By: Quinn Rogness
I sat down with the DJB ticket for SGA Executive yesterday. The ticket consists of Drew Jacoby, who is running for president, Jim Thompson, who is running for vice president, and Brittany Arnold, who is running for treasurer. We discussed issues ranging from the student-life senate seats to educational equality, as well as the candidates’ personal backgrounds and motivations for running. Here’s what they have to say:
QR: Why don’t you three introduce yourselves, and tell me a little bit about your background, how you got started with SGA, and why you’re running for SGA President-Vice President-Treasurer?
Drew Jacoby (DJ): I’m a third-year political science major who is minoring in philosophy, and am originally from Scottsdale, Ariz. I moved to Athens in eighth grade, and graduated from Clarke Central. During my first two years at UGA, I was not involved with SGA, and was one of those people who thought it was a waste of time. But during my sophomore year, my friends made me aware of a few open seats that I could run for, so I attended a few meetings and decided it was right up my alley. This past year, I worked hard to get to know people in SGA, and to discover its strengths and discover its flaws. I decided to run with Jim and Brittany in order to make those strengths stronger, and make those weaknesses better.
Jim Thompson (JT): I’m also a third-year from Atlanta and am majoring in public relations and psychology, and am minoring in political science. I got involved with SGA through Freshman Board, which showed me the possibilities for SGA to bring change on campus. I saw important legislation, such as a resolution advocating the repeal of a ban on undocumented students to be allowed to apply for admission to the University. It showed me that even though SGA has a lot of growing to do, we are going in the right path, and SGA can be a voice of change on campus. The past two years, I have been involved with SGA, last year being on the Communications Board, and this year serving as the executive secretary. Some would ask “how could someone who has been involved in SGA for the past three years change the organization?”, but I would argue the opposite, and say that I have been able to analyze it and see the strengths it does have, but also see the weaknesses. Given my experience, I hope to be able to use these lessons to apply to the position of vice president, and evolve the organization to be less of a factory for pet-projects and more of an advocacy group for student needs.
Brittany Arnold (BA): I’m a second-year business major with a pre-medical intent from Roswell, Georgia. I graduated from Greater Atlanta Christian School in the class of 2012. I got my start in SGA in my first year as a member of Freshman Board. Honestly, I joined student government because my brother was a part of it as a Terry College Senator, so everything he did at UGA, I wanted to do as well. On Freshman Board, I learned the role SGA can play, and I learned the importance of having an organization like student government that can be the voice for different students, and be a resource for the students. Having taken a year off from SGA, I realized the role that SGA can play in aiding diversity, and not just representing the traditional student.
QR: How will you balance being a full-time student with the demands of being SGA Executives?
DJ: I’ve already told my two employers that if I were to win, then I’d have to quit my jobs. Being SGA President is a full-time responsibility, and the way I see it, it is something that I really want to do, and I think this executive ticket would do a great job, so I think it’s worth the sacrifices. Going from a full-time student with two jobs to a full-time student and SGA President is not too much of a jump in terms of time commitment. I already know what it’s like to have a serious time commitment outside of being a full-time student.
JT: It would be such an honor to be elected to this position, and know that students have faith in us. That is all the motivation we need, and although it is a big commitment, and would be very tiring, it would be an incredible opportunity to serve this university which has given me so much. It’s a constant reminder to maintain my energy, and give it all I have. As someone who has been involved with SGA Exec, Dawg Camp, and UGA Miracle, I feel like I’m pretty busy now, so it wouldn’t be too much of a different time commitment to transition from my current roles to being vice president of SGA.
BA: I feel like the passion and drive that the three of us have for this organization means that the time commitment won’t be viewed as a burden, but instead an honor to serve. It’s exciting and we’ve been working so hard to serve beside two of my best friends.
QR: It was proposed that the SGA Student-life seats be abolished, but this was shot down. What are your plans for the SGA Student-life seats?
DJ: We definitely want to keep them because they are a valuable asset to SGA, but we all agree they need work. I passed an amendment (that passed with unanimous consent) that said regardless of the proposed constitutional amendment, we would either reassess or restructure the student-life seats, because they’re so valuable. Unfortunately, they currently serve the purpose that they need to. To get a student-life seat, one must be appointed by a committee of five to six people. For me personally, I knew four or five of the six people on that committee, so it was not hard for me to get a seat. In addition, there are fifteen seats, like one seat for religious organizations, one for political organizations, three for Greek-life organizations despite there being four separate Greek councils. There are ways that student-life seats are trying to represent campus, but they just can’t fully do it. For political organizations, there is one seat, but there are two political parties (College Republicans and Young Democrats) who don’t agree on very many things, so how can one expect there to be one Senate seat that covers both sides of the aisle? We all agree that they need to be there, but we see that there are flaws that need to be worked out. With my resolution, we created a task-force starting next year that will reassess how seats are given out and what seats are actually available.
JT: The seats are a great idea. We need that form of additional representation in the Senate, but the fifteen seats in their current states don’t serve the purpose they were originally intended to serve. I think it’s a great idea to take recommendations from student organizations on nominations for people to serve the seats, but that’s not going to change the fact that one political seat is supposed to represent two dichotomous political viewpoints, or that three Greek seats are supposed to represent four Greek councils. To add to that, the Intra-fraternity Council Senator was told by the IFC that he had to abstain from every vote, which is essentially a “no” given the way we count votes. Given those issues, there needs to be a complete reevaluation of the student-life seats. As Vice President, I would love to spend the next year trying to find a way to have the best representation of the student body in those fifteen seats.
BA: We understand that Student-life seats play a vital role in the Senate, and that the diversity they bring is extremely important.
QR: The Women’s Center task-force was created by the most recent Senate, so how will you help implement this new aid for students?
DJ: My entire view of SGA is that it’s there to help student with their goals, and it’s supposed to be students’ voice to the administration. There is no denying that the idea of a women’s center has taken a serious hold on campus, and it is going places.
JT: We recognize that the movement for the women’s center is a passionate movement on campus, so we want to support it moving forward. For example, Annelise Wornat, who was one of the co-authors of the initial resolution is someone who has been working closely with us. I’ve talked with her specifically about how we can move this forward, because obviously by the end of this administration, a women’s center won’t be in place. I don’t think SGA should be hindered by its inability to accomplish these large tasks in just a year, so I think we’re all in agreement that we should put a task-force in place to work all year to ensure that the next steps are taken like working with the Office of the Provost to develop the academic curriculum part of it, engaging with students to get the necessary input on campus, and just ensuring that this is a project that moves forward. One of the cornerstones of our campaign is that the student experience is so vast and unique based on the individual, but no one experience is greater than another. So we want to serve all passionate students on campus.
BA: The reason that people have such great reservations about SGA is because many students think that Student Government Association doesn’t do anything, and that legislation gets passed, but nothing becomes of it. I think one of the coolest things about the women’s center is that it is a resource that SGA can provide to students.
QR: How can SGA, a body of 60 students represent nearly 35,000 students all across campus, and how SGA can better engage the student body as a whole?
DJ: The three of us each have our own three areas of diversity that we like to focus on, and mine is focusing on reaching out to that 90 percent of the student body that is apathetic towards SGA, and that doesn’t vote. My whole view of SGA is that we would have significantly more power behind everything that we do if we had the majority of students supporting us, and that’s just what we do not have right now, so it is hard to be representative of 35,000 students with a small body of 60. The three of us all come from very different parts of campus, and we all represent very different students. One of the reasons I decided to run was because I’m a low-income student. I’m a Pell grant recipient, and I’m way over my head in student debt. I feel as though there are a lot of students who are in the same boat as I’m in. I wanted to stand up and be that voice, to stand up for things such as any HOPE initiatives or loan initiatives that need to be tackled in order to represent different parts of campus that aren’t currently represented in the circle of SGA.
JT: One of the things we realized when we first started this off was we figure out what our campaign name, our identifiable party ticket name would be. We realized there wasn’t one word that could summate our three student experiences, so if it couldn’t summarize three individual experiences, how could it appeal to 35,000? We’re not an exclusive party, we are Drew, Jim, and Brittany, we’re three students just like you, and we really want to continue moving that conversation going forward. It does involve outreach, it does involve making the concerted effort to reach out to students, to send out frequent surveys, to speak at organizations, to go to classes, to be present more than just this one week in the spring. We really want to work to eliminate the exclusivity that surrounds SGA, because I believe that’s one of the biggest reasons that students distrust us now, because there’s this notion that it is this impassible wall where one is either in it or not, because technically every student is a member of SGA. Whether you hold an official position or not, you’re still a valuable voice on this campus. Like Drew said, we all represent different areas of campus, and fostering an inclusive campus environment involves leaders stepping up. I’m an openly gay student, so last semester when there was the hate-speech event on campus, which reminded me that there may be students with these [bigoted] opinions on campus. That’s not the majority by any means, we needed to step up and say that we’re a university that does not stand for intolerance discrimination. So between the three of us, we represent diversity and different types of students.
BA: Going back to our platform, that is one of our main objectives, and we’re looking to do that through things like sending out Archnews emails, asking students what they want, trying to engage them more, and trying to be more transparent about what we are doing in SGA. We are doing this so other students will want to share their student experiences with us, so we can better represent them.
