There are five student body presidential and vice presidential campaign tickets for the 2016-2017 school year. Here are their platforms and what they hope to accomplish. Editor’s note: Some of the answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Nate Bridgers & Hayes Grigg
Affordability
“Textbook prices have become far too unaffordable. A recent U.S. public interest group study stated that college students spend around $1,200 a year on textbooks, which is absolutely outrageous. With everything we already have to pay for in tuition, and fees and food — we want to work with the bookstore to alleviate some of those prices and bring them down.”
Sustainability
“Our initiative begins with potentially adding a solar tree to Main Campus. We also want to look to continue look at solar panels and other forms of sustainable energy to produce excess amounts of energy to sell back to energy companies, which in turn makes us more sustainable financially, so tuition and fees can go down. That may not be something we can accomplish in one year, but it’s something we want to start working toward so that we’re living in a healthier environment where we can breathe, relax and lead.”
“We also talked about creating a new tradition, which is a campus blackout. Essentially what would happen is for 30 minutes on a Saturday morning; we would have all of the main power in the main buildings shut off. Another university does this, and they say they save a ton of money, even in those thirty minutes.”
Inclusivity
“Our team aims to include the most inclusive environment as possible. Hayes and I with Respect the Pack and Diversity Education Week, we want to continue to make those big. We want to continue to have our diversity outreach department collaborate with UAB, BSB and different minority organizations.”
“They also want to get an on-campus voting location back to Talley Student Union, have a stronger presence on Centennial Campus and start a Safe Ride Program for students on weekends.”
Cody long & Mitchell Moravec
Integrity, Innovation & Inclusion
“We think a lot of the problems have been brought out, we know that there have been problems with minorities here with the CMT v. BET party, with the pledge book that was discovered last year. These problems have been brought up, and the university says, we’re trying to fix this — they bring in a company to investigate, they conduct a survey and they say it’s a three-year process. We don’t want a three-year process; we actually want to do things right now. We were joking at one point about our slogan being “NC State says think and do, we say think and actually do.” It seems at times that things don’t get done. There’s a lot of talk about it, and a lot of thinking but no doing.”
Rye Robinson & Jotionette Jones
“Our campaign model is for every student. Our thought process is we want to make sure we can represent as many students as possible. When I speak to people about Student Government and ask them, ‘what has Student Government done for you? The answer I get a lot is ‘I don’t know’ or ‘they don’t do anything for me,’ and as a member of Student Government, that frustrates me. Students pay fees that I feel like they should be seeing the results of those fees. We try to create a platform that changes the lives of students.”
“We want to create midterm course evaluations. The way they are run at the end of the course is no good to students. Maybe it’s good to your professor, but it’s no use to students. If we could work towards working on a mid-course evaluation, it could also help students get the helped that they needed.”
“Not every student has the same experience at NC State, and not every group feels welcomed, so we created the initiative ‘Beyond the Wolf’ where we look at the differences of each group or look at the attributes they bring to the community.”
“Another initiative we want to start is students meet their teachers through cups of coffee. You would go through the Student Government website and pull up a pre-formatted email that you could send to any professor and gather a group of three to seven students and ask that professor to go to coffee with you. It opens the space for a student to speak with their professor and Student Government would reimburse the students for coffee.”
“We also want to improve the howl by adding a two to three minute video of highlighting different groups on campus and use the howl to let students know more quickly if they don’t have time to read the howl, they can instead watch the video.”
Harrison Preddy & Caroline Moody
“We are really running a platform on greater diversity in student representation. We really want to focus on bringing out representation in other parts of the school and making sure everyone has a voice. We also want to open up club autonomy; we want clubs to have more say in how they operate. We want public spaces to be public, and we want to get rid of some of the red tape for permits and liberating the process a bit.”
“We also want to lower student fees. We want students to have more transparency with Student Government. I’ve been talking with a lot of people who don’t really understand how big Student Government is and how big of a role it has in their everyday lives. We really want to raise awareness in what Student Government is doing. We want to publicize the voting records of student senators and publish a monthly newsletter on policies that have been changed.”
Paul Nolan & Brayndon Stafford
Academics
“We want to focus on increasing faculty engagement on campus. We have a 16:1 student to faculty ratio, so at a public institution you can feel like the professors aren’t engaged so we need to find student professor parallels.”
Diversity & Cultural Competence
“We want to initiate reporting a bias incident. Currently OIED offers a similar system, but it’s only for student to faculty or faculty to faculty, but this would make it more peer-to-peer reporting. We also want to make sure that all four action items from the racial climate town hall are addressed next year. We also want to install diversity training with all Student Government officers and peers are in a position can influence other peers. We think by educating student leaders, we can spread it throughout.”
Student Experience
“We want to create a sublet for student housing. We see a lot of bizarre Facebook pages for students who study abroad or have a co-op, but we want to create a streamlined process through Student Government.”
Student Governance
“We’re starting a WTF campaign — which stands for “what to fix?” This would be something that would become a hashtag for social media. Students think that submitting complaints has to be a formal process, but this is our way of making it more accessible.”
