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Student Body Votes Against Unity Ticket in Referendum Zach Jonas ’22 Managing News Editor On Monday, April 22 the student body voted in a referendum to decide whether the Unity Ticket would be given a chance to run for the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) executive board (E-board) positions. The students who comprised the Unity Ticket included: Gabriel Echarte ’22 running for president, Isiaha Price ’21 for vice-president, Dorjohn Boakye ’21 for Judiciary Council (JC) chair and Angelina Han ’22 for secretary. The results were announced on Tuesday, April 23, with 71 percent of students voting against overturning the JC’s decision to bar the Unity Ticket from elections.
Two weeks ago, the JC voted to expel the Unity Ticket from E-board elections after a student filed a campaign finance complaint against the group. The Unity Ticket, according to the JC, violated the Elections Committee section H. subsection ii. clause of the AAS Constitution, which states that “no more than $30 total from any source or combination of sources can be spent on the promotion of any candidate, and any campaign item promoting a candidate counts toward this sum.” As a result, the first election results were voided, and a second election cycle was announced. Gabriel Echarte ’22, the presidential nominee of the disqualified Unity Ticket, said that the clause in question “is objectively ambiguous.
It felt like a biased letter. Multiple people misinterpreted the passage.” In an email to the student body explaining its decision, the JC wrote that “active senators, such as the ticket’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates, should have been well aware of the proper channel for their inquiry. This was a failure to complete due diligence on their part.” Echarte said that the entire process of running in the campaign, being disqualified and then filing a referendum was extremely taxing. “It was a pretty painful process. There are some things that I want to change about the process. Like member parties are only informed about complaints against them when they get to trial in a public setting. They don’t know what they’re charged with un-
til the day of the trial,” he said. He also added that he believed the JC mishandled the situation. “I felt like the JC email took things a step too far. It felt like a personal attack,” Echarte said. Avery Farmer ’20, the newly-appointed AAS president, empathizes with the constituents of the Unity Ticket and plans to make the constitution clearer in the future so a similar election debacle will not occur again. “I am sorry that the Unity Ticket felt that the decision against them was too harsh, and I would remind students that the original issue came from an honest misunderstanding rather than from any willful subversion of the rules,” Farmer said. “I plan to encourage [AAS] Sen-
ate to take this opportunity to make the rules clearer surrounding elections, JC proceedings and referenda, with a focus on preventing prolonged disputes like we had in this election,” he added. Isiaha Price ’21, the Unity Ticket’s vice-presidential nominee also expressed his disappointment with the results of the race. We “the ticket [are] sad that the referendum did not go through, but we knew this was an uphill battle. We’re thankful for the student body’s patience,” he said. Nevertheless, several members of the Unity Ticket will have their chance to work in the AAS. Both Echarte and Han are running for senate seats in the AAS. Senate elections will take place on Thursday, April 24.
entangling celebrities like Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. In the last installment of the series, we look at inclusion, both in the admissions office and for students on campus.
experience feelings of exclusion beyond the admissions process. At the University of Michigan in 2018, an alumna circulated a guide to “Being Not-Rich,” which gained traction across elite colleges nationwide. The guide, which included advice on subjects like housing and
something wrong with you.” Amherst is among a cohort of elite colleges which host more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent, though the college regularly highlights the progress it has made. According to data released by the admissions office, the class of 2023 boasts record-breaking statistics. Aside from the college’s increasing selectivity — the acceptance rate this year fell to just short of 11 percent — the class of 2023 also consists of 129 QuestBridge scholars, with 56 percent of admitted students identifying as students of color. Yet, even as the admissions office’s efforts to diversify the student body appear impressive statistically, students still struggle to feel welcome in campus life. Once enrolled at the college, students are encouraged to take advantage of opportunities for inclusion on campus, ranging from affinity groups to resource centers. Diversity Intern Maya Hossain ’21 celebrated the progress made in the past couple of years of expanding the resources available to students: intensive advising for first-generation and low-income first-year students; expanded financial aid; and partnerships between the Counseling Center, the Multicultural Resource Center (MRC) and the Center for Diversity and Student
Leadership (CDSL). Putting these initiatives into action, however, is a different story. Limited resources often prevent substantive impact. Though valuable, the resource centers — the MRC, CDSL, Queer Resource Center (QRC) and Women’s and Gender Center (WGC) — are “bandaids,” Lee said. “You’ll have the resource centers, for example, that are technically for the students, but they’re understaffed, underfunded, and those spaces don’t always feel inclusive. That’s not to say that they’re not trying necessarily,” he said. Hossain added that the number of people actually investing in the work of access and equity for low-income students is low. “If you look at who’s propelling all of these things, you could identify them on one hand. It’s [Dean of New Students Rick] Lopez, [Director of the CDSL] Tenzin Kunor, a couple faculty members who feel specifically engaged with this stuff. You can find the source of any positive thing for a first-gen low-income student on this campus because of them,” Hossain said. “It’s really disappointing because they have to do so much. Every bit of progress we have, I have to hold myself back from fully embracing it because of
Admissions Scandal Calls to Question Access and Equity on Campus Continued from page 1 and then try to generalize the entire intro education?” Lee said. “So it’s really hard to always have to keep up, but it’s triple the amount of work for everyone who are people of color and low-income, first-generation students.” The barriers to entry in the classroom, Lee added, contribute to feelings of exclusion on campus. “It’s hard to always struggle, and I feel like that just emphasizes the imposter syndrome of ‘I’m not supposed to be here, how can everyone else keep up and I can’t.’ It’s weird, because it’s not even ‘work harder.’ Working harder doesn’t make a difference,” he said. Lee’s experiences are not uncommon for low-income students on college campuses. Traditional narratives concerning students’ college experiences insist that entering college presents a plethora of new and exciting opportunities ranging from a blossoming social life to a rigorous yet enriching academic schedule. Though this narrative is often lauded as the universal college experience, a deeper investigation disputes such an assumption. Over the past three weeks, The Student has investigated the college’s admissions practices in light of Operation Varsity Blues, the national college admissions scandal
Challenges of Inclusion Work Elite colleges make up a small percentage of the institutions attended by low-income students across the country. According to a 2017 report in The New York Times tracking wealth distribution across American colleges, nearly 40 percent of students in the top 0.1 percent of the income bracket attend Ivy plus colleges, a consortium including all eight Ivy League universities along with Stanford, Duke, MIT and the University of Chicago. That same number — 40 percent — represents the number of students in the bottom 20 percent of the income bracket who attend any two- or four- year university at all. Of those low-income students who do attend college, most attend non-selective universities, community colleges and for-profit schools. While most low-income students are not enrolled in college, those who are fall into the minority of students at an institution, especially if the school is considered elite. The same New York Times report indicates that only 4 percent of students from the bottom 20 percent attend elite colleges. Many
“ “You’ll have the resource centers, for example, that are technically for the students, but they’re understaffed, underfunded, and those spaces don’t always feel inclusive.” — Elinton Lee ’20
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office hours, highlighted the ways in which low-income students “realize that your socioeconomic status (SES) puts you at a significant disadvantage. You struggle to compete with the children of lawyers, doctors, executives and politicians. You start to feel deficient, like there’s
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