Coinciding with the election of the five Young Trustee finalists last week, the Board of Trustees recently changed the procedure of selecting future Young Trustees, eliminating next year's student election and giving an appointed committee the power to select the five finalists, according to Secretary of the Board Jerry Schnydman.
The Board of Trustees developed the new selection process in an effort to bypass what the members saw as an ineffective election system, after a series of discussions about the unreliability of campus elections and low levels of voter participation.
"The purpose of the decision is to ensure that the best possible applicants apply and are selected for the position," Schnydman said.
"In the past, there have always been concerns that it's been a popularity contest, and we want the qualified students to apply even if they feel like they're not the most known," he added.
Instead of choosing a Young Trustee among five finalists voted on by juniors and seniors, the Board will interview and select among students who turn in applications to a committee that will include the secretary of the board of trustees, two senior class students, one faculty member and the deans of student life, enrollment and academic services, undergraduate education and academic programs.
However, as in previous years, each student candidate will still be required to submit a petition signed by at least 100 students in the junior or senior classes in order to be eligible for the Young Trustee position.
The new procedure will not affect the five newly-elected Young Trustee finalists, who will appear before the executive board of the Board of Trustees next Monday for final selection of the next Young Trustee.
Finalists for the four-year position -- in which a Hopkins graduate from each senior class will have full voting powers and be eligible to serve on committees -- include seniors Arielle Goren, Santosh Sagar, Iverson Long, Manu Sharma and Chris Watson.
They were elected in a run-off election of eight semi-finalists who had been elected from an initial pool of 21 candidates.
Finalists expressed mixed feelings about the Board's decision to change selection procedures next year.
"I think that giving a certain amount of elective capacity to the students in picking someone to represent them is a good idea," said Goren. "But I guess it's sort of questionable how much a Trustee is really representing his or her class, so I understand the quandary."
Watson, who became involved in campus elections at Hopkins for the first time with his Young Trustee candidacy, supported the new selection procedure.
"The school uniquely understands the responsibilities of the Young Trustee," Watson said, "so the administration can best pick the person who can do the job."
He added, however, that it was "unfortunate that there's no proper system to allow students to have a part in picking the best candidate."
Goren, who echoed Watson's dissatisfactions with campus elections, commented that students were not well-informed about the Young Trustee elections because of "issues of miscommunication and inadequate dissemination of information" that plagued this year's elections.
"There wasn't enough advertising for the election, and with the problems [of fraud] with online voting, people were really frustrated," said Goren.
According to Schnydman, similar concerns about the campus's overall student elections system, guided by the controversial Board of Elections, partly influenced the Board of Trustee's decision to seek alternate methods of selecting finalists.
"In my seven years in this position, there has always been some problem with elections. The elections on campus are simply unreliable, and that's unacceptable for choosing someone for the Board of Trustees," he said, adding that the probability of the elections system getting better soon was slim.
While Schnydman admitted that a minority of students may feel disenfranchised by the elimination of the elections, turnout of juniors and seniors to the Young Trustee election has been consistently low.
According to Schnydman, who supervised the vote counting in the election, the first-place Young Trustee finalist received 106 votes and the second-place finalist received just over 90 votes, with vote tallies for other candidates dipping to 30 or 40 votes.
"The last election was an accumulation of the skepticism and cynicism about the process," said Dean of Enrollment and Academic Services William Conley, who volunteered at balloting stations in last week's Student Council and Young Trustee elections.
Long, a Young Trustee finalist and current executive president of the Student Council, also criticized the BoE for being ineffective at running elections, and added that these problems made it logistically difficult for the Board of Elections to make its selection.
"A basic concern was the time frame -- the Board of Trustees has to know they're going to have their five choices at a certain time, and at this time the BoE can't meet regular time frames," he said.
BoE co-chair Michael Seibert admitted that he could understand students' and administrators' frustrations, but also commented that the BoE had requested financial support from the Trustees Office this year and received no money.
"I would prefer a little more support from the Trustees' Office for running the elections," Seibert said.
According to Schnydman, the Board of Trustees will implement the new selection procedure for finalists next year and evaluate the system to determine if it will be continued.
