Two UA members resign

Sunday night, College sophomores Cornelius Range and Adam Hamilton resigned from their seats on the Undergraduate Assembly. College juniors Rico Moorer and Michael Chen, the next two highest vote-getters from last spring’s election, will step up to replace them.

In describing the reasoning behind their resignations, Range and Hamilton both said they felt the UA was not an effective way to generate change on campus.

“I felt as if the UA was holding me back,” said Range. “The culture isn’t conducive to change.”

He added that many of the projects the group takes on “don’t come to fruition.”

Hamilton agreed with Range’s assessment, but went on to criticize UA members’ motivations, calling them a “group of people with a high sense of superiority.”

“People try to join the UA on the idea that they have access to the administration,” he explained, but he has found that he can have that access without being a member. “It wastes a lot of time.”

He added that UA meetings are unproductive — “it’s really just one club of people that get together and argue over minutiae” — particularly citing last semester’s internal UA elections, which lasted several days.

“I could write a proposal and present it for the UA, but logically, that doesn’t really do anything,” Hamilton said. “I didn’t want to waste my Sunday nights.”

While College junior and UA chairman Alec Webley acknowledged Range’s and Hamilton’s concerns that “you can’t make radical, sort of overwhelming change very quickly,” he said he “respectfully” disagrees.

“I firmly believe that there is nothing at Penn that the UA cannot do,” he said.

Ultimately, Webley attributed the resignations to a change in interests.

“What they really wanted to do at Penn wasn’t the UA,” he said. “They’ll both be dearly missed, and I can say absolutely … they both expressed a lot of satisfaction with the direction in which the body was going.”

Range and Hamilton, who are also roommates, elected to resign together to take on more activist-like roles on campus, fighting specifically for increased enrollment of low-income and minority students through Project Butterfly, a grassroots effort to mobilize students established by Range.

Range also wants to decrease the accessibility of alcohol through this movement, though Hamilton said this was not his priority.

Although Chen and Moorer both expressed excitement about filling the newly vacated positions, Moorer — better known as “DJ Rico” — acknowledged that “there’s only so much you can do in the UA.”

“I don’t have any illusions that I’m going to completely restructure Penn,” he said. Still, “there’s a lot of little things I can do on the UA that I wouldn’t be able to do were I not [in the body].”

Chen, a former associate (or non-voting) UA member, said he looks forward to representing the ideas of other associate members.

And Webley said the body is pleased with the additions.

“We’re all very pleased that the UA will now have its own DJ,” he said.

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