The three remaining candidates for UNC’s student body president sat down with members of the editorial board to discuss their ambitions for the office. Overall, we were disappointed with how little the candidates managed to distinguish themselves from each other. We were hoping to see more of a departure from student government’s ineffective status quo. The fact that we didn’t see this from any of the candidates made us hesitant to endorse. But as we’ve said all year, it’s crucial for students to vote. We realize that one of these three candidates will be elected, and we look forward to a productive workingrelationship with the victor in the coming year.
Kathryn Walker’s willingness to eschew partisanship and speak passionately about the miserable state of relations between the University and state government is encouraging.
But it’s hard to reconcile this with her position as chairwoman of the College Republicans, a campus functionary of the party whose anti-education efforts she now purports to oppose. She and the College Republicans worked directly for the election of Thom Tillis, whose own platform and priorities have little in common with Walker’s.
Walker is gritty, open and willing to talk specifics. She has the most experience dealing with state government, although her track record there is modest at best.
Additionally, her plans to bundle student groups together and form representative relationships between those groups and student government don’t acknowledge the nuances of student groups’ varied objectives.
