demands inherent in the Office of the Student Body President. Dark horses Bott-Kirsh, Muto-Matkowski and Updike-Tarnowski offer platforms that lean primarily toward programming interests. If the policy versus programming debate proves significant in this year's race, then that leaves voters with an important question: Will elected leaders best improve student life at the bargaining table with administrators or through planning attractive new activities?
Or both?
Students can vote Monday in the online election from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
All News Stories for Thursday, February 6, 2003
