Some thoughts on waffle fries

Tonight, I had a conversation with a stranger in a dining hall. About USG elections.

I have never done this before. Not once, in my now almost four years here, have I given enough thought to the USG presidential candidates to engage in a heated debate over their respective merits — let alone a debate with a student I’ve never talked to before. I couldn’t tell you who I voted for in the past couple of USG elections. Truthfully, I’m not sure I could remember if I even did vote at all. This year, though, is different.

This year, there is Will Gansa.

If you have somehow missed the brouhaha surrounding this year’s elections, here’s the deal: there are three candidates for USG president — Molly Stoneman ’16, Ella Cheng ’16 and Will Gansa ’17. Stoneman is the current USG vice president, and she is running to, among other things, promote women’s leadership and improve events programming. Cheng, current University Student Life Committee chair, wants to emphasize policymaking over programming, and devote increased focus to projects’ execution.

And then there’s Gansa. He’s unaffiliated with USG, and is running on a platform of waffle fries, hand-ripened fruit, bringing back ICE and “bike reform.”

His campaign website features spoof endorsements and a video of him eating waffle fries. His candidacy shares a lot in common with that of Samuel Clark and Gus Mayopoulos, joke candidates who ran (and won) in last year’s Harvard Undergraduate Council election.

There are many circulating theories as to Gansa’s motives. First, there’s his own rationale — that he’s combatting the USG’s “tyranny of incumbency.” Then, there’s the idea that his whole campaign is satire. In his overblown self-presentation, he’s mocking the pageantry and politics inherent in USG elections. In his seemingly inconsequential platform issues, he’s parodying the ineffectual changes that USG is able to, or decides to, effect. He may even be calling out Princeton’s collective hesitation to confront serious University policy issues, like sexual assault and transparency in mental health-related forced withdrawals. If satire is Gansa’s goal (and I’m inclined to think it is) then that’s good. Both Stoneman and Cheng have also acknowledged that USG is out of touch with students, and I know that many of my friends share that sentiment. Critique deserves to be taken seriously. And yet.

I did not vote for Will Gansa. Whatever his reasons are for launching this campaign, however noble they may be, if he were to be elected there would only be two options for his presidency. He could follow the platform he set out and accomplish next to nothing of significance. Alternatively, as friends have suggested to me, Gansa would have an opportunity to address and remedy his more substantial critiques of USG and Princeton as a whole. He could begin implementing substantive changes to policy and student life. The problem is, we have no way of knowing what those changes would entail. We would not have voted for them on any platform. There would be no way to know whether these would be changes the student body would want to see.

But, even considering all of this, I keep coming back to the dinner conversation I had tonight. I think it’s important. I have heard more conversation about elections — in dining halls, on Facebook, on YikYak, even — than I have ever heard on this campus before. And because of that, Gansa’s candidacy has tremendous power and relevance. Gansa is in no way a viable candidate. But he has us talking about USG. In observing the obvious inadequacies of a joke platform, we’re forced to critique the status quo.

Gansa’s four platform issues don’t matter. But then, the obvious question is, what issues do matter? In urging the Harvard student body not to vote for Clark and Mayopoulos in 2013, one of the other candidates wrote, “Satire can point out problems, but we'll provide solutions.” Let’s use Gansa’s satire to rally around the problems other candidates have solutions for. Let’s keep the discussion going, and hold these other candidates accountable to their promises. Waffle fries, bike reform — none of it is important.

So — what is?

Sarah Schwartz is a historymajor from Silver Spring, Md. She can be reached at seschwar@princeton.edu.