Vote Oathout for EVP

Sophomore Patrick Oathout, the sole candidate for Duke Student Government executive vice president, is a man on a mission. Oathout exudes ambition and competency, two traits that will serve him well as he attempts to lead a newly restructured DSG Senate.

Last year, Oathout ran and lost against Gurdane Bhutani for the executive vice president position. We endorsed Bhutani last year, citing Oathout’s narrow conception of the executive vice president as merely an enforcer of procedural rules. But after serving a year as a senator for athletics, services and the environment, Oathout has matured substantially. As before, he maintains a fervent commitment to rules and procedures. But he also has concrete ideas about how to make the Senate better at outreach, advocacy and policy creation.

Oathout understands that running a successful Senate entails far more than enforcing the rules. First, it entails legitimacy. Students must believe that the Senate truly represents their interests and can act upon them efficaciously. Oathout admits that the Senate does not fully succeed in this regard. To that end, he cites leadership development, especially among younger senators, as one of his goals. Another goal is improving outreach through greater online presence and increased accessibility to constituents through DSG office hours and other avenues.

All this underscores Oathout’s larger goal to make the Senate a truly representative institution. In the recent DSG restructuring, Oathout favored a model of representation based on house location, which did not eventually materialize. Nevertheless, Oathout is thinking critically about how the Senate can get students personally invested in their own governance, with or without a location-based model. In the future, Oathout desires the Senate to act increasingly as an advocacy group rather than a think tank, reflecting the real desires of the general student body rather than the disparate ideas of individual senators.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of Oathout’s platform is his desire to reduce the number of amendments in the Senate. In his view, the Senate excessively regulates its internal affairs, agonizing about relatively miniscule changes in its constitution instead of focusing on achieving positive policy outcomes. For a senator so keen on rule enforcement, it is striking that Oathout supports a less pedantic approach to rules. He is headed in the right direction. DSG indeed suffers from a perception problem, partly because it cannot seem to successfully define its own structure, goals or procedures. Instead, the Senate should strive to ensure its culture of innovation remains fluid while its rules are not. Time spent debating bylaws is time not spent crafting and passing legislation. Oathout has thought long and hard about this problem and, as executive vice president, will have the power to partially remedy it.

Lastly, Oathout will be an excellent complement to whoever is elected DSG president. Oathout is attuned to all three presidential candidates’ leadership styles, including their strengths and weaknesses. As the president’s second-in-command, Oathout will tailor his own approach to achieve the best overall dynamic. Oathout is a bright and purposeful student leader. Our only reservation is that his extraordinary ambition may cause him to be entangled in inflated DSG politics. But Oathout’s concrete proposals and careful thinking convince us that will most likely not be the case.