Who’s Who in the Student Body Elections
Candidates for President
Pax Lloyd-Burchett
Hello, my name is Pax Lloyd-Burchett, and I use he/him pronouns. I’m a sophomore neuroscience major who is running for Student Body President. My decision to run was not made carelessly; working with the tremendous folks on Senate has been one of the most challenging and most rewarding jobs that I’ve ever had. While on Senate I worked with the Quest to review and rework their bylaws and began the process for reviewing the way winter and summer housing is communicated to students and considered by the staff and faculty committee. If I were to be elected, my primary goal would be to make sure that senators are better set up for success. As it stands now, senators have freedom but minimal direction when it comes to deciding their personal goals for their time on the Senate. I think that reworking the senator orientation would give senators a better foundation to work from. I would also reformat SB info to more effectively keep students updated on campus goings-on.
We are told that Reedies take care of Reedies, and this mostly holds true. The most impactful way Reedies take care of Reedies is through student engagement. We volunteer for Renn Fayre, we host dances, we hold SB positions, and we fund the very things the college puts on pamphlets. Senate plays a consistent game of chicken with the administration at large. Although students are the reason that this school is here (you have presumably come here to be educated), it seems that the administration remembers this only as far as it serves their tactical ends. They will take most everything from us, and gesticulate at the little we have left. We have one tool against that siege, and it’s memory. As it stands now the college is fighting an amnesiac in its students. There are always protests, outrage, and calls for financial action. The college treats these as new incidents every chance they get. I think Senate has the ability to change this by keeping a more detailed record of how, and what the student body has tried to bring about change. If we want to see real change in our college we must work with the administrators who care about students so we can weather those that are callous to our concerns. I am not delusional, Reed is a financial institution, but it is also my home. I care about this place, a lot, and probably more than I was meant to. To be frank with you, dear reader, I think that’s what we need right now. The administration expects a lot from us, and we expect very little from them. College students, scholars, senators, whatever you are in their eyes, you should expect more from a school that promises to have the highest standards of anything, let alone creativity.
I don’t expect some drastic, or instantaneous change; I demand accountability.
I hope you will vote for me as your next Student Body President, and support Isabel Hoff as my Vice President. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Candidates for Vice President
Misha Lerner
Hi, my name is Misha and I am running for Vice President. Reed is experiencing a crisis of democracy. Last election we had to extend the voting period because we could not reach the minimum quota of people needed to vote for the results to be valid. Additionally, a relatively small amount of people attend election assemblies and public senate meetings. To remedy this situation, I propose the student body government take upon itself a new role – one in which we address the fundamental issues facing students, especially the issue of student debt, not only as one college alone, but in cooperation with the students of other colleges and universities in Portland and across the country. While the student body government has not traditionally taken this role upon itself, given that the times we are living in are becoming more and more dire (remember that scientists only give us 13 years to reverse the effects of climate change), the student movement as a whole needs to take a more proactive role in shaping the nation. It is only through Reed breaking out of its shell and joining with other colleges can we begin to make some progress on these dire issues, and inspire a more democratic spirit at this school.
Isabel Hoff
I'm Isabel Hoff, or Izzy (she/her/hers). Sophomore, Environmental Studies-Chemistry major. I am currently a senator and am running for Vice President. This past semester on senate I have been working to get Reed to hire an Arabic language faculty member so that Reed can finally offer Arabic on campus, then who knows, maybe Japanese will be next! I have worked closely with Pax both on senate and in the Science Outreach Program and am looking forward to working by his side as the senate's executive team next semester. As VP I will oversee the treasury and student body funding. I plan to address issues with the current system through which Identity Groups receive funding, aka ID Funding. Other ways I have been involved on campus include but are not limited to the Peer Mentor Program, the Latinx Student Union, and through my job as a Peer Career Advisor.
Candidates for Senate
Alisa Chen
Hello! My name is Alisa Chen (she/her/hers)– I’m a first year ES-polisci major running for Student Body Senate. As a Senator I will represent WOC and low-ses students and hope to serve on the Bon Appetit committee and the presidential search committee. I hate the way Commons functions and understand that the board plans take advantage of everyone forced to purchase one, but particularly of first year students and students who face housing insecurity. To me this is both fundamentally wrong and unacceptable. On the presidential search committee I want to help ensure that the next president is genuinely invested in increasing resources for systematically disenfranchised students while also focusing on increasing financial aid for underprivileged students. Outside of these two particular pieces of stuff I want to get done I am also very interested in understanding the general bureaucracy that operates Reed College. Best of luck during this trying time of the year and please remember to take care of yourself!
Billy Fish
Howdy! My name is Billy Fish (he/him/his) and I am a sophomore running for senate. My main motivations for running are to make Reed a proponent of climate justice and to learn from and work with all Reed students to be a positive force for change on this campus. For me, the recent IPCC report, though its contents unsurprising, was a wake-up call. It reminded me that while there are many ways Reed students can minimize their own environmental impact, we must as an institution work together to promote the broader system change necessary for actualizing climate justice. On the institutional level, we must continue to push Reed to relinquish its investments in fossil fuels while also encouraging the college to continue investing in energy efficiency and other direct efforts to reduce its carbon footprint. As students, we must continue to push on-campus waste reduction and recycling programs. I plan to work closely with other senators and clubs to make these goals a reality. Furthermore, as senator, I would be extremely excited to be in a position that allows me to listen to the voices of all Reedies. One of the things that I love most about Reed is the wide array of perspectives and backgrounds the students here have. I very much look forward to senate office hours where I may hear about the change that other students want to see – and where I can work with them to make it happen. Empathetic, driven, and having much experience as a project manager, I will arm myself with the needs of all Reedies and ensure that we can all inspire the change we want to see at Reed. To borrow a slogan from the 2014 People’s Climate March: “To change everything, we need everyone.”
Looking forward to serving you,
Billy Fish
Pixie Freeman
My name is Pixie Freeman. I am a sophomore ES-PoliSci major. I am a low-SES 1st Gen student. I have several goals for my time in senate. If elected to senate, I want to work on making access to financial resources easily available to students in need. Some starting points for this work might be working with the bookstore to find funding for reliable and dependent textbook scholarships and organizing and coordinating with on-campus jobs to ensure broad based prioritization of low-SES students and students with FWS. I also would like to work with faculty to make social justice pedagogy (or other) trainings more frequent and a certain number of trainings required per-year. I want to broaden access and knowledge about bias-reports and work on holding staff and faculty accountable for their biases. I am excited to see senate become more accessible and open to all students on this campus.
Jonathan Lederman
My name is Jonathan Lederman and I'm running for the position of Senator. First of all, as a student with a disability, I want to make the disability services at this institution more formalized, because as they currently function, disability services at Reed require a lot of self-advocacy on the part of students, which inherently makes access a matter of behavior and not actual need. I hope to make this institution more accessible by instituting a peer advocacy network for those who need DSS services to learn from other students how DSS functions, what accommodations they can get, and how to negotiate with both DSS and professors.
The other part of my platform is institutional memory. As current president of Jewish Student Union, I've come to realize how many difficulties stand in the way of student organizing on campus-- and how they generate loss of institutional memory. In the position of Senator, I would work to increase online access to campus resources and preserve institutional memory through organizing documents of current and former clubs. Through this, I hope to improve social life at Reed and strengthen student organization on campus.
Aislin Lighter Steill
Hi! My name is Aislin Lighter Steill (she/her) and I am a sophomore ES-Poli Sci major. On such a student-run campus, I seek to improve direct institutional support for the student body and to continue calling for accountability to its members across many levels. I would like to better resource accessibility and awareness of them, particularly financial, career- and work-related, and health and counseling services. I will work with the HCC in the coming months as it undergoes changes to shape its structure and processes to provide more consistent, informative services to more students, as well as call for more faculty training in advising students and connecting them with low-SES, academic, and mental health resources. I will also strive to increase access to and familiarity with Senate goings-on in order to heighten involvement and enable it to continue providing attentive, effective representation of students’ evolving and ongoing interests.
I’d like above all to honor the twin autonomy and accountability Reedies strive for, and ensure that they are equipped with both the resources they seek and the power to seek and create more. I hope to do this position and its purpose justice, and continue moving towards the institution students deserve. Thank you for your consideration!
Ella Rook
Something that has always been important to me is giving people a voice. My name is Ella Rook and I am running to be your Student Body Senator. Although I am only a first year, I have seen admin claim that they care about student issues but their forums and fancy emails don’t effect change. As a senator I will work diligently to ensure that all communities at Reed are able to have their voice heard and implement policies that benefit the student body, not the institution.
Isabelle Sinclair
I started out as a freshman Reedie several years ago, and quickly realized I wasn’t prepared. I disengaged and did some of my own wanderings, and discovered something which changed my worldview entirely - restorative justice. The basic idea of it is this: when there’s a problem, center on the impact of what happened and the needs of the people who were harmed, rather than on blame and wrongdoing.
Connecting to others is a core driver in my being back. I’m part of the Restorative Justice Coalition on campus, and we’re working to pass a policy that would establish a judicial alternative at Reed. I want to contribute to the community I left, and to help bridge that gap for others who may be in the same position I was in years ago.
I want to engage in creating change at Reed by bringing in some of what I’ve learned outside of it.
Gabriel Wilkie-Rogers
Hi there. My name is Gabe Wilkie-Rogers, I use he/him pronouns, I’m a sophomore, and I’m running for Reed Student Senate because I like to go really deep on convoluted texts. Specifically, I’m referring to the Bylaws governing the Senate, the Quest, and the elections. Now, I’m fairly confident most of y’all haven’t read the Bylaws, and have absolutely no interest in doing so. That’s completely fair, and I’m pretty sure you’re making the right decision. I, for some unearthly reason, have delved quite deep into them. With this quasi-working knowledge of the Bylaws, I want to work to address the problems that they have, so that you can focus on something, anything, more important. These are problems ranging from aberrations in formatting, to physical copies being outdated, to vital information not being present, to them being inaccessible when SIN is down, to them being editable by anyone with a working computer. If you kind, generous, charming, and charismatic people elect me as your Senator, I will dedicate my time on Senate to bringing the Bylaws into the 21st century. Thank you for your time, and have a wonderful day.
Candidates for Quest Editorial Board
Loralee Bandy
Hi everyone, my name is Loralee Bandy, and I am running for Quest editor! I began writing for the Quest my first year at Reed, and have since been a member of the editorial board for the past 4 semesters. I love journalism, and I hope to continue to improve the Quest through updating the Quest handbook, improving outreach, and covering article topics that accurately reflect the views and concerns of the student body with my peer editors.
Katherine Draves
I am running for a Quest editor position because I believe the Quest is a crucial source of information and an integral piece of the Reed community. As an editor, I hope to expand the Quest’s investigative journalism and build a diverse writers room.
Purna Post-Leon
Hi everyone, I’m Purna (she/her/hers), I’m a junior Biology major, and I’m running for Quest Editorial Board. I’m currently a Quest editor and have been for the past two years. Over this time, I’ve had the privilege of working with several different teams of editors, and we’ve made significant changes to the Quest bylaws. We changed the structure of elections so that students now run individually, which we hope makes Editorial Board positions feel more inclusive and representative of the Student Body.
If I’m re-elected, I will focus on increasing transparency in the editing process. This semester, the Board has tried to make our editing nights more open to writers, but I worry it might still feel like an exclusive space sometimes. I want to improve this so that writers feel that they’re a part of the entire journalistic process.
The Quest can and should truly be a newspaper of the student body and reflect the wide variety of views and ideas held by Reed students. To make this happen, I think we need to improve our support systems for both new and continuing writers by providing them with article feedback every week — something I tried to pioneer at the beginning of this semester. Additionally, recruiting more writers at the very beginning of both semesters can help bring in more new voices to the Quest throughout the year. More student writers would also allow the Quest to delve deeper into the big issues on campus — like Reed’s refusal to divest from Wells Fargo — and expose facts that students might not otherwise learn about these issues.
Finally, I would like to create an anonymous Google form or other system for people to provide feedback on Quest coverage and how we can become a better newspaper for the student body so that we can be held accountable throughout the year, not just during Elections.
Ben Read
Hi, I’m Ben Read (he/him) and I am running for Quest editor for 2019. I am a sophomore comparative literature major who loves to read and write everything from poetry to theory to journalism, of course. I have served as a Quest editor for the past year, and I was a staff writer for the Quest before that. In my time as Quest editor, I have learned copy, content, and layout editing, as well as website production and management. As a writer, I reported on Portland events like Wordstock, Reed community lectures and performances, national politics and news and their effects on the Reed community, and Reed campus protest and politics. I also have editing experience from working as an editor for the Grail, a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal, and a writing tutor.
I am running for reelection in the hopes of not only continuing my work as an editor, but also continuing the process the Quest has begun, along with senate, to make the Quest more accessible and accountable. I believe in journalism and the Quest’s specific, vital role on campus in creating and maintaining campus history and in representing student voices, and I believe I can help the Quest serve this purpose. I have personally helped develop partnerships between the Quest and the DoJo to recruit new writers, clearly outlined expectations and editing practices, and furthered transparency in both internal hiring processes and elections.
I also want to continue the constructive relationship with senate that we have built this semester, and to continue work to build the presence of journalism on campus, especially since we lack an academic journalism program here at Reed. This includes bringing journalists to campus, connecting writers with journalism opportunities, maintaining high standards for writers and editors alike, and increasing outreach to potential writers so as to represent as complete a picture of the Reed community as possible. I promise that the Quest will never publish a 4-page issue as long as I am editor.