Johnny Vroom was the last person we spoke to Saturday. Yet all talk of next year's Student Council begins and ends with him.
Vroom anticipated every question we had; he addressed with good answers those concerns merely raised by other candidates. Vroom had put the work in ahead of time, both by drafting his comprehensive platform which has been on his website for weeks, and by working this past year as Council's chief of cabinet. Current Council President Dan Morrison appointed Vroom to this position, and now we endorse Vroom to be his successor as Council President.
The time has come for candidates to throw their predecessors under the AirBus. Yet Vroom had only compliments for the significant progress in marketing and growth made by the current Council leaders. And so Vroom, given his experience working under Morrison and overseeing the 11 presidential committees, is qualified in the right kind of ways to be your next president. "I have institutional knowledge," he said, "and I think that that's absolutely essential at an executive level to run an organization as complex as Student Council."
Vroom dismisses claims about the structural inefficiency of Council, saying 11 committees are adequate if each is smaller in number and well-managed. He does think there is a motivational inefficiency, however. To address this, Vroom wants to better explain to those elected as Council representatives the commitment which is expected of them, then hold them to stricter attendance requirements.
Vroom also created Look Hoos Talking, a series of 12-minute faculty lectures which sold out in a similar amount of time. Thus, he knows what makes a good Council initiative - and a bad one. Vroom thinks the current SafeWalk program - which pays on-call volunteers $9 an hour to sit at Newcomb and occasionally walk people home - needs retooling. "We had the data for SafeWalk and it was abysmal," he admits. He hopes to better the program by strategically placing walkers in the locations where they are needed.
Vroom, a Biology major, is an empiricist who thinks all questions worth asking can be answered with good data. Council's efficiency can be determined with data. Whether an initiative should be kept or dropped can be answered with data. Always, check the data: "And if we don't have relevant data then put it in a Penny for Your Thoughts survey to the student body," Vroom said, having considered, like a good statistician, all possible outcomes.
This is not to say Vroom admires data for its own sake. Ultimately, data is just the best tool for Vroom to get to what he's after: knowing student concerns. "I don't want to only use Speak Up UVa, I don't only want to use emails," he said, for in his analysis students are greater than the numbers they provide.
Part and parcel with his emphasis on data and student input is a commitment to transparency, to making those numbers known. "There's no point in being secretive; in any sort of a governing body or governing organization data should be flowing freely," Vroom said. He finds it essential to make both Council's budget and all CIO appropriations available on Council's website, despite possible repercussions such as students filing retroactive appeals. "I think that people deserve to know how money is being allocated," he added. His campaign literature even calls for the Council president to be held more accountable to the student body, because his obligation to students is the soil on which his platform stands, and runs deep.
The only way to know Vroom's ideas in full is by going to votevroom.com. The only way to know his full potential is by going to vote Vroom next week. We know, we know - like the boy who cried "vote" - who takes us seriously after a week of endorsements? But this one, reader, we especially mean.
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