Student government finds new voice
The ASUSU executive council gathered Tuesday to discuss a major change in the student government voting system and a change in the Residence Hall Association’s legislation that will affect students on campus.
Abigail Kingsford, ASUSU public relations director, announced a new computer program to facilitate electronic voting on campus.
“It can be viewed on any size of screen,” Kingsford said. “It’ll expand when it’s on a desktop computer and it will shrink as you go a tablet or a mobile device.”
Kingsford said the new system will also help students better identify and understand the candidates because a picture and short biography will appear next to each candidate’s name.
Linda Zimmerman, executive director of the student involvement center, said the system would be available to all organizations on campus within a few months.
Charity Maeda, the RHA president, spoke and invited members of the ASUSU council to future RHA meetings.
“We have written in our constitution that ASUSU has speaking rights,” said Maeda. “Anyone who’s appointed to attend those meetings you will be addressing the heads of dining, facilities and maintenance, our directors of housing and residence life, the RHA executive board and the residence and staff members who live on campus.”
Maeda said the new legislature will allow ASUSU to communicate important news out to the RHA.
According to Kingsford, relations were sometimes tense between ASUSU and RHA because both programs looked at students differently. She said if ASUSU were to speak at their meetings, some of the tension could be relieved.
“In the past there’s always been a slight disconnect between ASUSU and RHA because we both are programming-type bodies in that we plan events for students on campus,” Kingsford said. “RHA represents them as residents on campus whereas ASUSU represents them as students on campus. So they’re similar but a little bit different.”
Kingsford said the two organizations have had conflicts about promoting events on campus and in resident halls.
“There’s been a lot of lack of communication between the two,” Kingsford said. “The staff members and the RAs are frustrated with ASUSU because they feel like we don’t really do much to help them out, so they want to know why they should help us out.”
Maeda said the legislature to allow ASUSU to speak at RHA meetings will help to ease tension between the two groups.
“I really want to advocate a good relationship between RHA and ASUSU because I don’t want our residents or our staff members to think poorly of ASUSU,” Maeda said.
During the meeting, members of ASUSU discussed other issues. Zimmerman announced a server change for all officers in ASUSU that occurred Wednesday afternoon. She said the old servers were causing problems for the officers and desperately needed to be replaced.
Karson Kalian, ASUSU athletics vice-president, said the athletic department wasn’t getting enough advertising space on campus for their events. He said he was working with campus planning to get two permanent signs up by the Taggart Student Center and library in order to get more student awareness.
Jordan Hunt, the Academic Senate president, said the university will shortly send out a survey to the student body asking if a testing center on campus was necessary.
“The survey is ready, but for now we’re just trying to get a sense of how something like that would work and whether or not something like that would be something students would want or need,” Hunt said.
– addison.m.t.hall@gmail.com