Column: Now is the time to hold Elizabeth Adkins accountable

On Friday, Elizabeth Adkins was elected student body president of UNC. She is taking over an office that has been traditionally associated with white male recipients of the Morehead-Cain scholarship. 

This student government election season has been tumultuous, surreal and extremely entertaining, but that the end result is a student body president who breaks many of the traditional barriers to the office should be celebrated. The work that Adkins, and the only other eligible candidate, Maurice Grier, put into their campaigns to arrive at this point is immense. 

However, after taking time to appreciate the historic nature of this election and Adkins’ victory, it is important to prepare to hold her accountable. Adkins didn’t run as a collection of identities. She ran promising to take serious action on mental health, sexual assault and diversity. 

Student government is all too often a place where desire for change goes to die and the primary measurable outcomes are resume line items. Holding the Adkins administration accountable for her promises starts now.

The first indication of Adkins’ commitment to the ideas and ideals of her campaign will be the composition of her cabinet. The cabinet, like other student government positions, can often default to a small group that includes campaign managers, SBP also-rans and students on elite scholarships. 

In her platform Adkins argued that UNC’s “diverse student population” is foundational to the quality of the University. Her cabinet will be an early and important opportunity to draw widely from the entirety of UNC’s population.

As Adkins’ term continues, her commitment to diversity and inclusion will be measured not only by who she brings to the roughly 140 positions appointed by the executive branch, but also in the evolution of her concrete plans to follow through on promises of space allocation. 

Adkins has expressed support for both a Muslim student center created in partnership with the UNC Muslim Students Association and a space for Latinx students on campus designated in coordination with the Latinx Unity Council. If she remains committed to these proposals during her time as SBP, we should see her regularly prioritizing them in discussions of on-campus space.

The campus should have established Latinx and Muslim student centers by this time in 2018, but if it doesn’t, there should at least be concrete plans to incorporate that need for designated space into plans for a new student union or in other planned buildings.

Similarly, Adkins cannot control the way the University chooses to spend money, but she will bear a responsibility to advocate that UNC prioritize CAPS in spending and raising funds. As SBP Adkins will have a significant voice, and she can use this in advocating and personally fundraising for CAPS. 

Beyond this personal scale, UNC is launching a large capital campaign. Adkins will need to hold the University accountable for designating a meaningful part of the resulting funding to CAPS and other mental health efforts on campus. In comparison to those issues, sexual assault is a particularly complex problem to fight. 

The rules governing it on college campuses are labyrinthine, and it is a particularly damaging and isolating experience to be a victim of campus sexual assault. Adkins has said she will seek to make resident adviser education include further sexual assault training. This is an accomplishable goal that the student body should expect Adkins to fulfill.

It is possible to imagine a world in which Elizabeth Adkins fulfills a significant number of her policy goals, but it is equally possible to imagine a world in which she does very few of them on her way to a lucrative job with McKinsey. Ensuring the first requires a watchful student body.