The Tufts Elections Commission (ECOM) will be holding an election tomorrow for the office of the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate President for the upcoming academic year. All members of the student body are eligible to vote throughout the day on Thursday using their SIS accounts.
A Presidential Forum will be held for students to learn more about the candidates, TCU Senators Ryan Johnson and Gauri Seth, tonight from 9:30-11:00 p.m. in the Sophia Gordon Multipurpose Room. The Daily sat down with the candidates, who announced their candidacies last Thursday, to discuss their campaigns and platforms.
TCU Senator Ryan Johnson served as a trustee representative on the TCU Senate for the 2015-2016 academic year before being elected to a first term as a Senator this spring. Johnson, a junior, is also co-founder of Cheese Club and a member of other student groups on campus.
He explained that his hands-on experience of helping run student groups, combined with his year of involvement in Senate, has led him to him believe that the TCU Senate needs to provide more transparency and inclusivity to the entire Tufts community.
“I have had a year now of experience on Senate, and so I’m familiar with all of the rules and all of the proceedings…and [from my experience with student groups], I’ve had a lot of interaction with administrators [and] people in Dining Services’ and so I’ve gotten that sort of network of connections which I can leverage when working face to face with the administration and with student groups,” Johnson said.
Johnson explained that he decided to run to serve as TCU President upon joining the Senate last year and feeling that the Senate was not as inclusive with the Tufts community as he would have liked.
“My year on Senate showed me that a lot of it was exclusionary, people didn’t really know about Senate or what we did and that it was really kind of a space that I feel like needs a lot of reform, so that drove me to run — this feeling of exclusiveness that pervades Senate as it stands and the fact that so many people just don’t know what it does,” he said.
Johnson’s platform covers various areas, but he emphasized that his key priorities for the position are reforming club sports funding and improving sustainability efforts on campus.
“We really want to let student groups and environmental action groups know that Senate will, under my presidency, support their causes and really push the administration to take concrete steps,” he said.
If elected, Johnson said that he would also push for the creation of an on-campus pub and the introduction of an on-campus food truck.
Johnson said that through his campaign, he hopes to listen to as many voices as possible from the grassroots level.
“[We want] to show people that TCU Senate is not as exclusive as it once was and that we really want to champion getting more voices heard and getting more opinions working on solutions to their own problems,” he said.
He hopes that at tonight’s Presidential Forum, attendees will be able to learn about his platform, which he said emphasizes real changes on campus.
“I really hope that students will…see the motivations behind my campaign in that we’re not running because it’s the next step in our career; we’re not running because it just is what we’ve planned on doing since being a freshman,” Johnson said. “We’re running because we really want to make these changes…and that’s what I want people coming to the forum to take away.”
Johnson explained that his experience working with students groups outside of the TCU Senate make him the best candidate for the position of TCU President.
“I think something very unique is that ‘outsider’ element,” he said. “Almost every presidential candidate in recent memory has been on Senate for two or three years and has devoted themselves to that path at Tufts, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I feel like to truly understand the needs of the student body and to try to get things done, people need to have experience working and leading student groups and being out in different communities kind of at a grassroots level.”
