A WUPR Interview with Student Union Executives

BY WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY POLITICAL REVIEW EXECUTIVE BOARD

WUPR: Thanks for sitting down with us. Emma, you’re the first female president in quite some time and looking at the most recent election, there were very few women on the ballot. How do you plan on tackling the problem of gender diversity in SU?

Emma: Great question. I am definitely excited about being one of the first female SU presidents in a while. Even when I was a freshman in SU, there were a lot more females in SU than there are now. Last year only one female was on SU Exec, and by the way WUPR wrote a great editorial on that…

So it goes along with all kinds of diversity on campus. Treasury, especially, is not representative of campus right now, with one female out of 19 treasury reps. So yeah, I hope that me being a female and being on exec will encourage younger female students to run for SU, and I think SU as a whole just needs to do a better job of recruiting groups that aren’t currently represented in SU. And one of those groups is definitely women.

WUPR: During your campaign, you proposed eliminating slates in future SU elections. What do you hope this will accomplish?

Emma: When we were campaigning we talked a lot about the issue of eliminating slates, because we think the slate system creates this culture where you have to be an SU insider, been in SU for four years, to run for SU exec. You have to know who’s good at their job, what past SU execs have done, and it really discourages people outside of SU or newly involved in it to run. And that’s not the way it should be. I think by eliminating the slates you’ll get many more individual candidates who are qualified for their individual position. For example, Brian is the first VP PR in a couple years who has real media skills – video, website, graphics – and by eliminating the slate system we’ll get more people like him, who are not necessarily in SU but have these PR skills, to run for these positions.

WUPR: Do you foresee any problems this might present? Would future SU execs be less cohesive, maybe even butt heads within the administration?

Brian: I think it is important to realize that in SU elections there obviously are differing opinions, but its kind of more like a primary election than the real presidential election. Everyone kind of agrees on things, it’s just the nitty gritty details where people differ. It’s more important to find out who is actually going to be able to get things done. Obviously there are going to be differing opinions, but the benefits definitely outweigh the fact that it might take a bit of time for everyone to get used to each other’s ideas.

Emma: I think the SU exec positions are structured in a way so that they are very independent from one another. Once five people got elected, they could come together and make their overall agenda for the year. But the VP Finance agenda is going to be very different from VP PR, VP Administration, so to have people run and really think about their one position will actually create better elected slates overall.

WUPR: Another one of your platform goals was to increase SU’s accessibility and engagement with students, for example by creating a complaints site and holding town hall style meetings. But engagement is a two-way street. Do students even want to get more involved with SU?

Nick: I spend a lot of my time interacting with student groups because finances are definitely a big concern to people. And I think you do see the most desire to get involved with SU as soon as things go poorly. So people who feel like they’ve been slighted in treasury appeals before are often the ones who then decide to run. And similarly I think a lot of the time there is a demand for a SU response when something goes wrong. This is something we’ve seen a lot this past year, with some of the more controversial things to have happen, especially with what we’ve seen on social media. So we’re spending a lot of time figuring out how to engage the student body before hand, making sure its something we aren’t reacting to after the fact.

WUPR: What do you see as SU Exec’s role in responding to these incidents?

Emma: Yeah so I was talking about this with the outgoing president this morning. I asked what the current system is like. I think SU right now, if there is an issue on campus, a big one we talked about was gender inclusive housing, a student will come to SU with a complaint and SU will bring that complaint to the administration. I think SU has kind of become this middleman in a lot of ways for all sorts of types of issues. Something we would want to do is shift that focus to do more proactive advocacy work. Before there is a big issue with gender inclusive housing, before four students are told they cannot live in the situation they want to live in, we should be reaching out to different student groups who do advocacy work, who are passionate about different issues, and see what they would like to see on campus and advocate those to the administration before something blows up. SU should be doing a better job of interacting with students on a day-to-day basis.

Nick: Something I’ve noticed with the sort of reactionary type of approach that I think my [previous] SU exec group [adopted], is that sometimes after these Facebook posts or something would come out, we would get together and say, “Okay, we’re going to come together and have some sort of statement.” You look at the drafts of these statements and they are very pie in the sky types of promises, often promising that SU is going to commit money to hiring more people in so-and-so area. A lot of these promises didn’t seem very well thought through. To me it seemed like a gut reaction to something that needed to be addressed. That isn’t really going to handle it. You’re not addressing the problem in a way that is actually viable.

WUPR: There has been a lot of criticism about the large amount of money, we’ve heard as high as $300,000, in the carry-forward account. Do you see this as a problem and how will you resolve it?

Nick: Yeah so the $300,000 last year definitely caught us by surprise. You know, if Ammar, the previous VP of Finance knew about it and just didn’t tell me I’m not sure, but over the summer this number came out and we were all shocked. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like that trend is going to change in the near future. And its very complicated by the fact that student groups ask for more and more every year, and we give it to them, but simultaneously more and more money is returned to us every year. So, I think that something I’m going to be focusing on is looking at other ways to involve student groups in the funding process, maybe looking at re-organizing the category system as it stands now, maybe extending budgets to groups that don’t have access to money currently.

[The carry-forward account] is also a tool for the VP of Finance that hasn’t existed before…it allows for an incoming SU Exec to have a say about what they will prioritize that wasn’t in the old general budget [which gets written before SU elections]. They can devote some carry-forward money as proof that they’re interested in a particular initiative…[The account] is a problem if it continuously grows larger and larger every year. If it’s kept at a level that allows it to be used in productive ways, it’s largely okay.

WUPR: If you do see this as a continuing problem, would you consider lowering the percentage of the Student Activities Fee? [Currently, the Student Activities Fee is calculated annually by taking a percentage of that year’s tuition rate.]

Nick: It’s something we haven’t specifically talked about, though Matt and I discussed it last year and it has actually been in talks for several years now. It’s something to consider, but the whole math that goes into projecting out, the combination of decreasing the percentage but looking at the simultaneous increase in enrollment along with the increase in tuition, it complex…The time for a change in the system is probably coming up. Even if [this SU exec] don’t do it, it will definitely come up in the near future.

WUPR: To stick to budget stuff, there have been complaints about the decision to cut Bauhaus funding, which you [Nick Palermo] was privy to, as the previous VP of Finance. Why did you decide to get rid of it and what are your plans moving forward?

Nick: So, it’s kind of difficult to know where to start this question, because it has a lot of history. In the general budget, we definitely wanted to prioritize the events, class council-wise, that were consistently the strongest and had the most attendance. So, En Council and Vertigo has consistently been a very well run event. They pretty much ask for the same amount of money every year and always get high attendance. Same thing with Art Prom. Olinpalooza was not funded in the general budget in the previous year, just because they were looking at changing some things and also because when you’re dealing with talent, it’s difficult to give them a blanket amount of money. So that also wasn’t funded in the general budget [this year] because we just hoped to get more information.

The reason why I didn’t specifically commit to money for Bauhaus was at the input of [the previous] SU Exec and some of our advisors in SU. We considered that this was one of the lowest turnouts at Bauhaus yet, [an event] which has pretty large costs. You know I wasn’t aware that the tent itself for that was $8,000, which is pretty much half of what En Council spends on Vertigo. The idea was to give them time to put together an event that is more cohesive and would allow for more people to come to it. The goal was to work with them over the course of this semester and next semester, before the event, to make sure that this was an event that was sustainable.

Something that I realized, though, in the aftermath of the StudLife article etc. is that the groups I fund in the general budget are groups that I constantly need to be following up with, beginning on Thursday [inauguration], by keeping them in the loop about ongoing funding trends, telling them where money looks like it’ll be going in the general budget for next year, and giving them the chance to respond. That was something I really didn’t do with Architecture School Council. I think it is unfortunate because it’s something that only really came to me after putting together a general budget this last year…We have already started talking to Architecture School Council. We’ve also connected them with the Social Programming Board (SPB) to see if they can share resources and knowledge, to make sure that this is an event people are going to actually want to go to and that people remember as a major part of their fall semester. It is definitely something we are committed to doing.

WUPR: This is a question for those of you who previously served on the Social Programming Board (SPB). You’ve had so many successful PR campaigns in SPB. How will that translate to SU Exec?

Brian: Yeah I mean I think that is probably the goal. If you think about the fact that a year and a half ago, people didn’t know what SPB was, because it was a new group. Just in the one year Emma and I were on SPB, I think it became a logo that people recognized and a name people were able to connect to the events SPB organized. I think there is a lot that SU does that people don’t really know about because the SU branding and SU presence just isn’t there. They might see the logo but they don’t really connect the dots. Working on things like the branding of Student Union in terms of the events we do, and who the people involved in SU are. I think most people can’t name their senator or anything, much less go talk to them. That’s really important. And then things that SPB has done with social media, like our Facebook campaign to announce WILD artists and then announcing Happy Hour. The SPB Facebook page is something people care about checking.

WUPR: We thought we heard somewhere that you plan on re-vamping the SU website?

Brian: Yeah, that’s been in the talks for years. Yeah, so SPB website I did one summer and I’m going to work with Eric Suiter, our tech advisor, and a few other people to hopefully actually get that moving and get it up and running.

WUPR: What is at the top of each of your priority lists? In other words, the day you are inaugurated, what is the first thing that you’re going to sit down and get to work on?

Emma: My eMail password.

Vivek: I can take that. As someone who has been involved with SU, and the Senate specifically, for the last 3 years, I think on the exec level that we have a constitutional infrastructure that hasn’t been followed and a lot of the problems we see in SU are a direct result of that.
WUPR: Can you give us an example?

Vivek: Recruitment and retention. The VP of Administration is supposed to head a committee dedicated to recruitment and retention, which as far as I know hasn’t happened throughout the entirety of my SU career, which is quite lengthy now. Recruitment and retention is a problem, so it’s baffling that we have this constitutional requirement that hasn’t been acted upon.

Another example is the School Presidents Council. Bringing that back will help us spread SU’s message to a more localized school level. En Council has a better understanding of what engineers want and what engineers need than SU. So I think opening up that line of communication with the 5 presidents of the school council will be good. So it’s not really much of a vision, but basically I hope to do what’s required of my position—also things we talked about in our platform, like revamping the election commission, so that it goes out and tries to engage students and make our election process more open to them, as opposed to just monitoring where candidates can and cannot use chalk.

WUPR: Same question to the rest of you.

Brian: I want to start the SU PR committee, to provide resources for student groups – provide resources for student groups to help market their events. The website, obviously, is a big one. But I guess, just in a year, when the next elections are going on, I want people to think of the VP PR position as more than just sending the all-school email. I want people to understand how it serves as a resource for student groups and how it works within SU.

Nick: I realize a lot of the things I’m interested in stem from the individuals on SU Treasury, and the people in the committees. We have 10 new treasury representatives, out of 19, so I think this is one of the first times there are more inexperienced people than experienced. I think the need to integrate these people into SU, especially in something as high profile as Treasury, is really, really important…I want to reinforce the idea that they are one of SU’s biggest representatives—people have the chance to have a very positive or very negative interaction with them, and that determines how most people see SU as a whole. Helping them realize that will is important. I also want to get them up to speed as quickly as possible, so I can get them to help me enact the sort of changes I’m hoping to make.

Emma: I want to sit down with each individual point of the platform and make a timeline to implement them. I think SU Exec is a really cool experience where a lot of things are the same year after year: Nick will have to conduct Presidents and Treasurers training; Brian will have to send the all-school emails. So we have a cool opportunity where we can say, for example, “Okay, we’re going to accomplish going through the Constitution by September.”

I want to do that with everything in the platform. When I was on SPB, that is an organization where something new comes up every day, its really hard to implement big changes right off the bat. I could probably name more things we didn’t get the chance to do than things we did. But with SU Exec, we have the opportunity to accomplish the vast majority of these things. We just have to be very strategic about it.