Candidates emailed potential supporters and broke out the sidewalk chalk Monday after officially launching their campaigns for the presidency of Northwestern’s Associated Student Government.
After unofficially campaigning throughout Winter Quarter, presidential hopefuls announced their candidacy and immediately began “non-verbal campaigning,” which ASG election guidelines define as the use of any written materials, ranging from chalking to opening an official Facebook page.
The three presidential tickets are: Weinberg junior Victor Shao and Medill junior Brad Stewart, SESP junior Kameron Dodge and Weinberg junior Steven Monacelli, and Weinberg juniors Dan Tully and Jeziel Jones. Each team has 10 days during which to campaign before Election Day on April 11.
Shao and Stewart said their primary goal is increased campus communication and greater freedom of student expression. Campaigning under the slogan “Express Yourself,” the duo often brought a chalkboard to meetings with student leaders during Winter Quarter, asking them to write down how they voiced their thoughts.
“Our campaign in general is all about expression,” said Stewart, who is the pair’s vice presidential candidate. “ASG is often seen as being out of touch with the average student’s needs, and we want to change that.”
In order to accomplish the goal, Shao and Stewart said they hope to create a website to which students can submit proposals for improving their NU experience. According to Stewart, the concept would be similar to the popular social news website reddit, which allows users to vote certain posts up or down depending on how much they like them.
Shao, who is also an ASG senator and vice president of finance for Delta Upsilon fraternity, said the pair’s past experiences in student life would help them transition into their leadership roles.
“We are confident that we’ve done our homework and that we are prepared for the job,” Shao said. “Given the diversity of NU experiences and passions, it has to be ASG’s role to adapt to that culture and make sure that it is the best that it can be.”
Monacelli and Dodge also stressed the need for a ticket that would understand various dynamics on campus. This led them to forgo the position of vice president and run as two equal candidates. Dodge, a leader in Dance Marathon and CATalyst, would work with the broader student body while Monacelli, a former ASG senator, would be in charge of internal ASG affairs.
“You could think of it as student body president and student government president,” Monacelli said. “The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but we each have our own focus.”
The two presidential hopefuls said their planned initiatives would target two separate, yet related, spheres of the NU community. Dodge discussed the creation of a program to bridge the gap between ASG and student group leaders, which could help groups unaffiliated with ASG seek information from the student government. Meanwhile, Monacelli emphasized the importance of frequent attendance at ASG Senate, saying he wanted to “set the bar higher” and possibly impose penalties for missing Senate meetings.
But Tully and Jones said they do not think the next president should focus on the internal workings of ASG. Running under the slogan “Grow NU Connections,” the pair hopes to combat what Tully calls the “Sheridan Road effect.”
“When you’re walking up and down Sheridan and you see a Northwestern student you don’t know, you look away and you try not to interact,” Tully said. “But when we use our cell phones as shields to prevent that connection from taking place, the whole community is affected.”
To resolve this problem, Tully supports the creation of an ASG task force devoted only to greeting unfamiliar students. Tully said although some students have labeled this “ridiculous,” he thought it was equally ridiculous to live in a divided and unfriendly community.
Tully said ASG did a “relatively good job” in its administrative duties, and that its primary focus should be on building relationships with the student body. Recalling his freshman year in ASG, he said he objected to the Senate’s focus on procedural matters and purely internal issues.
“You hear talk all the time of resume padding and kids playing dress-up in ASG. I don’t want to play dress-up,” Tully said. “ASG is only important as long as it is relevant to students.”
Each pair of candidates plans to attend the ASG presidential debates, which will stretch from April 4 to April 9, two days before Election Day.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated Steven Monacelli’s role within ASG. He is a former senator and the current vice president of community relations. The Daily regrets the error.
