Note: The Editorial Board did not consider Stephanie He (27C) for an endorsement because she did not respond to several email requests to speak with The Emory Wheel’s Editorial Board.
The Editorial Board endorses no candidate for Emory University’s Oxford College Student Government Association (OxSGA) presidential race due to the considered candidate’s apparent lack of preparedness for the position.
When Kenan Bajraktarevic (25Ox) joined the Zoom meeting for his interview with the Editorial Board, he was wearing a hot pink cowboy hat and sitting in a darkly lit room. Bajraktarevic did not provide the Wheel with a platform about his candidacy and instead only submitted a 150-word blurb that lacked much substance. This blurb, which is posted on the Wheel’s website, is vague and provides no concrete policy ideas.
During his interview with the Board, Bajraktarevic spoke generally about issues he heard about from Oxford College of Emory University students. Bajraktarevic cited Yik Yak, an anonymous social media app similar to Fizz, as the primary source of the complaints. Statements such as this led the Board to question the reliability of his sources of information.
While we do not endorse Bajraktarevic, he demonstrated some positive attributes in his interview with the Board. He has valuable connections with faculty and staff in the Oxford community that will be beneficial when trying to work with the administration to draft and pass legislation. He specifically mentioned his relationship with Valerie Molyneaux, Oxford’s associate dean for academic affairs.
One of Bajraktarevic’s ideas that stuck out to the Board was to add lockers in the Atlanta campus’ student center for visiting Oxford students to safely store their belongings.
Bajraktarevic spoke about publicly disseminating the results of end-of-semester class and professor reviews. This way, students can have University-backed information about what a professor or class is like, instead of simply turning to external resources like Rate My Professors.
However, these positive notes were not enough for Bajraktarevic to earn the Editorial Board’s endorsement due to his lack of tangible, thought-out policies. It felt as though he took the entire election process as a joke rather than a true responsibility, which is a quality that makes a voter uneasy and disheartened. In the future, we hope to see Bajraktarevic take election time seriously so that it reflects the serious needs and desires of Oxford’s student body.
The Editorial Board encourages members of Oxford’s community to vote “no confidence” in the OxSGA presidential election this week.
The above editorial represents the majority opinion of The Emory Wheel’s Editorial Board. The Editorial Board is composed of Marc Goedemans, Sophia Hoar, Carson Kindred, Justin Leach, Eliana Liporace, Lola McGuire, Saanvi Nayar, Sara Peréz, Jaanaki Radhakrishnan and Ilka Tona.
