SKYY Party presidential candidate Andrew Steinberg, left, and SGA Leonardtown Legislator Andre Beasley, speak with South Campus Commons 1 residents last night.
In the days leading up to the start of SGA elections, presidential candidate Andrew Steinberg is a mess — literally.
“You can always tell when he’s stressed because the amount of dirty laundry in the room increases,” said Steinberg’s roommate Ben Fuld, a junior marketing and finance major. “In the days leading up to the election, the amount of dirty laundry in the room was piling up.”
Although his floor may tell a different story, the SKYY Party leader who spent the last year as the Student Government Association’s vice president of finance wants nothing more than to clean up the organization from what he calls poor leadership and misdirection in the current administration.
Steinberg said he wants to usher in a new era of student leadership founded in building strong relationships on and around the campus. With the arrival of a new university president, Steinberg thinks that this year is the perfect time for a change in SGA leadership as well.
“How this [university] president comes in and perceives student interests and activism on this campus is going to define the next generation of students,” he said. “The new SGA is going to set the tone and set the agenda with a new administration.”
His top initiatives include improving safety on and around the campus and prioritizing lobbying state legislators. Steinberg said he wants to focus on facilitating relationships between student group leaders, the university and Annapolis, students and police and the SGA and the administration.
Steinberg was elected as the SGA vice president of finance last spring, promising transparency within the finance committee and hoping to encourage the administration to do the same.
To accomplish this goal, Steinberg launched a finance website — his “pet project” — that laid out all aspects of the “daunting finance process,” including how the committee allocates the $1.2 million in funds to the student groups that apply for it.
Under Steinberg’s leadership, the finance committee also expanded Group Help, a program dedicated to funding student groups’ last-minute projects, and instituted one-on-one workshops to help student group leaders figure out their budget issues.
Steinberg served as an Easton Hall senator in the Residence Hall Association his freshman year and the SGA’s Denton Community legislator his sophomore year before taking on his role as the VP of finance.
Steinberg said encouraging interaction between different university student groups is at the core of his platform.
He said he would create a Student Campus Policy Committee, which would bring together student group leaders to discuss campus issues and organize meetings between SGA residential legislators and corresponding RHA representatives.
Former SGA President Jonathan Sachs, who has publicly endorsed Steinberg, lauded Steinberg’s efforts to target the divided student population.
“It could change how the administration views the student body and make the students on this campus united and be extremely effective,” he said.
The recent tension between students and university and Prince George’s County Police is exactly the kind of strained relationship Steinberg is hoping to improve.
“There’s this attitude and culture on campus that sees police as more of a hindrance than looking out for our safety and welfare,” he said. “The SGA needs to be an advocate to the local government. How often has the SGA worked with Prince George’s County Police? It’s our shared jurisdiction.”
And Steinberg isn’t satisfied with the past administration’s Annapolis presence, either.
“I just believe that this current SGA administration has just failed in fulfilling their responsibilities to the student body,” he said.
And Steinberg, who Sachs said can recite SGA bylaws on command, is familiar with working around the clock.
“He definitely has his quirks, but at the end of the day, SGA is really this kid’s life,” said Fuld, fellow member with Steinberg of Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. “He likes to wear his suit and his fancy shoes and all that jazz, but when you get right down to it … he wants to do the job the right way, in the best interests of the students.”
gulin@umdbk.com
