Elections for the 2008-2009 Student Assembly president and vice president will end at today at 5:00 p.m. Voting, which can be done via the Assembly's web site, began on Tuesday morning. Many campaigns have increased the number of posters and chalk messages promoting their candidates in order to become more visible on campus.
Supporters of presidential candidate Molly Bode '09 have been running a table in Collis Cafe to advertise the election period and encourage people to vote for her. They have even offered their personal computers to students so they can vote and have rewarded voters with cookies for doing so. A female member of the Class of 2011, wished to remain anonymous, said she thought the table of Bode's supporters was the only place where one could vote, and she was suspicious when the girls at the table asked her if she had considered voting for Bode, she said.
"She said that this was not a voting place, they had just set it up for Molly, and that's when I knew I had made a mistake, but I voted for Lee Cooper anyway," she said.
"My campaign was mobile, moving around the campus seeking out normally underrepresented voters," Lee Cooper '09, presidential candidate for the Assembly, said in an e-mail message.
In an informal poll conducted by The Dartmouth, 80 percent of students have either already voted or are planning on doing so before the polls closed. Students cited e-mails sent from both candidates and the Elections Planning and Advisory Committee as primarily responsible for reminding them to vote. Students can also vote for members of The Green Key Society, heads of the Committee On Standards and the Organizational Adjudication Committee and the presidents and vice presidents of the Class of 2009 and 2011.
Community colleges across the country are facing increased pressure to accommodate the rising number of students opting to enroll in two-year institutions, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on Tuesday. A 48-state survey of members of the National Council of State Directors of Community Colleges cited increased tuition costs at public universities as the driving force behind the enrollment trend. The survey revealed that institutions in 16 states do not have the resources necessary to satisfy the needs of their current and future high school graduates. Among the shortages, two-thirds of the community-college officials surveyed noted a lack of faculty members in science, mathematics, technology and engineering. While all officials surveyed predicted that state funding to their institutions would increase within the fiscal year, many said that the financial support would not be enough to keep up with increased enrollment and inflation. Rural community colleges that lack local monetary support will be most affected by insufficient state support, the Chronicle reported.
