Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senator and presidential candidate Brandon Rattiner has focused his campaign on building community within the student body, calling himself a voice for students "here and now."
Rattiner said that as TCU president, he would focus less on multiyear initiatives and abstract conversations and more on current students.
"The thing I really want to do is be realistic about what [the TCU] Senate can accomplish and remember who our constituents are," he told the Daily in an in-depth interview.
Rattiner, a junior, has identified three overarching themes to define his campaign: building community, strengthening intellectualism and increasing Tufts pride.
Building community, Rattiner said, is his most important goal.
Tufts students are "over-programmed" and student groups are fragmented, he explained. He hopes to unite groups next year by holding larger, collaborative events rather than small, uncoordinated ones.
His first step to implementing this plan is creating in the fall a leadership dinner for the heads of TCU-sponsored organizations.
Rattiner sees increasing awareness of diversity issues and reengaging off campus students as an additional way to contribute to building community. He proposed block parties for students living off-campus and providing financial incentives for off-campus programming as ways to appeal to what he called a disconnected off-campus student community.
The junior outlined specific plans to strengthen intellectualism on campus, including founding a late-night student-faculty "conversation series," which would take place in Brown and Brew; making professors' research more accessible; and consolidating course syllabi online prior to registration.
As co-chair of the Senate's Education Committee this year, Rattiner has already started work on several of these projects, such as collaborating with the provost's office to co-sponsor the conversation series.
To bolster Tufts pride, Rattiner hopes to increase coordination between the Senate and Programming Board and build support for athletics, including increasing publicity for varsity athletic events and working toward better recognition of club sports.
The only candidate who is a rising senior, Rattiner believes that his age and leadership ability distinguish him from the other candidates.
"You grow up a lot from junior to senior year," he said, adding that ineffective leadership has characterized the Senate for the past two years because the past two junior presidents have lacked perspective.
Rattiner, a political science major, was born in New York City and raised in Denver. He deferred his admission to Tufts for a year to serve as president of the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization (BBYO), the largest international youth group for Jewish teens.
A member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity and a frequenter of Tufts Hillel, he sees himself as representative of the average Tufts student.
"A lot of Senate is dealing with things as they come up, so in essence, you're kind of voting for the judgment and perspective of the person more than you're even voting for them or their ideas," Rattiner said. "I think that my experience and my ideology [are] much more representative of the average student at Tufts."
Senator and outgoing TCU Associate Treasurer Lauren Levine, who worked with Rattiner on Senate's Allocations Board, said Rattiner is an inspirational figure for both Senate and the student body.
"As a senator, the most striking thing to me about Brandon is his ability to motivate people," Levine said. "When he talks about changes to Tufts and how much he loves Tufts, I think it really inspires dedication in everyone else. For me, he is really a moving figure."
Sophomore Katy Simon, Rattiner's campaign manager, expressed similar sentiments and praised Rattiner's leadership style.
"He's one of the most genuine people I've met, and he tells it like it is," said Simon, who served on Senate the past two years. "The school can feel competitive sometimes, but he's very grounded and he doesn't fall out of perspective."
But members from the two opposing presidential campaigns disagreed with Rattiner on several points.
Presidential candidate Chas Morrison and his campaign spokesperson Brian Agler, both sophomores, found fault with Rattiner's vote in support of Senate's funding for the Trips Cabin at the Tufts Loj, which the Tufts Mountain Club administers. The Senate voted 20-5 on April 5 to allocate $230,000 of the recovered funds toward building the cabin.
"I think it's fairly hypocritical of him to say that he's all about transparency and accountability when he didn't recuse himself on the Loj vote," Agler said, adding that Rattiner's involvement in TMC was a conflict of interest. Rattiner is not a dues-paying member of TMC, but he considers himself closely linked to the group.
Morrison supported the Trips Cabin project but voted against the allocation, calling it a mismanagement of Student Activities Fee funds. He criticized Rattiner's support for the project.
"I think that was frankly a terrible decision," he said.
But Rattiner said that expansion at the Loj property will benefit a wide variety of student groups.
"The demand is there," Rattiner said. "The Loj has a waiting list of [seven] TCU-funded groups ... because there's not enough space up there."
In addition, he said, the Senate granted the money to TMC under the condition that the group would lower costs and make it easier for all students to travel to the Loj, located a two-hour drive away from campus.
Agler also said that Rattiner's platform lacked specifics, criticizing his focus on "here and now."
Senator Samia Zahran, also a presidential candidate, questioned Rattiner's ability to connect to students "outside his circle of friends or his comfort zone."
"I'm a little disappointed in his campaigning just because I'm hearing bad things about how he approaches culture groups," Zahran, a sophomore, said. "He sort of approaches them not as someone who necessarily cares genuinely, but as someone who only cares because he's running for president."
Sophomore Bruce Ratain, an AEPi brother who has worked on Rattiner's campaign, said that Rattiner is uniquely qualified for the position.
