Student leaders at Georgetown University drafted a letter to President Obama and leaders of the U.S. Congress in mid-July urging them to quickly reach a deal on raising the debt ceiling. More than 130 current and former student body presidents signed the letter, but Undergraduate Council of Students President Ralanda Nelson '12 was not one of them.
"There were some things in the letter that I wasn't comfortable with," Nelson said. "The wording was generally very vague and unspecific," she wrote in an email to The Herald.
The letter referenced the deficit reduction goals set by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in 2010. "I didn't feel comfortable affixing my name to the letter as the representative for the Brown undergraduate community knowing that not every student would necessarily agree with the commission's findings and the cuts it recommended," Nelson wrote.
Obama held a conference call with some of the letter's signatories July 26 in the midst of the debt ceiling negotiations, one week before he signed the Aug. 2 compromise bill.
Michael Meaney, president of the Georgetown University Student Association, came up with the idea for the letter on a bus ride home from work with his friends, he wrote in an email to The Herald.
"We thought how unfortunate it was that people our age — the people with the most at risk should we have defaulted — had no voice in the debate," Meaney wrote. "So we decided to take action."
Meaney and other Georgetown student leaders reached out to over 200 student body presidents across the country, including Nelson.
Nelson contacted a few people — including UCS Vice President David Rattner '13 and Wendy Schiller, an associate professor of political science — whom she felt would help her make a valid decision. Though UCS does not have a specific policy on involvement with national issues, Nelson wrote that she and the rest of the executive board "approach decisions such as this with the mindset that we're speaking on behalf of all of Brown's undergraduate students. Therefore we are necessarily careful about doing our best to reflect the diverse and varied beliefs and opinions of the students with our actions."
But other student government presidents thought differently.
"I valued its main goal of compromise," said Natalie Raps, Cornell's Student Assembly president.
Raps said the letter's "efforts of bipartisanism" weighed heavily on her decision to sign. "It worked toward reaching a common goal rather than advocating for certain ideologies," she said. She also felt the contents of the letter would not alienate the Cornell student population.
