Posted by Adam W. in Questions for the Candidates - Rob’s Introduction
These are questions specifically for Rob based on his introduction post.

Rob, you stated this:

To me too often in these past terms, many past administrations did not hold the standards expected, in my view played favorites, or worse let their administrations agendas be such a driving focus in putting what could be termed their ‘allies’ in positions in the cabinet and such that rifts formed in the club. This process to me has only gotten worse in more recent times and become more evident.

A lack of holding to standards makes sense. The rest of this doesn’t make sense to me and isn’t evident at all to me.

To be sure, there have been instances of execs placing friends of theirs into cabinet positions. But there have also been instances of execs placing people they did not care for at all into cabinet positions. I believe every President has placed people into their cabinet they were not friends with. With the limited number of people applying for cabinet positions, it isn’t feasible for a President to surround themselves with only those they have been friends with. Since I joined the club there have been over 50 different people who have served in cabinets and in that time all fourteen of the Presidents have chosen a cabinet member who hadn’t been chosen by a previous President. In my view the Presidents collectively have done a great job of including a variety of people as well as new people into their administrations.

So to the questions. What is the evidence that I am wrong? And of the last fourteen Presidents, how many would you say were selecting their cabinet members in the inappropriate manner that you described?

Adam W.

Good morning Adam, thanks for your follow up questions here. So since you’re fine with the standards part, I’ll elaborate on what I mean by the others. First to point out the second and third part of my problems highlighted were/are my personal opinions and views at those times. So what I mean here is with the ‘playing favorites’ it is the feeling that develops in the past seeing presidents elected and applying to different roles such as the cabinet, fcomms, or ship openings like CO. And often qualified people get passed over for someone who is an older member for them being ‘more experienced’. So this rolls then into my second part about the allies, and rifts forming. People who say could be new CO’s apply and know the ship say better then any other applicants but then get another person win out, and the ship only seems to go down hill or change in tone from what it was before.

As for the second part of your question, regarding the last 14 Presidents. I do not have an exact list on hand to break down each president. But the above example has happened in recent time. The result of this was that the player on the ship in question who applied to be CO got hurt and/or felt cheated by the choice, and and in turn a rift formed as a result of this action. This is one of the most recent examples I recall.

To be clear as well, obviously some things which could be seen as favoritism or having an agenda could just be the President making a bad call, such happens obviously, and I’m not immune to it either, nor would I claim to be. But in short, to me there has been more often or not in the years arguable favoritism and placement by past administrations. As well as a lack of trying to build up newer members to roles, and encouraging others to take those leaps, over time this then resulted in an apathy by new and old members in different ways just assuming A) the same old hats would always fill said roles, B) people not applying cause what’s the point, if you don’t know person Y or agree with person X you won’t get a role and this all meant that in more recent years these feelings became more evident and us ‘older hats’ to the same roles burned out or not were able to do them anymore as they were a chore and so we got the lack if anyone to apply for things.

To speak about this term as President, James and I tried repeatedly to look for someone to fill open positions that came up, like EDir, FComms, CMM, and SOX, all of these took much wrangling and teeth pulling to find someone and often we didnt even get any applicants for the weeks or more we had open and made every effort to advertise for the openings. CMM in particular remains unfilled atm and I at least spent much of the term trying to either A) figure out a way to spread its duties to other areas of the club unsuccessfully or reshape it in some other form to be a multi-person job vs just one person, and B) everyone I asked new or old just did not have the time, desire, or such to help out.

I hope this answers your question Adam, please let me know if you got any follow ups.

Robert Archer