Q: What is your platform and mission statement?
A: Our platform is broken up into four sections. We have a section on short term, long term, internal, and uplifting our peers. In our process of campaigning, we’ve met with a lot of current UGBC members and a lot of former members who have recently left, and a lot of them are on our team right now, working for us.. This is not to disparage UGBC in any way. We know a lot of people in there. We respect all of them. We have learned that there’s a culture in there that I think originates from a certain leadership style, and that’s why we want to lead by empowerment.
First day, priority number one, we need to restart the existing Constitutional Task Force, because [the] one that exists right now was left by the wayside when the Chief of Staff resigned, which was not communicated with the public. That will involve a member from every committee, every council. You cannot be prepared to make external progress if your internal matters aren’t sorted out.
From there, we would move into the short term section of our platform, which are tangible improvements to student life that we think we could implement within one semester. A big question might [be] how are you going to get things done when you have to work with administration? There are limits in student government, but all five things that we list on our short term goals section, we don’t need administration for. UGBC has the power to do it by themselves.
One thing I think is important to state is, yes, UGBC has the capacity to accomplish a lot, but to accomplish long term sustainable change, administrative support is important, and I think something that separates Andrew and I from the ticket is the administrative ties that we have. From our experience and our involvement on campus, we have a laundry list of about twenty administrators that we both have personal relationships with, and we both feel that is super, super important as far as pushing for change and advocating for change. UGBC is the voice of the students to the administrator, so there needs to be a relationship there.
It would be ignorant for us to say that the two of us individually are going to go into UGBC and the two of us individually, are going to change the whole organization. We are two leaders leading a group of 104 student leaders, and I think that’s really important for us, as outside candidates, to make clear we are not going in just the two of us. We are going in through meetings with active UGBC senators, meeting with people who have been in UGBC and have resigned. The top three leadership positions within UGBC have resigned this year due to the current culture in place. That’s something that isn’t really public knowledge, but it’s the Chief of Staff, DEI Director, and Head of Finance. They manage a $400,000 budget. That wasn’t really communicated with the public. And once we heard of this, we were like, holy cow, this is an organization that has huge capability to drive change, but there are some internal issues that need to get straightened out, and that’s why Brody and I think we have the fresh perspective from all of our involvements across all corners of campus to be the ones to help it go in the right direction
Q: What about your position sets you apart?
A: One, our administrative connections. Two, is our diverse involvement on campus. Again, we have the utmost respect for everyone within UGBC, but I think if you’re only involved in UGBC, that can kind of give you a closed lens. Andrew [is] involved in spaces that I’m not involved in, and I’m involved in spaces that he’s not involved in.
Whetzel: A lot of my work and my extracurricular involvement on campus are first-year based. I’m a first year RA. I’ve been an RA for two years, and I’m going to be a first year RA next year. I’m a Freshman League captain, and a 48 hours retreat leader. I work in the Office of Student Affairs as an intern for Shawna Cooper Whitehead, and I think through that, I have a wider lens that we can kind of view this leadership role through, [but] I don’t have a full lens. I think another thing that sets us apart is tangibility: tangible action plans and tangible improvements in the short term. What does UGBC really do? Do they really impact me? And the truth is they do, and there are a lot of great things that they do, even that they’ve done this year.
Q: How would you describe the current relationship between UGBC and the student body and how do you plan to fix things?
A: You can’t talk about the current relationship between UGBC and the students without mentioning the fact that last year, Megan and Katie ran unopposed. I think, in my opinion, that’s a reflection of a large disconnect between UGBC and students. We’ve had a lot of conversations within the last two and a half months. To be frank, students don’t care about UGBC. The large majority of students we talk to, they just don’t care. I understand it, and they don’t feel UGBC has impacted them in any way or is advocating for them in any way.
On what we would do to fix it, I’ll dive into one specific thing, just because we’ve been to a bunch of Senate meetings over the last little bit. There’s a section of the Senate meetings called ‘Public Comment’. Basically it’s after an hour to an hour and a half of meeting of going through [UGBC’s] agenda, then they say, ‘Oh, now public, you can ask a question’, but there’s never any public there to ask the questions, because they would have to be at the entire [meeting] the whole time. Also, there’s no accessible seating for the public. You have to get in from the back corner of the room. We would make sure there’s accessible seating, and we would move that public comment section to the beginning of all Senate meetings, so that the public has a chance to voice their opinions to the whole Senate. Another thing is, it’s helpful for the senators too, because they’re coming from committee meetings right before the Senate meeting. So you’ll have senators that are sitting there for two and a half hours that then have some public question asked to them, and they just don’t really want to answer it, because they’ve been there for almost three hours. I think it would be helpful for both parties.
Q: This one of the first UGBC elections in a while with multiple candidate groups? Thoughts? Why this year? Why now?
I think change needs to be made. There’s only one candidate that’s internal right now. Our slogan is ‘for students, not status quo’, and we want to change the existing status quo. If there were no outside candidates, it’d be another unopposed election again. I think if you have a fresh voice come in there, we can really change things for the better.
Q: How do you plan to bring better civic engagement and practices outside of UGBC to the greater student body?
A: Andrew and I want to make it very clear that it is a priority to us, and that civic engagement is extremely important to us. We would lead a student government for students. We are all for student government, and we want to empower free speech and student choice on campus through everything we could possibly do. Andrew and I take pride in the rooms we step in, we’re not going to have someone work harder than us. We are going to step in on day one, and it would be false for us to say that that is solely going to be on Andrew and I, because to make sustainable change, you need a team of people, and that is something we would empower our leaders to do.
Q: In the past few years there have been instances of unrest amongst students regarding racism, political unrest, discontent with bodies of BC administration, How would you change UGBC’s reactions to these things? Further, how would you bridge the gap between students and the administrative bodies they are upset with?
A: I think there can be a tendency within student government to administrative relationships to say ‘we want to go in and we want to fight the administration to make change’. Hard conversations are what it takes to make change for students, and Andrew and I are more than comfortable with having hard conversations. However, I don’t think fighting the administration reflects the kind of people [we are]. We’re not out to fight administration. But necessary conversations for change need to be had. We’re prepared to have those conversations, and we’re prepared to push back if necessary.
Q: We saw on your Instagram that you want to implement a program called BC Bonds. Could you expand on that?
A: It’s not our only main platform piece, because we understand that there are a lot of other problems on campus. It would be an online program that would create a low stress atmosphere for students to make friends with each other. This could be extremely helpful for freshman students that are really struggling to meet new people, or transfer students that come in, and feel like, what do I do here? I’ve seen a lot of posts, way too common posts on Herrd, where they say, ‘I’m a junior, I haven’t found my people’. Or ‘I’m a senior, I haven’t found my people’. And I was just thinking, how can we reach those people? Because they’re introverted, or they can be hard to reach, and you want to provide an easy avenue for them to make friends. It would be a program similar to the Marriage Pact, designed as friendships instead of romantic relationships. The way we would do that is through student initiatives. We wouldn’t need more than $2000. We’d work with the computer science department and we would offer a monetary prize for the creator of the best program. That way, you’re investing in your own talent to get a program that aids your own students. I think it’d be a creative solution to a problem that is too often here.
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