VIO | Blog Row

Last Thursday’s Student Assembly elections resulted in the voting in of a new SA executive — or did it?

Former SA President Zach Pilchen (’09) has now become the newly elected SA vice president. Former Vice President Valerie Hopkins (’09) has now become the newly elected SA president. While Mr. Pilchen had promised to be president for only one term, I don’t know if this was exactly what people understood it to mean. Now, I’m not in the SA and am not always privy to its intellectual back-and-forth or general intrigue — including, but not limited to, Matt Skibiak’s drunken abuse of the Senate’s listserv (”Hey y’all! Party on and I endorse Val and Zach! Probably shouldn’t say that, but whatever. I’m a senior so eff you!”) — but I question Mr. Pilchen’s trading places with his former vice president.

While this trade arguably affords Madame President Hopkins the opportunity to truly prove herself as a student executive, I’m wondering about any possible differences between a Pilchen / Hopkins v. a Hopkins / Pilchen administration. The problem is, I can’t really think of any — at least in substance.

I think it would have been better for Ms. Hopkins to do more during the campaign to differentiate herself from her running mate, who naturally overshadows her simply because he has already held the position for which she was running. The obvious response to that, however, is that this differentiation was simply unnecessary given the fact that: 1) everyone knows Zach and Valerie, and the key to winning any SA election is name recognition; and 2) their opponents — who, it appears, decided to run their campaign on a wave of idiocy and inexperience — had absolutely no chance of actually winning. The final vote totals favored Hopkins / Pilchen 70% to 25%, the remaining 5% going to write-in candidates.

I voted for the two of them both in this election and in the last, and I don’t regret it. In any case, the fact that Mr. Pilchen and Ms. Hopkins decided to run the SA equivalent of a Chinese fire drill seems more for show than for substance. We’ll have to wait until the next year to see if I’m right.

[NCF]