GUSA Survey: Calen Angert angling for your love
Posted by: Molly Redden in News, Vox Populi, tags: Calen Angert, GUSA Election, GUSA Survey, Videos
Calen Angert and Jason Kluger
This week, the Voice, which has interviewed all the candidates running for GUSA President and Vice President, will give their endorsement of one or two lucky pairs. But don’t take our word for it! Vox wants you to make a (more or less) informed decision when roughly a fourth of you decide to vote in this year’s GUSA election!
We’ve sent surveys to all eight presidential candidates and will post them as we receive them. Below, Calen Angert explains why he and VP candidate Jason Kluger deserve to be elected as top execs. If video’s more your thing, check theirs out here.
What are three things you’d try to accomplish as GUSA execs?
- Improve career services. We hope to make career services not just a resource for students to discover, but a proactive service which comes to the students. Through short consultations, the career center could achieve two goals: raise awareness of its existence/usefulness to the student body and help students to consider their future life goals/plans. While job placement is an important function of career services, it should also consider a wider scope when directing students for life after the hilltop. Career services should help students develop a life or career plan on an individual basis as opposed to catering primarily to those with defined goals.
- Work on student safety. After sitting on the Student Safety Advisory Board, I understand that only so much funding and resource allocation goes towards student safety. Though I support advocacy for increased funding, the current economic crisis is a harsh reality check for such dreams. However, within the confines of the safety budget, we can restructure and streamline operations to create funds from previously committed monies. Through student lead initiatives, such as student drivers for Safe Rides, the decreased hiring costs could allow for an expansion of Safe Rides’ hours of operation or its fleet.
- The Georgetown Fund: While we would normally suggest intellectual life and improved relations between students and professors for one of my main issues, we will substitute a part of our platform which received less attention in this campaigning period. The executive branch works under a $60,000+ budget, and we intend to allocate $30,000 of it for student groups in need of funding. Under this plan, student organizations may apply for money and a GUSA co-sponsorship to host an event. Considering the already scarce funding available to students, the Georgetown Fund would provide simple access to much needed money. We believe GUSA should serve the students, and funding their activities helps to show this support.
What qualifies you to be GUSA’s next President and Vice President, keeping in mind that how you’d look as an odometer is fair game.
Between us, Jason and I have more experience than any other ticket running. We both served on the previous administration’s executive board, and I also served in both the senate and the Student Safety Advisory Board. We’ve seen the issues, we know the issues, and we now how to deal with the issues. We bring continuity to this election – not through platform, but through institutional knowledge. Each administration only has a year in office, so having some experience and preparation before leading the executive is an invaluable asset in achieving platform goals. We also shower regularly – clearly a plus.
If GUSA had unbridled control of all things Georgetown, what’s the first thing you would change?
We’d rework the alcohol policy and try to bring back the Healy Pub. That thing must have been awesome.
How would you characterize Dowd’s time in office?
We think Dowd was pretty effective in his time in office. Aside from just launching the Summer Fellows program, he gave it the hope of a future by funding it for at least the next two years. He also hosted a slew of events (Britto lecture, Opera in the Outfield, etc.) and revived the Hindi language program. We think that while Pat did a great job, he simply did not have enough time to see certain objectives materialize. For instance, though Pat worked on diversity related issues, there was not enough time to completely follow through with this part of his agenda; we wish to complete such goals in the coming year.
How do you feel about the findings of the SCUnity report and GUSA’s reaction to their recommendations?
We think SCU did an incredible job both in their depth and quality of research. However, this question now lacks relevance considering SCU’s proposed split from GUSA. In the coming year, we hope GUSA and SCU will have a better working relationship, and we will do all in our power to
foster such ties.
Other GUSA Surveys:
Entries (RSS)
Let’s be honest everyone. Pat Dowd and his cronies more or less wrote all of these answers. Calen knows nothing, has done nothing and will do nothing. He is just a Pat Dowd cronie and once Dowd is gone next year..Calen will not know what to do.
A vote for Calen is a vote for a puppet whose puppeteer will be gone in less than 3 months.
Intriguing. What makes you say that?
The fact that if you look at Calen’s campaign-his banners, where they are placed, who is running his campaign, his main supporters, even the name of his website: “calenandjason.com” ..remember “patandjames.com”??????…they’re all reminiscent of Pat Dowd’s campaign.
Pat is working very hard behind the scenes to promote Calen’s campaign..i mean Calen’s VP is also from the GUSA executive and all of Calen’s platform…i can assure you that he didnt come up with any of that.
Calen is the Manchurian Candidate….except he has no will power of his own so they don’t need to insert a chip into his brain.
Well, I feel this deserves some clarification: while I understand how people could interpret my campaign as such, I can assure you that Pat has played a minimal role in the development of my platform and my support structure. Should I be the “Pat Dowd ticket,” he would have exclusively endorsed my campaign and my initiatives would be based less on career services and a Georgetown Fund. Even the way in which i run my campaign (ever see Dowd produce a video?) differs from Pat’s methods. I certainly respect Pat’s work and his ideas, but to label me his “cronie” would be a far exaggeration of the truth. Does my website bear similarities to how pat and james named theirs? Yes, but I chose the naming pattern because it reinforces my and Jason’s names when supporters visit the site and view our platform. However, a similar naming pattern for my website does not imply that I am “under the influence” of Pat Dowd. As for my “main supporters,” I’m pretty sure that Pat joined every facebook group and endorsed every campaign in this election – he does not put any exclusive backing towards me. And if my time served on the executive, senate, and student safety advisory board (maybe this is a logical reason for my safety concerns as opposed to Pat’s brainchild) does not qualify me for this position, I don’t know what would.
[...] Calen Angert angling for your love [...]
[...] Calen Angert (MSB `11) and Jason Kluger (MSB `11) have won the GUSA presidential election, according to an email sent out by Election Commissioner Mirco Haag (SFS ‘09). (Want to see what Angert and Kluger hope next year will look like? Read their campaign promises here.) [...]