Will Lindsey seems to be taking a different approach for running for Student Body President. Rather than focus on all of the categories where he “will accomplish” something, he approached his platform as a Private Equity group would, discussing the limitations of the office and student government and giving appropriate responses to these limitations. Technocrats of the world unite!
Will breaks his platform down into three parts: redefining the policy making process at UNC, enhancing the academic foundations, and how he would organize his executive branch if elected President.
Redefining the Policy-making Process at UNC
Giving Agenda setting power to student organizations
The Lindsey administration would change the insular nature and unproductive ways of the executive branch, by making his executive branch a Catalyst for change. That’s right y’all.
The Lindsey administration wants to give students the power to set the agenda for his administration. To give them that power, he will ask each active student group to produce a two-page paper outlining their goals for the year. Then he will streamline the goals so that the executive branch would be able to help all the active student groups achieve their goals. Our goal is to be read occasionally, how can they help us?
Increasing Student Government’s Accessibility
So that the population of UNC can know what their benevolent overlords in student government are not accomplishing, the Lindsey administration would put out bi-weekly videos with updates about their doings. We plan on subscribing.
Another point in his platform is to have an “Open Executive Branch” meeting with the different Presidents of active student groups. These groups however, have to have submitted their platforms to the Lindsey administration so that they can know exactly what the groups aren’t doing.
Student government initiatives will no longer be derived from what student government wants to do and instead will come from student groups. The Lindsey Administration wants to be the agents, not principals of campus priorities.
Promoting Student Generated Ideas
Their first idea is to have a petitioning system similar to the White House, where a student can start a petition and if it reaches a certain number of signatures then the administrations will address this problem. We’re looking forward to what UNC students ask the administration to do; we vote for a petition to overthrow student government and install Art Pope as dictator for life. (We, for one, welcome our new Papal? Papist? Popeist? overlords. We’d like to remind them that we’re the only conservative publication on campus)
They also want to create a student government incubator where students can come get funding for their proposed solutions to some problem that students face on campus. (Our biggest problem is that other publications use our racks, someone come up with a solution and see if you can get funding.)
The third part of promoting student ideas is the creation of the Carolina Institute, a think-tank, that will hold the administration accountable and propose solutions to problems faced in student government.
Building a Relationship with the State Legislatures.
This is the area where Lindsey really shines. His internship in the NCGA has given him a lot of contacts within the leadership of the General Assembly. He plans to use student government to lobby the General Assembly on behalf of UNC students. He wants to create a student run lobbying group that draws from all parts of the campus. Another aspect is bringing members of the GA to UNC’s campus to engage with students. We think his hope is that students won’t protest and reinforce the legislators image of UNC.
Maintaining UNC’s commitment to accessibility
Advocacy and tuition is the big issue for every campaign, and the Lindsey campaign wants to make sure that tuition increases do not occur, or if they do occur that they are sustainable. Along with tuition, fees are another concern for the Lindsey campaign. He wants to conduct a full audit of the fees for all students, and make sure that everyone knows what all the fees are funding.
Lindsey brings back his think-tank idea, to discuss how they could research ways to increase funding to the University or restructure the endowment.
Expanding Student Government’s Relationships to Faculty, Alumni, and Chapel Hill
The Lindsey administration wants to increase the outreach to faculty by making sure that they are always invited to provide input on all of the initiatives that his administration will have in place. He even plans to meet with department heads to get their input on his academic plans.
For alumni, the Lindsey administration would create a newsletter that details to them everything that the administration is doing, and then ask them for money. He also plans on having the alumni reach out to the Board of Governors and try to impact policy at the highest level.
For the town, the Lindsey administration would continue the Leimenstoll adminstiration;s Fix My Town initative and reach out the the local leaders for greater advocacy on behalf of students.
Enhancing the Academic Foundation
Improving Academic Advising
The Lindsey administration recognizes the frustrations of students over the quality of advisors in the academic advising department. He thinks that the best way for students to really be advised properly is to establish and strengthen a department based advising corps. He would increase the exposure of already existing programs, recruit more department advisors, and advertise the new advisors.
Lindsey also wants to create a unified peer advising group, because the current groups are fragmented by department and college. This is an interesting idea, but it would require more coordination than any other proposal.
The administration wants to refine and streamline the Steel Building experience, they do not want to remove it, though that would be awesome to advocate. The administration would prefer to make the experience more pleasing to students. They want to create an instant message style service for students who only have minor questions but cannot find the answer.
Promoting Faculty retention
UNC has been losing our great faculty due to them being picked off by other schools offering better pay. The Lindsey administration wants to create a “Faculty Retention Fund” where almuni would -get this- donate to help better pay our professors.
The last part is course offerings, but there is very little posted about this, other than that the Administration would like to improve course listings and have smaller class sizes.
The Committee Structure of the Lindsey Administration
We are not going to write about the full breakdown of the different committee, but it is available for the reader’s perusal online.
Y’all, we made it through 36 pages of information and made sure that we brought up the most important parts of Will Lindsey’s platform. If you want to read more, check out his platform here: http://www.lindsey2013.org/index.php/platform
Great analysis for a great candidate.