Brandon Cuffy is running with the YOUR Party.
The candidates for SGA president receive a lot of attention during the campaign weeks, but the other executive candidates should demand just as much attention.
Each one of the Student Government Association’s three supporting executive positions has critical responsibilities. The vice president of finance manages the distribution of millions in student fees and the vice president of academic affairs acts as the student body’s point person when dealing with the provost. But it’s the senior vice president who acts as the president’s right-hand man, helping to run the organization and define priorities.
Junior finance major Max Jacobs, junior government and politics major Brandon Cuffy and junior government and politics major Jazz Lewis are vying for senior vice president with the SKY Party, Your Party and STARE Party, respectively.
The senior vice president hopefuls said they feel they embody the larger values of their party, but they each chose a few key issues to hone in on.
For Cuffy, ensuring students’ safety would take the front seat, while Lewis said he would focus on increasing diversity at the university, and Jacobs emphasized unifying the student voice.
The senior vice president has a seat on the committee crafting the university’s diversity plan, and Lewis placed that role at the heart of the position.
“It is really crucial to what I’m really interested in,” he said. “I want to push things to increase the visibility of all these students on campus.”
Lewis, the public relations chair of Community Roots, was a major player in the STARE movement last semester, so he decided to sign on with the coalition to help make those goals a priority for student government.
“The biggest issue a lot of people had with STARE was saying we were barking at the moon,” Lewis said. “We wanted administrators to hear us and mold a university we would like.”
With STARE — Students Taking Action to Reclaim our Education — he pushed for the reinstatement of Associate Provost for Equity and Diversity Cordell Black and pressured administrators to take action after black student enrollment for freshmen dropped dramatically.
Senior vice presidents have also traditionally played a large role in the SGA’s efforts to improve safety, in part by organizing the group’s annual Safety Walk. For Cuffy, who also served as a vice president with the Black Student Union, that’s not enough.
He said he would work to station police officers at the most dangerous spots on campus every night, and improve their relationships with students to make “an environment for open dialogue.”
“That feeling that you aren’t in a safe environment — that can be a deterrent to learning,” Cuffy said. “…We want to create regular, manned posts so officers are standing there every single night. We’d get opinions from students to get what areas feel most unsafe, and make sure there’s always an officer there.”
As the SGA’s chair of public affairs this past year, Jacobs, who is also actively involved in Hillel and helped re-launch the Terrapin Times after years of dormancy, said he saw all the areas that need improvement and wanted to remove obstacles blocking effective action.
“This is the time for students to come out with one voice,” he said. “The biggest issue for me is setting one agenda, one set of talking points. That way we can pursue our own students’ agenda and get the administration to listen to us.”
Jacobs also said safety was high on his to-do list and that he would focus on improving the annual Safety Walk by getting more students to care. It all comes back to mobilizing the student body into a unified voice, he said.
All three candidates bring experience from leading organizations outside the SGA, and they agreed that allows them to view the position through a wider lens and appreciate concerns from all viewpoints.
“I had only heard of the SGA when elections came around,” Jacobs said. “I realized if I want to actively get things done I have to move into the bigger organization: the SGA.”
gulin@umdbk.com
