Single Ticket Vies For IOP Head

Kenzie Bok ’11 and Sarah E. Esty ’11 will be running as an uncontested ticket for President and Vice President of the Institute of Politics Student Advisory Committee, IOP student leadership announced early yesterday morning.

Bok and Esty, who are blockmates in Pforzheimer House, will have three weeks to articulate their platform before the November 15 elections, in which 263 Harvard students affiliated with the IOP will be eligible to vote.

Bok’s expected ascension to the head IOP executive position will mark the fourth consecutive year in which the IOP has been led by a woman and the third time in the past five years in which only one candidate has sought the presidency.

Current IOP President Mary K.B. Cox ’10 said that while the uncontested elections may appear to be the result of the “uber-political” nature of IOP students, the actual causes are structural.

When there are only a handful of students qualified to run, it is hard to form multiple tickets, especially “when you factor in that some people don’t want the job and some people don’t want to run against friends of theirs,” Cox explained.

She added that the IOP may attempt to increase competition in the future by decoupling the presidential and vice presidential positions. Bok, who currently serves as chair of the IOP Fellows Program, said she had mixed emotions upon learning Monday that she would run unopposed.

While she said she was excited to avoid potential divisiveness, she did not want to lose the sense of engagement that comes with a campaign.

“One of the main projects of the next three weeks is convincing people who no longer have to make up their mind about the ticket that they should still talk to us about our platform,” Bok said.

She added that she was excited to set up such meetings and to begin speaking to students about issues that matter to them.

“The likely expansion of my coffee and pizza budget does not get me all that excited, but talking to people about their experience at the IOP and where it can go from here really does,” she said.

Bok cited J-Term as one of the most important issues she hopes to work on as President.

“We are looking to see how the IOP could be involved in doing some sort of pilot work to see what it would look like to have student-initiated programming for J-Term,” Bok said.

Bok and Esty will also be inheriting a number of IOP community-building programs instituted by Cox, who said she hopes her successors—both of whom she said she counts as friends—could expand upon her work.

“I think the general sense at the IOP over the past year is that we’ve spent a lot of time on community and developing members-at-large and holding social events,” Cox said. “I think we now need to swing the pendulum out a little bit toward [Harvard] outreach.”

Cox said she had no doubt that Bok and Esty would be up to the challenge.

“This is not just their job, their extracurricular nine to five,” Cox said. “It’s a place that they really love.”

—Staff writer Evan T. R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.