Why Didn’t More Students Run for Student Government?

Written by Crista Fiala

On Monday, December 11, 2023, Dean Dawson sent an email out to announce the start of online voting for Student Government Association (SGA) positions. Students will have through Friday, December 15, to vote. When students open the online form, however, they might be disappointed to find that only one person ran for each position, except for secretary. No one decided to run for secretary. Last year’s vice president, Syed Ali (Class of 2024), is running for president. Last year’s treasurer, Jordyn Hunt (Class of 2024), is running for treasurer again. Maya Tomko (Class of 2025) is running for vice president. While it is great that these three students decided to run, it is hard to believe that so few students wanted to run for an SGA position. The previous SGA article discussed how seven out of the fifty undergraduates who responded to our survey wanted to become members of SGA.

One issue might be that there has been an overall lack of advertising for elections. Apart from the email announcing elections on November 29, there have been no posters or social media posts. Perhaps an event at McGovern that invited students at a time when most were available, offered snacks, and thoroughly explained the importance of SGA would have garnered more student attention. An event like this would have been especially important after SGA’s semester of absence. Many students likely have no idea what SGA does, given that ten out of fifty undergraduate students who responded to the survey said they did not even know that USJ had a student government. The email from December 11 about online voting also explains that students can view candidate profiles on the @usjsga Instagram page, but there is currently only one temporary Instagram story from December 11 that features all the candidates. Otherwise, the @usjsga page has not been updated since March 24, 2023. Since not everyone has an Instagram, these profiles should also be posted around campus and shared through email.

Another issue, however, might be that candidates had such a short time to apply and, in theory, have their candidate profile uploaded to the Instagram page. According to the November 29 email, students only had until December 6 to decide if they wanted to run and for what position. Then, candidate profiles were supposed to be uploaded to the Instagram page on December 8, and voting was planned to start a few days later on December 11. While the USJ News Nest is optimistic about the return of SGA, we would like to see changes in the SGA voting process in the future.

The USJ News Nest will keep you updated on SGA’s developments.

Featured Image: Crista Fiala