Yale Daily News

AMEN

This column omits the little detail that Lawlor and Rothstein both work for Katie's campaign. They're not exactly unbiased observers. They should have been more honest with the YDN and its readers.

You all aren't commenting as the coordinator and student coordinator of CBL. You all are both working on the campaign!

Abby's the policy director and Ariela's at least advising! Ariela hosted Katie's fundraiser!

I'm surprised that the YDN didn't catch this...

Is the Harrison campaign so desperate for attention that it's asking its staffers to endorse it under the auspices of their other extracurriculars? With no interviews?

plus, it doesn't say that Lawlor is Katie's suitemate....

bias anyone?

True, but it's not like they're getting paid or anything. They're volunteering for Katie for the same reason they wrote this article: because they believe in her.

A clarification @#2:

You're absolutely right that we're publicly working on Katie's campaign--I am her policy director and Ariela has been advising the campaign. It was never our intent to mislead the YDN or its readers, and for that honest miscommunication I sincerely apologize.

But it wasn't an accident that both of us are working for Katie: the reasons we're working so hard for her campaign really are the ones we stated in the column. We came to this race out of the experiences we talked about in our column, and they continue to inform our belief that Katie is the candidate who can do the best work as alder on the board and on campus.

I apologize once again for the omission, which was purely accidental.

Seems like the fact that they're working on the campaign only makes them more credible. They're acting on what they believe.

Plus, it's not like anyone on these staffs are getting paid!

The comment boards only get crazier every day.

Guys, not to nit pick, but this is election is weird as it straddles school and city life. There is going to be overlap. I could really careless if people who are working on the campaigns write op-eds about their candidates. This isn't the only thing people do with their lives. They probably work on people's campaigns as they met the candidates through the orginizations that they are both involved in.

I think more people from the campaigns should write directly. They probably have the most compelling and convincing arguments as to why their candidates are qualified.

I think that the issue is that this was written in a way that implied that the authors were objectively writing this column as if it were a personal endorsement made based off of their experiences in their organizations, and the reality is that it isn't.

My problem with this is that they're writing as if they're representing "urban studies" or "CBL" at Yale. They're not, and they have no right to act as though their organizations are endorsing a candidate.

This article seems to argue for Katie's skills as a "coalition builder" and her desire to engage not just a handful but "swaths" of Yalies. I think this is an admirable but ill-defined and perhaps overly ambitious goal. While I agree that an ideal alderman would work closely with nonprofit organizations and would encourage greater student involvement in New Haven, I don't see those two functions as necessarily overlapping (I think this op ed tends to confound the two), and I don't see the latter as the primary responsibility of the office. Shouldn't that be the job of on-campus organizations and Dwight Hall? Jones' proposition may not appear to have such as broad a scope, but it makes sense as a concrete way to gives Yalies access to city hall in a way that only a student alderman can. I feel Katie is a serious candidate who has a vision for improving New Haven through community involvement, but I'd really like to hear more specifics on how she plans to execute that vision once in office.