Students vote to change ASUSUEC
Last week Utah State University students approved changes to the structure of the Associated Students of USU Executive Council in a special election.
“I am thrilled,” said ASUSU President Les Essig. “This was a wonderful opportunity for students to participate in a constitutional change.”
“I think generally students agree with the changes because it consolidates a lot of the red tape. It will make it a lot easier for students to have access to the officers,” said Tagg Archibald, ASUSU executive vice president.
The restructure takes the number of votes on the Executive Council from 20 to nine, but also creates an academic senate that will deal with the concerns relating to individual colleges, Essig said.
“Student body officers are wearing too many different hats. They are not able to focus on the students who elected them into office,” Essig said. “This will allow senators to focus more on their respective colleges and programmers on the events and activities.”
Kathy Leslie, ASUSU activities vice president, agreed.
“There will be a 100 percent increase in efficiency. It gets really easy to get bogged down with all caps I wear,” she said. In addition to planning activities such as the Howl and Mardi Gras, Leslie said she also sits on many other student committees including the Student Fee Board.
Even though the activities vice president is losing its vote on the Executive Council, Leslie said she supports the change because it will allow “directors to focus on what they love to do, which is planning activities for the students.”
Of USU’s more than 20,000 student population, 692 voted in the special election. More than 400 approved the proposal, and nearly 150 voted against the changes.
Johanna Carling, a junior in political science, voted against the proposition saying the cut in voting members on the Executive Council could mean a cut in the amount of representation.
“The way I understand it, [the council] needs a quorum present to pass decisions. Three or four students could potentially be making decisions for everyone,” she said. “I hope it turns out better than it sounds like it will. I would be happy to see it be a positive change for the students – hopefully over time I’ll be proven wrong.”
Most of the offices that were combined have to do with programming, Archibald said, changes that will not affect the representation of students or their concerns.
Essig said students will still elect a relatively large number of students to office. Nine will vote on the Executive Council. Senators, elected by members of their college will vote on an academic senate.
“It’s not a perfect structure, but it’s the best we could come up with, and we hope Executive Councils in the future will continue to perfect it,” Archibald said. “Everyone has to remember that we’re students too and we’re not going to do anything on purpose to reduce representation on campus.”
A.J. Rounds, graduate studies vice president, said the changes are especially welcomed by graduate students.
“This will empower grad students to take their future into their own hands and mold out a future for them,” he said. “This gives us the opportunity to eventually break away from ASUSU and effectively deal with and find solutions to problems that specifically concern us.”
A smaller student government will allow the voice of graduate students to be more clearly heard, Rounds said. Graduate students currently make up 18 percent of the student population but only holds 5 percent of the vote on the current council.
Essig said the changes will create more opportunities for students who don’t want to campaign for an office to be part of ASUSU leadership.
Programming is one example. The approved proposition will place three appointed chairs, activities, arts and lectures and traditions, under one programming vice president elected by the students, Leslie said.
“I think we really did our homework to find out what would work best for our system,” she said.
Essig said the turnout for the election was actually higher than many special elections that have been held in the past.
“I think it’s embarrassing that so few people care about what goes on at the university. We complain about tuition and restructure but then none demonstrates that they care,” Carling said. “There’s a disconnect between what we see and what we do to fix it.”
However, Carling said she felt the special election was poorly advertised.
“There is more that we could have done but we were on a very tight time schedule,” Archibald said. “We encouraged students to come up and talk to us, but we can’t make everybody happy.”
-bnelson@cc.usu.edu