CPE students participate in political activism around the country.
Many things separate Sarah Krulik and Jenny Hansler. For starters, Krulik is a sophomore, while Hansler is getting ready to graduate this spring; the former is majoring in public health and political science, the latter in English and Spanish. But there is an underlying force uniting the two (besides sharing a particular taste for the color blue), and that is a passion for politics.
It was this passion that prompted them to join the Committee for Political Engagement (CPE), a student-driven organization devoid of partisan affiliation and dedicated to building political awareness and participation at UR and beyond.
“I’ve always had a passion for making sure that people are involved, making sure they’re aware of what’s going on,” Krulik said, mentioning afterward how raising awareness drove her to join CPE.
“When you’re in the college environment, you’re kind of in a bubble. You’re not necessarily aware of everything that’s going on in your surroundings, out in the real world. I think that CPE is a really good way to break that barrier between the outside world and the college world, in a way that we can apply to college kids so that it’s interesting for them,” she said.
Hansler’s involvement with the committee followed a similar route. “I was very politically driven in high school, and I was looking for an outlet not only for my partisan views, but also as a way to generally increase consciousness on campus,” she explained.
As an organization, CPE hopes to combat the political apathy rampant in the young adult population. Both Hansler and Krulik expressed concern regarding college students’ lack of awareness, whether intentional or not, of political issues, particularly when students play such a crucial role in the political realm.
“Our age population is the biggest demographic in the United States, other than senior citizens, but we don’t use our political power nearly as much as that voting bloc,” Hansler noted. “Therefore,” she continued, “our needs are largely ignored by elected officials, because they don’t see who they’re representing having that need.”
Hansler and Krulik saw this lack of interest firsthand after orientation week, when CPE launched an effort to register incoming students to vote. “We’d ask people, ‘Hey, are you registered, would you like to get registered? It takes five minutes,’” Hansler said. To their dismay, most students they spoke with declined the offer.
Political apathy among college students can be traced to a greater feeling of disillusionment with the American government. “There’s not as much of a recognition that… these policies that people are really upset about, ultimately come back to us to [change by electing] people who aren’t going for [that] certain policy or who are going to advocate for a [different] policy,” Hansler said, her emphatic gestures rattling the table. “There’s this thought that the system’s broken, we can’t do anything about it. And in an ideal world, it would be ‘Hey, this system’s broken, let’s demand of our elected officials that we fix it.’”
As these two spoke about CPE, the enthusiasm palpable in their voices, the group’s methods for breaking this disillusionment rang clear – events, programs, and panels, with student interest in mind. The Committee wields a range of weapons, organizing and orchestrating events more engaging than merely handing a student a newspaper. Instead, as Krulik put it, CPE offers “a panel
of…your professors, peers, alumni, actually explaining things.”
The most recent of these panels, held at UR last year, dealt with perhaps the year’s most explosive issue: the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance scandal. “We spent a lot of time planning last semester,” Krulik recalled. “It was an interdisciplinary panel, with representatives from the political science department, the computer science department, the philosophy department, and Mark Zaid,” a UR alumnus who, as a Washington, D.C. attorney, is considered an expert on NSA law.
In pooling these diverse perspectives into a panel, CPE helped students to “really get engaged and understand and be educated with what’s going on,” Krulik added, reminiscing on what has been her favorite moment as a member of CPE.
CPE also sponsors election events. On the 2012 election night, the Committee “hosted a big watch party.” Hansler described the event. “We had huge screens showing the polls coming in – it was really exciting. […]We had a huge turnout and people were really excited, really engaged with it, from across the political spectrum.” She emphasized the organization’s commitment to getting students excited about politics as a whole, sans the nasty battles and bickering of parties.
Hansler said this same theme was apparent a few months later when the group took around 75 students by bus to watch the presidential inauguration. “Despite your party, that was something monumental to see,” she said. Regarding the upcoming midterm elections on Nov.4, CPE will be hosting voter registration drives and ensuring students have access to absentee ballots.
Along with Hansler and Krulik, four other students sit on the application-only committee: senior Rachel Goldberg, junior Angela Remus, junior Steven Torrisi, and sophomore Jason Altabet. Though the application deadline for this year has already passed, students are encouraged to submit suggestions for themes and events, and, of course, to participate in them.
In initially defining CPE, Hansler said that its mission “focuses on educating and engaging the student population with politics, both on the local and national level.” Yet the most fitting description of the goals of the group is found in neither a dictionary nor a brochure, but in their motivations.
“If we really want to change things, if we’re so passionate about having our needs met, we really need to work to vote, to educate people on these issues, and to let our elected officials know this is what we demand.”
Trombly is a member of the class of 2018.
