Shortly after midnight, junior Brian Tesser won the election for Tufts Community Union (TCU) President. But in an election held on April 7 for several Senate and other TCU positions, five of the six community representative positions went unfilled.
Community representatives come from the Asian American, Africana, Latino, women’s, LGBTQ and international communities -- the same communities that comprise the Group of Six. Representatives are full senators with the voting powers and responsibilities of other senators, according to junior Paige Newman, chair of the Tufts Elections Commissions [ECOM].
Senate Diversity and Community Affairs Officer Allison Aaronson, a sophomore, said that in the April 7 election, only the position of international community representative was filled.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot," she said. "I’m really alarmed by it."
Aaronson attributed the lack of interest in running for the position of community representative as a combination of factors such as lack of transparency in Senate, impatience with Senate operations and impressions of Senate as a harmful space for minority students.
“I think part of it is that community reps didn’t have great experiences on Senate this year and therefore weren’t going to recommend it to other people to do and aren’t rerunning,” she said. “And I think that’s partly because we didn’t start off the year really educating the body about anything, so it wasn’t a very intentional space.”
Former LGBTQ community representative Renee Vallejo, a junior, said they decided not to run again in order to avoid being in a space that could be mentally harmful, silencing and invalidating.
“I served as LGBTQ community rep, but I only ran because if I had not no one else would have, and the community would have been without a rep,” Vallejo told the Daily in an email. “At the time a friend of mine was on Senate, so there was at least one person that I knew I had in my corner of support. This past year we had a few community reps step down from their position because of how harmful it was to them as minorities.”
Newman saw the lack of candidates as a result of failures in communication on the part of Group of Six centers to their members.
“I sent multiple emails to each of the Group of Six centers in the weeks leading up to the election, asking them to talk to their groups,” she said. “I sent them all the information they needed ... none of them would even answer an email to get back to me, and one or two did, but by the time they did it was after the election.”
According to Newman, the position of international community representative has only existed for two years, while the others have existed for much longer.
First-year Amaya Contreras Driggs, the newly elected international community representative, said she ran on her own initiative as opposed to receiving information on the position from the International Center.
“It was more ... like all [of] the sudden I decided I wanted to run ... no one really encouraged me for it, no one really told me about the position, it’s just by coincidence that I decided to go for it,” Driggs, a first-year, said.
Daniel Vargas, former Latino community representative, suggested the lack of interest is due to students feeling that Senate is not the place for them to voice their concerns and to poor advertising for both the position and the elections.
“A lot of community reps have left the positions particularly throughout last semester ... and I don’t know for sure [why] but I do know that there’s been a sentiment that it’s very difficult for community reps to be heard during Senate meetings and sometimes even to be acknowledged,” Vargas, a first-year, said.
He added that the environment of Senate was a contributing factor for representatives deciding not to run for re-election.
“The role that they ... have to play as community representative is either not understood by senators or sometimes not taken seriously, and so there’s a lot of frustration that comes from being in that kind of position," Vargas said.
According to Newman, the five open seats will be part of the election next fall.
“I think we’re going to have to do more in-person visits to the centers, which we don’t usually do because normally they’re fine about answering our emails ... but clearly this shows us that we need to go in and have a face-to-face conversation and really emphasize the importance of this,” she said.
Vallejo stressed the importance of senators receiving training and doing work surrounding cultural sensitivity.
“There were countless moments over the course of the year when community reps would voice their concerns around their safety and validity,” they said. “The offender would apologize and ask to be called out if they did it again, and we would be right back at it again the next week.”
Aaronson said that next year there would be several changes to make the Senate environment more intentional, hopefully increasing interest in the community representative position. These changes include pushing elections back two weeks at the beginning of the year, focusing the Senate retreat on creating an inclusive space and improving communication about the positions with the Group of Six well before elections begin, she said.
