With approximately 45 percent of the vote, Andrew Allison ’04 won the Yale College Council presidency for the 2002-2003 academic year, YCC Vice President EB Kelly ’03 announced yesterday.
Ryan Sheely ’04 is the new vice president, Lindsey Parker ’04 is the new secretary, Andrew Klaber ’04 won the office of treasurer, and Elliott Mogul ’05 will be the next Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee chairman. All of the officers elected are current YCC representatives. A total of 1,965 students voted in the YCC elections this year.
Allison said he is excited about working with the other members of the executive board. He also said he plans to implement some of the issues from opponent Matthew Nickson’s ’03 platform.
“His focus on constituent issues is something the YCC definitely needs to work on more and we’ll be working to try to implement the ideas that he had,” Allison said. “I think 24 hour [Cross Campus Library] and late-night dining at least are two things that we definitely want to work on, and in the case of late-night dining, we already are working on it.”
Allison said he has been working on dining hall reform throughout this semester and is currently working on booking a fall concert.
Sheely, who is YCC secretary this academic year, said he plans to continue working on dining hall reform throughout the summer and will be a point person for ongoing issues because he will be in New Haven.
Sheely and Parker both spoke about increasing representatives’ accountability.
“[I want to] set up a better liaison system and make sure that when we do come to resolutions we make sure we’ve researched and really understand what people are thinking,” Parker said. “I want to have a handbook for each representative upon coming back to school and have report sheets so that when they do meet with student groups they are a liaison between, they write down what was said.”
Sheely said his main goal is to make the YCC a legitimate, credible place for student voice. One of the ways in which he will implement this plan is to develop a code of ethics, he said.
“A code of ethics — would require reps with a conflict of interest on a particular resolution to recuse themselves from voting, which is something we had problems with this year,” Sheely said.
Sheely also mentioned amending the YCC constitution to require higher attendance at meetings and to require representatives to attend a certain number of their college council meetings.
Mogul said he has already made plans to meet with current UOFC chairman Ames Brown ’02 over the weekend to discuss plans to make the UOFC more responsive to students’ and organizations’ needs.
“From there, I’ll see what he’s done, what I need to be doing before next semester to make [the UOFC] more responsive, and have a comprehensive online guide for all of the students,” Mogul said.
Mogul was elected to the YCC in January and served as a YCC associate in the fall. He is also a Freshman Class Council representative and communications chairman of the FCC.
Klaber has been on the YCC for two years and has worked on such projects as the Newspaper Readership Program. He was out of town yesterday and unable to comment on his victory, but he has said previously that if elected, he would like to work on securing corporate sponsorship for spring fling.
Outgoing YCC President Vidhya Prabhakaran ’03 said he is happy with the results of the election, as each winner has demonstrated his or her ability on the YCC this year.
“I think we have a very strong executive board for next year and people should be pleased with their votes,” Prabhakaran said. “Every single person who is now on the executive board has shown results this year, and so I’m pretty pleased.”