As Jumbos head to the polls tomorrow to vote for their Tufts Community Union (TCU) president, they'll be faced with the same challenge Democratic voters have faced throughout this primary season: how to choose between a clear vision for the future and a series of concrete plans that perhaps lack vision when no candidate offers both.
And just as this paper endorsed the former before Super Tuesday, the Daily now endorses sophomore Duncan Pickard for the TCU presidency.
Pickard, moreso than either of his worthy rivals, sophomore C.J. Mourning and junior Elton Sykes, has a unique ability to lead that will enable him to unify both the individual members of the Senate and the separate factions of the Tufts community to work together toward universal goals.
Of course, all of the candidates in this year's contest recognize the value of building and strengthening community ties at Tufts, and Sykes and Mourning certainly have clear ideas about how to accomplish this goal. However, Pickard has the combination of leadership and communication skills that make him the best equipped to fill the two most essential roles of the TCU president: managing the various committees, projects and personalities within the Senate itself and using the Senate as a tool to serve Tufts as a whole.
As a leader, Pickard brings to the table an attitude and a résumé that make him best suited to an executive role in the Senate. Those in charge of a large organization like the Senate need to be able to identify broad areas of improvement, then delegate and motivate individual committees to create plans to address those problems. The buzzword of Pickard's campaign has been "vision," the label he's given to his ideological framework for tackling problems in a way that leaves micro-management of policies to the Senate committees while freeing him up for macro-level administration.
For instance, although Pickard identifies lowering campus food prices as a potential goal if elected, he considers it merely one step toward his wider goal to control the cost of the average student's undergraduate experience at Tufts. Pickard doesn't focus his campaign on single projects or lofty ideas but on the logical chain of events that will allow good ideas to become working policies.
Pickard's effectiveness as a leader is particularly evidenced in his work with the Media Advocacy Board, formerly the Media Advisory Board. Pickard turned what was a loose coalition of the heads of several campus media outlets into an active media programming board that sponsors events and facilitates communication about speech and media on campus.
While Mourning and Sykes have criticized Pickard's vision for being overly broad and lacking in substance, it is frankly not the president's job to concern himself with the specifics of each individual project. The Senate is such a large organization with so many moving parts that its president cannot function as a micro-manager; to become bogged down in too many details would render any candidate ineffective as a leader.
For this reason, Mourning's extensive and impressive committee work does not necessarily recommend her to the TCU presidency. Mourning's name is attached to more projects and policies than either of her opponents, but her most recent accomplishment, combining Points and Dining Dollars into a single entity called JumboCash, shows that her practical mindset is better suited to the work of a committee member than to that of a president. While it can't be denied that JumboCash's convenience factor is both brilliant and appreciated, Mourning failed to foresee the broader negative impact the plan could have on some students' financial aid packages. Mourning has demonstrated that she has the energy and the wherewithal to get projects done, but she doesn't have the same big-picture mentality as Pickard - a mentality that will be key to successfully leading the Senate as a whole.
For his part, Sykes has not shown enough capability in a leadership role to demonstrate that he is ready to be in charge of the Senate. Although Sykes has co-chaired a committee, his tenure in such a position was not nearly as productive as Mourning's, and his plan for the future isn't as cohesive or as functional as Pickard's.
As such, Sykes' campaign platform is built solely on several good ideas, some of which have no hope of being realized in a way that students will be able to appreciate. For example, one of the main goals of Sykes' three-pronged platform is to improve students' residential experience. He has noted that one of the ways to do this would be to merge the Office of Residential Life and Living and Tufts' Facilities Department to consolidate the powers that influence on-campus housing. However, these two organizations have such different responsibilities, and the Senate's authority is so limited, that Sykes' plan would never realistically be able to address his concerns about student housing.
Finally, Pickard is the candidate with the greatest ability to promote interactions between separate student groups, the Tufts administration and the TCU Senate. One look at Pickard's clear and professional campaign, which brought him great visibility amongst the student body, leaves no doubt that he has the communication skills to grab and hold the attention of a large audience. As such a clear and effective communicator, he will be capable of mobilizing that audience to work toward a common goal. And his diverse background - he has held a variety of leadership roles both within the Senate and in the greater community - has provided him with the working relationships he will need to actively begin the process of building campus unity.
Given the fact that Pickard has a more effective platform from which to launch this spirit of cooperation and togetherness, Jumbos' first task as a unified campus community should be to elect Duncan Pickard as TCU president.
Polls open tonight at midnight.
