Why I’m Voting For Ale Murat

By Andrew Yuan ’24

Note: This piece is written before presidential primaries and though it’s meant to be an endorsement of Ale Murat ’23, I hope that the next Executive Board, regardless of who they may be, will seek to work towards policies and models of leadership embodied by Ale. Ultimately, readers can interpret this piece as an encouragement of positive, recurring conversation and civil discourse on Student Council leadership. 

As our mental health reaches a new low after Winter Formal cancellation and failure of Visitations policy changes, don’t you hope for a change? A change that the current Student Council has yet to deliver? A change candidate with a vision beyond the current Student Council Executive Board? 

Ale Murat will bring that change. I am not discrediting other presidential candidates’ policies as unbold or cliche because trust me, I have read them all and they are inspirational. Yet, the change that Ale has already brought and will bring is the change we all need. 

Understanding a candidate’s leadership goes beyond the public persona that they have built. Policies matter:

One, Ale listens. 

In the past school year, a few upperclassmen lobbied Executive Board candidates to include StepNPull installations on campus bathroom doors as a part of their campaign platform. Ale listened. These are the minor changes in our student life that other candidates have failed to notice. Following the incorporation of StepNPull as a means to reduce sanitary COVID risks in municipal governments and workplaces, Ale moved fast to include these otherwise overlooked policies in her campaign. 

When the administration has failed to listen to student petitions and outcries in the past year, the Student Council must deliver students’ wishes and bridge the widening division between student body and the administration. Ale’s timely replies to suggestions on Instagram comments and live Q&A session evidenced her willingness to effectively incorporate student needs in her tenure as Student Council President. 

Two, Ale reaches out. 

Ale shows her connection to the student life at Exeter on her campaign. When I was counting Executive Candidates’ signatures with the Elections Committee a week ago, Ale’s outreach to fellow students surprised me: from student athletes to bookworms like me, Ale gathered signatures beyond just a few friend groups, dorms or impatient students waiting in D-Hall lines. 

 When I read some candidates’ statements, I was left in genuine confusion as to how connected they are to our student life. Candidates should not run when they broadcast a lack of understanding of the multifaceted intricacies of life at the Academy. Such campaign proposals discredit pre-existing policies and organizations that are currently working to achieve or have achieved these promises. Candidates who campaign on falsified information of “status quo” simply do not meet the bare minimum needed to represent us as a student body. 

Three, Ale commits. 

Under the leadership of the current Executive Board, our Student Council has seen major steps taken to increase transparency: making the agenda of the Executive Board available to all students, updating the student body on its progress in The Exonian and frequent posts on its Instagram account to promote school wide policy changes. Ale wants to take a step further. 

To remove the bureaucratic processes in the Student Council, Ale promises to work with the Elections Committee to pass the newest Student Council Constitution. Under the newly proposed Constitution, students who have continuously worked with Student Council committees may be nominated by Committee heads to become Select Representatives. Upon approval by a simple majority of the Council, students may share an equal voice with other elected representatives as a voting member on the Council. 

Furthermore, Ale’s proposal of open forums between administration and Student Council would ensure unprecedented insight into policies proposed by the Academy. As some of you might have recalled from earlier this term, the Open Forum hosted between student leaders and the administration provided some clarity to the Academy’s otherwise cloudy progress on its sexual misconduct reporting policies. Students were able to critically interrogate and directly contribute to the Academy’s reform. 

On a final note, we must not let our Exeter community fall under the influence of systems that reward toxic masculinity. This election, we must take the necessary audacity to stand up against certain pipelines in our Student Council that empower candidates to assume offices on the Executive Board due to certain past office experiences they had. All candidates should avoid practicing performative activism over effective changes to the Academy’s anti-racist policies for the sake of election. At the end of the day, regardless of who wins in the upcoming election, it is our obligation to hold Executive Board candidates accountable for their delivering on promises and representing us as a student body. 

So this election season, vote Ale Murat for President.