The Daily Princetonian Editorial Board should not endorse Young Alumni Trustee candidates

The following is a guest contribution and reflects the authors’ views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.

Last Wednesday, the 150th Editorial Board of The Daily Princetonian endorsed Aishwarya Swamidurai ’26 for the 2026 Young Alumni Trustee election. But it didn’t make an endorsement last year, and not the year before that, either. In the past 20 years, the Editorial Board has only endorsed a candidate once, in 2023. Going forward, the Editorial Board should no longer endorse Young Alumni Trustee candidates because its outsized influence on campus risks influencing the electoral narrative in a way that contradicts the intentions behind the election rules that prohibit campaigning. Moreover, the lack of transparency surrounding the Editorial Board’s endorsement process makes the endorsement particularly problematic. 

To be clear, we are not claiming that any of the 2026 Young Alumni Trustee general election candidates have violated election rules nor that the Editorial Board should never endorse in any election. We instead emphasize that the Editorial Board’s specific endorsement of Young Alumni Trustee candidates, while conforming to the letter of election rules, undermines the spirit of the Young Alumni Trustee election rules in the first place.

The Young Alumni Trustee handbook, which provides an overview of procedures surrounding the position and its annual election, explains that the election process is atypical in that it does not permit candidates to campaign or run on issue-based platforms. 

This means that candidates may not “make statements proclaiming to represent or advocate for a particular constituency, issue, or point of view,” nor “engage in any form of organized effort to solicit votes in any medium.” They also may not “deploy other individuals or organizations to engage in such activities on their behalf.” Additionally, while candidates are allowed to respond to requests from media like the ‘Prince,’ candidates must observe these constraints around issue-based and organized campaigning.

The handbook explains that these prohibitions are meant to reduce the likelihood that candidates arrive on the Board with staked-out positions formed without access to full information. Being perceived as beholden to a position or constituency formed during the campaign can “undermine both the workings of the board and their own effectiveness,” it says. Young Alumni Trustees are expected to represent the University’s interests as a whole as opposed to any specific constituency, including their electorate. 

The Editorial Board’s endorsement of Swamidurai, though, argues that students should vote for a particular Young Alumni Trustee candidate and creates perceptions of the candidates which contradict the intention behind the prohibition on campaigning.

As a vocal and influential force on campus, the Editorial Board can influence the election outcome through the wide readership of the ‘Prince’ on campus and beyond. As the University’s only daily student news publication, the ‘Prince’ is by far the most widely-read paper on campus. The ‘Prince’ is also the only campus publication that has consistently covered the Young Alumni Trustee election process for at least the last 20 years. 

Because of this unique position to influence the campus narrative, the Editorial Board should be especially prudent in using its platform to drive discourse on the Young Alumni Trustee election.

Beyond that, the Editorial Board’s interview process risks associating candidates with specific policy ideas they never explicitly stated in their candidate statements. The handbook states that even the perception of having made certain promises or being associated with a certain constituency is enough to undermine a trustee’s effectiveness. 

This is important precisely because the endorsement includes new information, often made by anonymous individuals familiar with the candidates, about each candidate. The official candidate statement of Jamil Fayad ’26, for example, does not mention his work for the Science Olympiad; Enzo Kho ’26 did not mention his term as Undergraduate Student Government Social Chair; Swamidurai did not mention her negotiations with administrators on the paid Block 32 plan. The endorsement article includes all three of these additional details. If students aren’t allowed to campaign and only allowed to share what they included in their campaign statements, an endorsement that provides additional context would go against the spirit of this rule.

Furthermore, the Editorial Board explicitly asked anonymous individuals familiar with the candidates for subjective judgments. These individuals “emphasized [Fayad’s] character,” labeled Kho as “deferential,” and “painted [Swamidurai] as a leader who was successful in outreach to constituents and familiar with the intricacies of policy creation.” The Editorial Board itself also judged that Fayad is inexperienced in policymaking, stated that it was unimpressed with Kho’s record as USG president, and labeled Swamidurai as effective and assertive. 

While we understand the Editorial Board’s rationale in maintaining the anonymity of these sources so that they may speak candidly, this anonymity significantly reduces transparency in a way that risks electoral integrity. By keeping the individuals interviewed anonymous, the public is unable to ascertain that these people responding to media inquiries are not deployed by candidates. We want to trust that all of the finalist candidates possess high integrity, but the Editorial Board’s methods are inherently flawed in that they risk accidental violations of election rules and systematically prevent the public from finding out.

Finally, the Editorial Board writes that it looked for “a candidate who understands the broad range of student needs and values and the imperative of advocating for student well-being.” But this falsely represents the Young Alumni Trustee as someone who should serve students’ interests rather than the long-term interests of the University as a whole. This directly undermines the charge given to Young Alumni Trustees in their service to the University.

Ultimately, the ‘Prince’ should stop endorsing Young Alumni Trustee candidates to honor the publication’s commitment to intentionality and transparency. We hope that the Editorial Board acknowledges the problematic nature of this endorsement process. Should it continue to view endorsements as appropriate, we expect that the Editorial Board will publish explicit guidelines that would bring its conduct in line with the election’s spirit and the journalistic standards of the ‘Prince.’ 

The influence of the ‘Prince’ over campus discourse is precisely what makes this matter. A publication with wide reach has a responsibility to exercise its editorial power with transparency and restraint. Ceasing endorsements in no-campaign Young Alumni Trustee elections, and publishing explicit guidelines on when endorsements are appropriate, would align the Editorial Board’s conduct with both the spirit of this election and the standards the ‘Prince’ sets for itself.

Jacqueline Zhou is a senior majoring in philosophy. She can be reached at jacqueline.zhou[at]princeton.edu.

Mai Kasemsawade is a senior majoring in politics. She can be reached at pk9861[at]princeton.edu.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.