Hayley Tsukayama Staff Writer

Vassarions, meet your incoming Vassar Student Association (VSA) Executive Board: President Sam Charner ’08, Vice President for Student Life Morgan Warners ’08, Vice President for Operations Summer’s-Grace Green ‘09, Vice President for Academics Jessica Cho ’08, Vice President for Activities James Kelly ’09, and Vice President for Finance Jessika Wong ’08.

As candidates, all members of the Executive Board spoke to the importance of transparency, efficiency, and making the VSA more relevant to the greater community, but said that they would not lay out specific plans until after they had discussed their goals together.

“The main plan right now,” said Charner, “is to make a smooth transition to the new Exec Board.” The retreat for all VSA Council members will take place on Saturday, April 28, and the first Council meeting with the newly elected representatives will be on May 6th. After establishing these connections, said Charner, Council will be able to set its long-term strategy and plans for next year.

Warners agreed in a separate interview, saying that before Council embarks on a concrete plan, it has to establish its members’ level of cooperation and “get on the same page.”

In certain ways, they already are. Each Executive Board member specifically emphasized the strong need for transparency, cooperation, and more student involvement. “I envision a stronger focus on collaboration than ever before,” said Kelly in an e-mailed statement. “All will be involved in the new mechanisms of the collaborative process…[for] better programming and more effective planning.”

Cho said in an e-mailed statement that she wants to examine the pre-advising process by beginning conversations with the Dean of Freshman’s office and majors’ committees. “There is a real need for more faculty and/or a guarantee of classes from year to year for students, especially those who are in multidisciplinary programs,” said Cho.

Green, also in an e-mailed statement, said her main focus would be on breaking down what she sees as a “barrier that formed between student leadership and the VSA at large.” Wong said there must be an “increase advertising of special purpose funds” so that students know how to fund their events. Warners said he is already envisioning a way to fulfill his campaign promise to attend a student group meeting—like, for example, a study break—every week to increase board visibility and reach as many students as possible.

Charner and Warners also specifically mentioned the importance of continuing to push the College and the Board of Trustees to move to a need-blind admissions policy as soon as possible.

Apart from these larger, ideological goals, the new Executive Board members also had their sights set on some currently pressing campus issues.

Immediate concerns such as the College’s contract with the Aramark Corporation, issues of space (including what to do when Davison dorm goes offline in two years), and how to include student input on the upcoming scheduled evaluations of both Dean of the Faculty Ronald Sharp and Dean of the College Judy Jackson are clearly priorities for Charner and the rest of the board.

Next year’s Executive Board must also establish a precedent for two brand new Executive roles: Warners’ post is new to the Executive Board, while Cho’s post will now be focused primarily on dealing with the College’s new Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs office.

Board members believe that they are up to the task. “It’s a really great group,” said Wong, noting the balance between Council veterans and new members to Council, as well as the presence of more juniors on the Executive Board this year. Charner is the current VSA Organizations Executive, while Wong and Kelly are currently the presidents of their respective classes. The presence of juniors, said Wong, “is a good precedent” to set, ensuring the continuity of ideas from year to year.

The Board of Elections originally planned to release election results at 1 p.m. in The Retreat on April 21, but announced them five hours later during the Jewett Centennial due to a few problems.

Various software problems have plagued VSA elections over the past few years, but there were no software issues this year; in fact, Board of Elections chair Matt Morse ’07 said in an e-mailed statement, “As far as I’m concerned, the software performed very well.” Instead, the technical limitations of the Vassar Campus and human error at the California office where the votes were counted caused the holdup.

Vassar restrictions on program memory allocation and bandwidth use caused the first delay, making it impossible for the Board of Elections to run the voting software properly. The College has placed these limitations largely for security reasons, Morse explained, but these restrictions made it impossible for the Board of Elections to upload the results to the program’s online tabulator.

Morse uploaded the votes with two sets of data: the “real” copy of election data and a test backup copy. The California office caused the delay in the result of the presidential election by mistakenly running the extra set of data in place of the real set.

According to Morse, “this caused the tally program to go crazy because it was given two conflicting sets of data…When we looked at the numbers, they didn’t make any sense.”

Warners said that he intends to address student discontent over the bandwidth limit. “The response I get,” said Warners, reflecting on why the bandwidth limit cannot be increased, “…is that it's never going to be enough.” Yet Warners said that he identifies internet problems as a top student complaint. "There has got to be some way to get around [the demand problem],” he said. In upcoming dialogues with the College, he and the rest of the new Executive Council hope to raise this issue as part of a broad program to communicate student concerns to College administrators.