Runoff student body president election begins today

The two remaining student body president candidates criticized the current administration and defended their platforms in Monday night’s runoff debate.

The Coalition of Carolina Voters, a group of 12 student organizations, held a runoff debate in the Daily Tar Heel office after inclement weather left it without a meeting space on campus.

"(Andrew Powell) has failed in reaching out to many groups on campus,” candidate Houston Summers said. “He’s kind of segregated those groups off and let them be on their own.”

Candidate Kathryn Walker said the role of the student body president is to show up to student organization meetings. She said it is hard for groups like the Black Student Movement to meet with the student body president.

“I think these meetings, and being a face on campus and meeting with students, is part of the job,” she said.

Walker, former chairwoman of the College Republicans, said “Republican” is not a label that defines her ideas.

“Nowhere when I signed my party card when I was 18 did I say, ‘okay, I want to give up these beliefs because I want to be a Republican,’” she said.

She said she was proud that her organization and the Young Democrats combined efforts to hold a voting drive in the fall. She wants to bring student organizations together to create a larger campus leadership council.

Summers defended his previous statements about offering athletics-style tutoring services to the entire student body in an effort to improve minority male retention rates, which he said are higher for athletes.

“It’s about taking the successes with athletics that we’ve had and taking the resources that we give to student athletes and offering them to other students across the University,” Summers said.

He also stood by his statement that he voted for Thom Tillis in the 2014 N.C. Senate election. Voter records showed that Summers did not vote, but he said there must have been a mistake in the records.

“It would have been a pretty silly thing to do to lie to the Young Democrats about voting Republican,” he said.

The candidates said they could not point to a weakness in their platforms.

“It’s very hard to say that something that I worked for is not going to work,” Walker said. “If there is any fault within my platform, it would be perhaps there are some vague spaces, only because I think platforms need to be living documents.”

Summers acknowledged that it may be difficult to get the Board of Governors to listen to student ideas.

After his campaign ended Feb. 10, former candidate David Marsh endorsed Walker.

Walker said she is humbled and happy that Marsh endorsed her campaign.

“I respect David for all of the work that he did, and we talked to make sure that the strong points of his platform are still incorporated,” she said.

university@dailytarheel.com