What history teaches DSG

Although you might not know it, we’re in the middle of the campaign to decide who will be the next president of Duke Student Government. Election day is April 6. The DSG President is the single most important student when it comes to policy making at this University. Current DSG President Mike Lefevre, a senior, said of the job: “It’s such a huge opportunity; [the president is] the most empowered student at the University.”

The president of DSG serves two roles. Lefevre told me that good DSG presidents “[are] not buddy-buddy with the administration. They are lobbyists.” He also noted that a good president must have a firm command of “grand management and longevity.” In other words, the DSG president is the advocate-in-chief for students but must also be a manager of a 100-plus person organization responsible annually for more than $600,000.

I’ve worked with the past three DSG presidents pretty closely. Each had a distinct style. Each had successes. Each suffered setbacks.

Jordan Giordano—who was president in 2008-2009—recognized that the number of student groups was growing much faster than the funds available to sustain them. He sought approval from the student body for an increase in the student activities fee. The increased fee was to pay for additional funds for student groups, Zipcars, student legal services and a bus tracking system. The students rejected his proposal in a major early setback. During the rest of his term, Giordano found other ways to pay for student legal services and Zipcars. He also oversaw a reform of the budgeting process for student groups that extended the solvency of student group funds. Giordano recovered from an early setback to deliver better services to students.

Awa Nur—who was president in 2009-2010—under whom I served as executive vice president, entered office when the central administration was ramping up its efforts to close a University-wide budget shortfall of $100 million. Nur had to throw out her platform. During the recession, the DSG president didn’t lobby for new programs. She had to lobby simply to keep successful existing ones going. Her defining moment was, perhaps, when she told the DSG Senate that there was “no way in hell” students would accept a directed choice solution to the multi-million dollar dining deficit. Circumstances forced upon Nur a very different presidency than she campaigned to have. Her adaptability­—and poise in meetings, what Lefevre termed “a strong sense of meeting etiquette”—meant that students were largely sheltered from drastic service cuts.

Mike Lefevre, the current DSG president who served on the executive boards of both Giordano and Nur, campaigned on his ability to protect Tailgate and to end the so called “emergency” dining fee. The disappointments suffered on those fronts hardly make his administration a failure. He oversaw the merger of Campus Council and DSG. The merger reduces redundancy and improves the quality of representation available to students. Surely, that improvement is a legacy worth having.

What is clear from these examples is that what the candidates say to you in their campaigns will probably not be the major issues of their presidency. Indeed, DSG presidents are handicapped because they work on shorter time frames than the other major policy makers at the University. Giordano noted that, “One of the most difficult things is that a DSG president is on a one-year horizon whereas the administration is really in a multi-year time frame. Being aware of that, in terms of the disconnect between the two, is really important. If you operate on their horizon, you can really make a difference.”

There is no cookie-cutter candidate who will have all of the right answers either. As Giordano told me, “To be honest, different styles and different methods work for different people in different atmospheres.... Being student government president under lacrosse is very different than being student government president during the recession and dealing with all the budget issues.” Elliot Wolf—who was president in 2006-2007—and Nur were drastically different in their approaches to the job, but each style was generally appropriate to the task at hand.