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BY ELENA CHOPYAK and JACK KEEFE

In print | April 26, 2007

Due to widespread student concern over responses given by Student Council presidential candidates during last night’s Candidates Forum, an additional discussion with on-campus candidates was held last night at 10:00 p.m. in the Intercultural Center to discuss the candidates’ commitment and connection to IC communities on campus. According to Swarthmore Asian Organization IC intern Andrea Pien ’08, “students from the IC were concerned that the candidates were evading concerns about students of color, queer communities and women.”

“We wanted to clarify their opinions and alert [the candidates] to the importance of engaging in dialogue,” Pien said. More than 50 students assembled in the IC Big Room to pose questions to the candidates and hear their responses before voting. Three of the four candidates, Peter Gardner ’08, Rasa Petrauskaite ’08 and Louis Rosenberg ’09, attended; only Carlos Villafuerte ’08, who is currently studying abroad in Spain, was absent. The forum was organized by Pien and fellow IC interns Jose Aleman ’09, Tatiana Cozzarelli ’08 and Camila Leiva ’09, and the discussion was facilitated by current student council president Joella Fink ’07.

Students generally posed questions concerning the candidates’ involvement in IC events, their sensitivity and awareness to issues of diversity and their dedication to advocacy based on IC interests. Ground rules for the discussion aimed to ensure an environment that was civil but frank, calling for time limits, relevancy of questions and a prohibition against interrupting candidates during their responses.

Fink exhorted the crowd to “try not to let any hearsay or rumors” sway the debate.

One of the first questions posed to the candidates concerned what they had done to “be better allies to working-class people, people of color, queer people and women.” Gardner said that he had “been a friend,” and that he would “push for every member of Student Council to participate in ally-building workshops … to create a safer, more productive discourse.” In her response, Petrauskaite mentioned her participation in Multi during freshman year, in addition to involvement in “Beyond the Box” conferences, Small Group and Ring discussions. Finally, Rosenberg spoke of his work relationships with individuals in the Black Cultural Center and the Women’s Resource Center, primarily through his position as an Interfaith intern, and said that he was “always trying to reevaluate the ways I perceive and approach people.”

Questions concerning the candidates’ personal commitment to IC ideals and goals dominated the discussion. One student asked what IC-related events the candidates had attended during the current semester, and how they would get the student body to be more involved in these types of events. The three candidates agreed that while Student Council has a responsibility to engage students, there is no easy solution to this problem. Both Gardner and Rosenberg admitted to having limited participation in such events themselves this semester.

“I have been complacent. I have not been a participatory member,” Gardner said.

At one point in the discussion, a question was posed as to why the candidates’ answers at this forum were “very different than the ones we heard yesterday” and why IC issues were not covered in candidate platforms. It was at around this point that one student, apparently expressing dissatisfaction with the candidates present, began to prominently display a piece of paper that said, “None of the above is an option.” During this display, Gardner began his response by saying that, “the past 24 hours” had been “undoubtedly the most humbling of [his] life,” and that he wished to apologize for any perception of him being a racist or a sexist.

“We all know there are issues of discrimination that we face every day. We all know that minority groups are especially a focus of discrimination and misrepresentation,” Rosenberg said in reply to the question, clarifying that his error was in his lack of specificity in combating certain problems, and implying that the lack of IC issues in his platform wasn’t surprising, as the platform was “two paragraphs long” and that the only concrete idea he saw fit to include involved “dorm representatives.”

In her own response, Petrauskaite said that the previous night had “brought to sharper focus that there needs to be a more institutional change” in how student council addresses the IC community. "[If elected,] I will create a special committee that meets six times a year, and the members of this committee would be student group leaders

Candidates were also asked to cite an example of racism, homophobia, classism or sexism on campus, and what their responses to that example were or would be. Petrauskaite discussed in general how people “discriminate without even knowing it” and proposed incorporation of discrimination issues into the academic curriculum. In his response, Rosenberg spoke of discontent with “articles in The Phoenix about whether it is rational to be religious,” and how he and other individuals helped organize Religion and Spirituality Week this semester partially in response. Gardner referred to his own campaign fliers, which, according to e-mails sent to numerous IC mailing lists, allegedly used stereotypes of female beauty to compare the existing Student Council to how it would be under his leadership, as an example of this type of negative discourse.

“It’s come to my attention that a lot of people have been offended about a lot of the signs I’ve put up … I realize in retrospect that that was embarrassingly insensitive of me,” Gardner said.

Prior to the discussion and apparently in response to e-mails exchanged within several IC lists, Gardner e-mailed a response, stating in part that he hoped that, “my sincerest apologies for what I know to have been an inadequate and unproductive response to an important question [regarding IC on campus].” In the e-mail, Gardner acknowledged his privilege as a “straight white male who grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.,” and expressed a hope to “develop more ideas, new initiatives, and a better understanding of where the IC groups are coming from and where they want to go.” Aside from expressing contrition for his past remarks, Gardner also expressed in a later question that the Board of Managers should not be considered “Platonic, philosopher kings in an ivory tower,” and that he would be an activist in bringing student concerns directly to them.

Other issues addressed included the candidates’ support of closed groups, for which they all claimed to be in favor of full funding, and their opinions about the potential role of an ethnic studies program at the college, to which all candidates generally expressed approval. Despite the forum, opinions were still mixed at the end as to the sincerity of the candidates in relation to IC issues. “I appreciate [the candidates’] willingness to come here,” Aleman said. However, attendee Ishita Kharode ’08 said that she wished the candidates had been more “straightforward in their responses.”

“I think it would have appeared more sincere if they had answered the questions more directly,” she said.

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