Q: Two members of the ASUO Senate have already left the body because they felt they were overworked and underpaid. Do you think that requiring the ASUO executive and Senate to serve 60 hours of community service will take away from building a stronger student government?
A: I don’t think having members of the student government being more involved in the community and community service in any way would harm student government. If you look at student athletes, they are some of the most overworked and under-appreciated members of campus. They get involved in O Heroes, they are involved in community service and they find time to do all of those things. I certainly don’t think it’s right for the executive to mandate what the student Senate does with its free time, but I can speak for the ASUO executive that we will be taking on a charitable cause and engaging in the equivalence of two hours for each member of the executive staff per month … For the slate members that are running with the United Oregon campaign, they have all signed on to this idea, and they like the idea that if we’re leaders on campus, we should be leaders in the community as well.
Q: Your slate outlines implementing a transportation department. Can you speak to the importance of this idea and what it will be able to do?
A: That’s an idea that started a long time ago. It’s something that I worked on as a intern for the Office of Student Affairs and right now, the transportation policy is coordinated under the Department of Public Safety and that’s it – and that’s just not good enough. The best idea that we all have come up with is to have a transportation department under the vice president of Finance and Administration in Johnson Hall. We need to bring in experts who have the numbers, the statistics, the funding and the authority to make real decisions and real recommendations from a campus-wide transportation policy approach. That would include how we are mitigating the need for more and more students to come to campus with fewer parking spaces and we think that that is the best model to work on that.
Q: Your platform doesn’t mention the issue of sexual assault. Where does United Oregon prioritize this issue?
A: Originally that was something that was prominent on our platform, but we received word from the (Sexual Violence Prevention and Education) task force that they would like both campaigns to take off mention of the Sexual Violence Prevention task force from their platforms. I think that’s the right thing to do. I think that all student leaders should work to prevent, and to promote sexual assault prevention on this campus but it shouldn’t be used as some sort of political football. That would be wrong. We took that off of our platform out of respect for the seriousness of the issue, but it’s something that we are going to focus on very heavily during our year. I think that when we talk about sexual assault prevention on this campus even the dialogue on how we start that conversation is flawed. We hear things like, “We need to reduce drinking because that’s what causes sexual assault,” or, “We need to work with sororities and fraternities to do this,” and I think that there are a lot of well-intentioned ideas on how we can prevent sexual assault on campus but we need to be very clear: Sexual assault happens for one reason, and that is a rapist decides to rape. We need to avoid victim blaming, and we need to be very careful about the dialogue that we pursue.
Q: How will your slate work together with the Sexual Assault Prevention task force?
A: It’s our understanding that this task force has been created only within the last couple years, and while it’s a great way to discuss and bring up new ideas and initiatives that task force itself doesn’t have teeth and it doesn’t have institutional funding, so we want to provide both of those things. First in funding, we want to provide an institutional source of funding for this task force somewhere in the range of six-figures that can provide for a whole host of programing on this issue, and when it comes to teeth — meaning authority — we want to make sure that we have mandatory educational opportunities for the freshmen class coming in and working with Greek Life to do that as well.