ASUSU president seeks the student voice
Some students may not know what ASUSU stands for, and ASUSU president Grady Brimley is looking to change that.
After being elected president by 366 votes in March, Brimley said one of his biggest goals was to stay in touch with the student body, something that four months later he says is still his number one priority.
“We just want the government to be for the students rather than student government being a separate clique group like it has been in the past,” Brimley said. “We want it to be one and the same with the students.”
Some of projects currently being worked on to bring the students and the elected officials closer together include a revamp of ASUSU’s Web site and a remodel of the third floor space to help make it more student friendly, Brimley said. Part of the remodel will also be used as a hands-on learning experience for an interior design class, with the final plans being left up to the students, he said.
“We will be able to have the students pick the best plan so that the third floor will be more friendly and people will just automatically want to come up here, and that way there can be more interaction,” Brimley said.
In addition to the third floor remodel, Brimley said he thinks the revamped ASUSU Web site will help keep students involved and up to date on what is happening around campus. There will will be information on all of the activites and on ASUSU, he said.
Brimley said he feels part of bringing everyone together is understanding all the views of students around campus, something he said he is trying to do by diversifying his cabinet and relying on the student-elected advocate to bring more feedback from the students. It is the job of the student advocate to form a committee and find the “true voice” of the students, which Brimley said he feels has been underutilized in past years.
“It is the job of this position to go out and find out what the students’ voice is and so when we do have a controversial issue we can go out to the student body, not just here in the TSC, but everywhere and find out from the different colleges what everybody is thinking,” Brimley said.
One of the most important areas Brimley said he feels needs more student feedback is student fee raises. Different organizations come to ASUSU and ask for fee raises, and those raises should be determined on research and whether or not the majority of the student body wants them, rather than a “blind vote,” he said. Brimley said he wants to work with organizations to help fund their needs without always having to raise student fees.
“The administration automatically goes to student fees to get needed money because the easiest place to get new funds is from student fees, so they automatically go there when people like myself and Gary Chambers automatically try to think of other ways to fund needs,” Brimley said. “In one meeting, we decided that we could get the (Connect Ed) program and there were other ways to do it without raising student fees.”
Besides making sure to get student opinions on as many issues as possible, Brimley said he also feels it is important to help students feel like they can become a part of ASUSU. In the past, the student government has been a group that some students feel like they can’t get into, he said.
“What would make me feel successful is not that I am remembered, but that this year is remembered as the year that the most people ever ran for student governement because they just saw how fun it was and they saw what they can actually do in student government,” Brimley said.
-debrajoy.h@aggiemail.usu.edu