Ben Frederick, former president of the Spring Arbor University (SAU) Student GovernmentAssociation (SGA) has an interesting way of describing his tenacity:
“I’m a bit of a bulldog. When I see what needs to be done, I do it.”
If he’s a bulldog, he’s the kind of bulldog whose owner dresses him up when it’s time for a walk. Frederick is always—ALWAYS—dressed like he has a photo shoot later that day: belts the color of coffee with a teaspoon of cream matched with wingtip shoes with designs as intricate as an Antique Roadshow doily; apparently tailor-made navy pants and white collared shirts that hug his body like they haven’t seen each other in years; paisley wool tie with shining tie clip; and hair faded close to the sides of his head, with the top long, and coiffed— reclining back on itself. No area of Frederick’s life is untouched by his ambition to do all things well. This is how he dresses for a Monday.
Frederick is required to dress well for his current job as an "enrollment intern"—the more professional sounding name the school gave to the tour guide position this year. Frederick once told me in conversation, "The people who really change the world care a CRAP TON about something." He then rattled off the things that he cares a "CRAP TON" about: LGBT rights, coffee, Spring Arbor University, and doing his job well. "I want to work the hardest. I want to have the best tours."
This is the mindset that drives him now as an enrollment intern, and this was the mindset that drove him to run for president.
I sit down to talk with Ben over dinner, at the tall half-booth/ half-tables in the DC. He’s dressed the way he dresses; I’m dressed the way I dress: sweat pants and a Frederick-Wurmlinger t-shirt—merch from Ben’s second time running. “How appropriate,” he says, with trademark, crystal-clear diction. Over honey glazed chicken and crab Rangoon, we cover the run-up to Ben’s first presidential bid.
“Kyle and I had always joked about running,” he says. Kyle here is Kyle Lintemuth, one of Ben’s closest friends; a Peer Advisor at the time and still a PA now. Ben decided to take the idea of running seriously when then-Vice President Rachel Bogues (now Mundy) got up in front of chapel to announce that two weeks after applications had become available, SGA had still not received any submissions. After chapel, Bogues and Steven Hlatky approached Ben and asked him to consider running. He had no idea who he would want to work with as his vice-president. They introduced him to then-junior communications major Brittany Bellamy, and the next day they were running mates.
After Ben agreed to run, the landscape of the election quickly changed. A zero horse race was suddenly a three-horse race. “OH the Vote!” began appearing in sidewalk chalk around campus. The O of OH the Vote! was Whitney Olson, a fiery-haired sophomore, and the only woman running for the presidential spot. The H was Caleb Hortop, an intelligent and outspoken leader of campus Republicans, who had real-life political experience, working as an intern for Mark Wahlberg while in high school.
The Matt Demerit/Annie Norris pairing materialized as well. Their campaign slogan could have been “DeMeritt/ Norris 2014: Really, Really Ridiculously Good Looking” –seriously, these two could be models—but, in fact, it was, “Let’s Talk.” They put out a great, funny campaign video hashtagging their way through all the major points of their platform.
But, in the end, nothing could compete with the unstoppable, impeccably run campaign of Frederick/Bellamy. Where DeMeritt/Norris opted for humor, Ben and Brittany opted for social proof, airing a sleek, well-produced clip in chapel the day voting began, featuring a who’s who of SAU students who all told the camera they were voting Frederick/Bellamy.
They won, and by a lot. That week was a crazy one for Frederick: “We got up to speak in chapel on Monday, we got the results on Tuesday night, we got up to speak in chapel again on Wednesday—to thank everybody—and then we immediately started hiring.” Amid the work, Frederick decided to e-mail his Core 200 professor, Jeremy Norwood, to ask for an extension on a paper. “The e-mail I got back said things like ‘very disappointed,’ and ‘you can do much better than this.’ And at the end, there was no like, ‘It’s okay.’ It ended very sharply.”
The next day in class, Norwood immediately approached Frederick. “He said, ‘Hey man, sorry if I hurt your feelings with my e-mail. But, you know what I mean?’” For Norwood, the point was that life, as Frederick puts it, “kicks your ass.” This mindset followed Frederick into the following semester—his first as president. “If you need to stay up until 2 am to get all your work done, you stay up until 2.”
Frederick has stopped paying attention. His eyes are on his phone.
“Trevor Tarantowski had a feather in his chicken wings.”
He shows me the Snapchat, as Tarantowski, a freshman on Ben’s floor, shows off a wing with an arts-and-craft-looking off-white feather sticking up out of the breading. We are both grossed out, and happy that next year’s SGA president Joey Dearduff ran on a promise to work with Chartwells to make the DC food better. No feathers in the next generation’s wings.
While the Facebook posts of some of my older relatives would deride Frederick’s behavior—pulling out his phone and checking Snapchat at the dinner table—this shows off a tendency of Frederick’s that makes him an effective communicator, and that made him an effective president: his adeptness at using all of our generation’s means of communication to make the issues at the heart of his campaign and administration known.
One of the major pushes of Frederick’s first semester in office, was to set up an SGA text alert service. The vision: Once, every day, SGA sends out a text to everyone who has signed up to receive it, detailing all of the relevant SGA-related announcements for the day. “I pushed for that to be just one. If it’s more than one, people stop paying attention.”
As the fall semester ended and J-term began, Frederick continued to push for innovation. SGA rented out White Auditorium for the evening of January 14th. A banner appeared at the turn in the Student Center stairs so that everyone crossing campus through the Student Center—and in January that’s everyone—would be forced to see it: snow-topped pine trees emerging out of mist; “The January Sessions” superimposed over the trees in a deep, traffic light yellow. White Auditorium was moodily lit that night, as Frederick took to the stage to cast his vision. He explained that a band would be playing worship music, and that there would be people stationed around the auditorium to pray with anyone who needed it. So far, this is all pretty typical worship night stuff. But, in the back of the theater, there was a station dedicated to art: to sketching, to painting, to drawing with markers, and a station dedicated to journaling.
My freshman year, a junior English major mentioned to me that the rigid way evangelicals in America have worshipped corporately (20 minutes of worship music, 25-40 minutes of sermon) excludes many (most?) of the ways that Christian’s experience God. She wished that there was a time devoted to journaling or to painting so that artistic evangelicals could worship God in a way that felt natural to them. In “The January Sessions,” Frederick was trying to address this need. He was trying to reach out to the marginalized within a community devoted to reaching out to the marginalized.
Frederick’s ambition is his most salient characteristic. But the way that he defines ambition is caring a “CRAP TON” about something. Frederick is driven, and he is driven by a desire to reach out to the people who don’t feel at home in the church or in the SAU community. All the hard work Frederick puts in— all the ambition— is devoted to people.
Ben Frederick loves people a “CRAP TON.”
