TCU presidency may go uncontested

From the resignation of the Tufts Community Union (TCU) President to a failed attempt to remove the vice president, this has been a year of unprecedented situations for the TCU Senate. Now the body may face another unique situation -- an uncontested presidential race.

Junior Pritesh Gandhi, who has been considered a main contender for the presidency for much of this semester, decided last week that he will not run.

"I think it's best for the Senate to move on and I think if I ran it would bring back a lot of things from the past," Gandhi said. "I want to explore other activities my senior year and focus on graduate school -- so I think Senate may detract from that."

With only two weeks remaining until senators must file petitions to run for office for next year, junior Randy Newsom remains the only declared candidate. Because candidates must already be TCU Senators, and with the Senate's three other juniors saying they are not interested in the job, an outside candidate would have to act quickly and find an opening spot in the senate to be eligible to run.

Petitions are due on Wednesday, Apr. 2, and Senate elections will be Wednesday Apr. 9. The presidential candidates will be nominated on Sunday, Apr. 13.

However, despite the current uncertainty about who may emerge, senators doubt that the election will go uncontested.

"I feel like someone will pop up from the woodwork," Senator Josh Belkin said.

The diminished interest in running for Senate president this year is a sharp contrast to three years ago, when four senators ran for the nomination. The change was likely caused by the lack of upperclassmen on the Senate this year, according to Treasurer Ben Lee.

"Those are the type of people who would run," Lee said.

Lack of experience on the Senate may be a reason for the lack of presidential candidates this year. While each class is allotted seven seats, there are only four juniors on the Senate because no one else ran for office. Of the four, Cristina Gioioso joined only last month, and Julia Karol is completing her first year as a senator. Newsom joined Senate midway through his sophomore year, and Belkin is the only junior who will have served two full-terms at the end of the semester.

According to Lee, a smaller-than-normal lot of upperclassmen senators is likely the result of juniors who opt to go abroad and normal cycles in student leadership.

Like other unprecedented situations the Senate has encountered this year, the TCU Constitution does not say what student government should do in the event that there is only one presidential candidate. The Constitution says only that the Senate "will nominate two presidential candidates from among its members to participate in a campus-wide election of the TCU President."

Since Elections Board (ELBO) is in charge of the meeting where candidates are nominated, it would likely be its duty to determine how to deal with such a situation, ELBO co-chair Abby Lillianfeld said. But because the elections are still a few weeks away, ELBO has yet to discuss the situation.

Also slated to be on the presidential ballot is a new TCU Constitution. In the past, there would have been concern that without a presidential election, not enough students would have voted on the referendum to enable it to pass. Online voting, however, has proved to be successful in getting students to vote on referenda, so it is likely that the vote will go ahead no matter what the presidential race looks like.

Whether the presidential campaign is even important to the functioning of student government is matter for debate. Campaigns lead to greater visibility of student government and increase name recognition of senators on campus. But over the past few years, campaigns have centered much more on leadership style than actual issues.

Debate during last year's campaign was about which candidate would do a better job interacting with the administration and not which candidate best understood what issues were important to the student body. Two years ago, candidates argued over who had the skills to carry out the projects they envisioned and how they could best reach out to the student body.

"It's a marketing blitz rather than an education blitz," Belkin said.