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As the University confronts the loss of three senior-level administrators, a worsening pandemic and a transition to online learning, the Emory student body is in dire need of a strong, stable leader. The Emory Wheel’s Editorial Board endorses, with some reservations, Lori Steffel (21B) in her bid to become the next president of Emory’s Student Government Association (SGA).
Steffel’s experience in student government is virtually unparalleled. The three years she has spent advocating for Emory students’ well-being both qualify her for the presidency and quantify the organizational competence she will bring to the job. The president of SGA does not merely oversee the executive board; they are responsible for the legislature as well, and Steffel’s tenure as SGA’s speaker of the legislature as well as executive vice president will inform her in both of these pursuits. This dual experience in both passing and executing legislation uniquely suits her to the office of SGA president.
In her past positions, Steffel gained the valuable crisis management skills she will need in her forthcoming role. Former SGA President Dwight Ma’s (17Ox, 19C) impeachment, last year’s controversy surrounding the anti-Israel mock eviction notices posted on doors, Heather Mac Donald’s inflammatory speech and the constitutional challenge to the Student Activity Fee (SAF) increase all occurred in her student government career. When asked in an interview about what she had learned from the Ma events, she cited the need to “have cohesive and cooperative leadership” and stated that she would never “unilaterally remove [subordinates] from their roles” as Ma had.
As recently as this week, Steffel and other leaders established a program to provide Emory students with free $25 Uber vouchers to fund their travel in the midst of the University’s recent closure. While SGA’s actions in each of the aforementioned events were imperfect, Steffel’s involvement in all of them and her consistent cooperation with the Wheel convince the Editorial Board that she and her administration will maintain an even keel in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic and administrative leadership vacuum.
Emory’s student body will need bold leadership even after the pandemic passes, however. Steffel’s administration will be responsible for more than just navigating crises; she and her executive board will also need to ensure all students’ welfare. In that department, Steffel’s ideas are encouraging. When asked about her greatest regrets from her last year in SGA, she spoke, unprompted, to SGA’s most consistent inadequacies: its failures to engage efficiently with other student organizations and to institute long-term, action-oriented programs. Her commitment to prioritize the latter in particular is a consistent part of her appeal, as is evident in her online platform’s focus on momentum.
The concept of “momentum” appears ambiguous at first glance, but Steffel’s commitment to reifying such a slogan quickly became evident in her interview with the Wheel. While she expressed great pride in the current SGA administration’s success in instituting the free printing initiative, the tampon initiative, global student ambassadors and weekend C-route shuttles, she has also demonstrated a clear desire to move beyond such short-term ideas toward sustainable, institutionalized change.
However, the centerpiece of her platform, an expansion and implementation of the Emory Edge initiative, does warrant criticism on the basis of its infeasibility and logistical difficulties. According to her platform, the program would drastically increase access to resources for summer opportunities. As Steffel said in her interview, it would ensure that any student seeking an unpaid internship would have the necessary funding to pursue it. The program would solve a significant problem if implemented, but Steffel herself admitted in an interview that “if you wanted to fully fund it, … you’re looking at close to half a billion dollars. That’s insane.” When pressed on her plan to secure that money, she stated only that she would continue to lobby administrators to prioritize Emory Edge over other campus initiatives. She would not name any specific initiatives or departments she believed should lose funding to cover the costs. Emory students deserve a leader willing to push achievable policies, admit their costs and publicize clear plans with which they will implement them. Steffel ought to consider adapting her vision to reflect real-world circumstances and foreseeable challenges.
Her professed perspective on the recent referendum to raise Emory’s SAF also merits denunciation. SGA faced a constitutional challenge to their efforts campaigning for the increase. While the Constitutional Council voted to uphold the results, their opinion castigated SGA for campaigning using in-progress voting information unavailable to the student body, and rightly so. Steffel, however, stated that she was “hesitant to say [she] regretted anything” and that what they “did was necessary to get that outcome.” We regret her inability to highlight a specific point at which SGA failed the student body during the referendum. While admitting when one errs is difficult, Emory students deserve elected representatives capable of recognizing their mistakes and learning from them.
Nevertheless, we believe Steffel and her administration will serve the Emory community well, both as its leader during the current crises and as an advocate for its welfare. Her successes and laudable qualities outweigh her mistakes and flaws, and for these reasons we encourage students to vote for Steffel in the election for SGA’s next president.
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