RESPONSIBILITIES
Educates student body on issues affecting UCSD at city, state and national levels
Lobbies officials and legislators on behalf of student body
Serves as UC Student Association rep for UCSD
SALARY ‘amp; BENEFITS
$5,250 per year
A-spot parking upgrade
As the only candidate running for vice president of External Affairs, Gracelynne West has already won. But that doesn’t mean she has any idea what she’ll do once in office. Judging by her inability to form concrete plans or original ideas for how to approach her job, this campus is in for a year of ineffectual outreach and meek legislative lobbying.
West has focused on increasing diversity at the university while ensuring that college affordability remains a legislative priority. Her plans for achieving these goals? It’s hard to tell because West appears to have difficulty expressing her ideas, often stumbling over her words in attempting to describe her stances on important issues.
It’s difficult to imagine anyone so unassuming and inarticulate as West displaying the type of gung-ho spirit and hardnosed position-taking necessary to represent our university within any serious political arena.
When she does speak up, West offers unoriginal solutions to complex problems that have plagued our university for years. Asked how she intends to increase diversity at UCSD, West harps on strategies of ‘outreaching to students.’ Questioned about her ability to lobby for the California D.R.E.A.M. Act and the California College Affordability Act, West points to her success in registering students to vote in the 2008 presidential election. How those things are related remains to be determined, but West assumes that every student she helped to register automatically became a D.R.E.A.M. Act supporter.
Unless West has some Jedi-like powers of persuasion she has yet to reveal, not much is going to happen in the External Affairs office next year.