Yang's Ticket to Run Unopposed

After years of cutthroat council battles, Sue Yang’s greatest opponent may very well be student apathy.

This weekend, Yang, who is junior class vice president and CC ’10, revealed her ticket Action Potential as its members filed to become candidates in the upcoming Columbia College Student Council elections. They will run uncontested, and for a council that has had close and bloody elections in recent years, it might not be politics as usual for Action Potential.
The Action Potential ticket is composed of relative council outsiders, a team of student leaders culled from different areas of campus life who may be less familiar with the Satow Room than previous candidates.

After floating the idea of running past Sarah Weiss, another junior Yang had met in the Columbia Urban Experience, the two began to reach out to student leaders who might be interested in joining the ticket. Weiss, head of CUE, was one of two students to serve on the search committee that selected Columbia College Dean Michele Moody-Adams, and has held leadership positions in the Barnard/Columbia Hillel.

“We wanted to find people who shared our personality too,” Yang said. “We like to have fun. None of us are really politically motivated at all, so we wanted to go out there and find people who shared that same kind of energy.”

While it was difficult to drag away some student leaders who were already committed to their own posts, Yang finally pulled together a ticket consisting of Weiss; Nuriel Moghavem, CC ’11, who has had experience as representative-at-large at the Activities Board at Columbia and treasurer of CIRCA; Deysy Ordonez, CC ’10, who is president of the dance group Sabor, and the treasurer of Student Organization of Latinos and the Secretary of Organization of Pakistani Students; and Student Governing Board representative and Ahimsa Intergroup Chair Sana Khalid, CC ’11.

“It feels like all the planets and stars have aligned,” Yang said, though she did acknowledge that the ticket didn’t represent every facet of campus.

Moghavem, the candidate for vice president of funding, met Yang during their time as leaders with the Undergraduate Recruitment Committee, and she had heard his name thrown around by mutual acquaintances. “I was sitting in my room one day and I got an e-mail from Sue,” he said.

“I really thought it was time for us to bring in some new perspective to the council,” Yang said.

Moghavem said he thinks bringing in candidates with limited council experience will allow for a fresh view and a possibly more active future council.

To beef up on campus political know-how, ticket members are working to educate themselves, appealing to council members, students, and alumni resources on how to best fit into their jobs when the time comes to take office.

While the ticket is running unopposed, the candidates say that their greatest opponent may be the indifference from student voters that seems to have permeated the elections in recent years. Hoping to launch something of a “grassroots” campaign, the candidates see their job as one to keep students as engaged and excited half-hearted voters.

But without the need to beat out another ticket, Yang said Action Potential could focus on the positive outreach portions of campaigning while leaving behind the negative aspects.
“I don’t think we need to print out a thousand fliers,” Moghavem said, instead underlining his commitment to engaging students, and “finding out exactly where the opponents are.”
“We still have a long campaign ahead of us,” Yang conceded.

Elections Chair James Bogner, CC ’10, said that while it is unclear how the campaigning rules themselves will be determined in a one-party election—those, he said, would be up to the party to decide—a change in the debate format, which had been mentioned even prior to the candidate filings, should be in the works in the coming weeks.

“We would want to move...more toward a kind of town hall meeting where the candidates can field questions,” Bogner said, later continuing, “You change the debate format ever so slightly to hopefully allow parties to have more of a conversation and really dive deeper into the issues.”

The election for the 2011 class council is also uncontested, and the Elections Board may have to make some similar accommodations.

“It’ll become a greater responsibility for the Elections Board as well as the party to take some control over the situation because in the past...The fear has always been that to change it [the debate format] would be to allow chaos to ensue,” Bogner said. Instead, he said, they were “hoping to get a little more out of it.”

The class of 2010 Clear Party ticket is headed by Cliff Massey, CC ’10 and a candidate for vice president student life on last year’s Connect Columbia E-board ticket. He will go up against The Party, where junior class president AJ Pascua is gunning for a re-election. The 2012 class council races are the most contested of election, with five separate parties vying for a win.