When ASUO President Jared Axelrod took office last May, he had several goals that would require large-scale changes, which he said were “more important” than smaller, more tangible goals.
With the end of winter term approaching, Axelrod, a junior, said he has yet to decide whether he will run for re-election in the spring. With it a possibility though, students may ask whether Axelrod has accomplished his campaign goals.
Nine months into his administration, Axelrod said he and Vice President Juliana Guzman have done a good job of working to fulfill their goals.
But, some students have a difficult time defining exactly what the ASUO president does.
Claire Davaz McGowan, a graduate student who began at the University as an undergraduate in 1998, said she gets her information about the ASUO from the Emerald, but does not pay much attention to the elections.
“I think the only time we hear about them (the ASUO) is when they’ve made a controversial decision,” she said.
Davaz McGowan does not vote in the elections because she is also a classified staff member and is not allowed to vote. She said she only voted one time in her four years as an undergraduate and that was when she knew one of the candidates.
Although classified staff members do not pay the incidental fee, McGowan plans on working as a GTF next year and will have to pay the fee. She said the fee has grown a lot since she was an undergraduate but she hasn’t seen a growth in services.
“I’m not exactly sure what the ASUO does besides that,” she said.
University junior Chris Pfanner said he votes in student elections but is “not the most knowledgeable guy” about the ASUO.
Pfanner, who said he did not vote for Axelrod in the last election, said most of what he knows about Axelrod and his positions on issues comes from Emerald articles. Pfanner said the issue that most concerns him is the growth of the incidental fee compared with how many services students receive.
“I think that is ridiculous and unnecessary,” Pfanner said. “I don’t feel that I’m getting $200 per term out of the incidental fee.”
Axelrod said knew when he ran that his goals might not be fully realized this year, but thought the larger issues, such as resource fees and higher education legislation needed to be addressed. He also said he thinks that sometimes students don’t want to focus on bigger, long-term issues.
Progress on campaign goals:
1) Axelrod said he wanted to push the administration to create course evaluations with more “meaningful” questions and make them available to students. Answers to the last four questions on evaluations (those questions that are common to every evaluation in every course) are available online at courseevals.uoregon.edu, but students do not have access to any other questions.
A joint committee between the University Senate and the Office of Academic Affairs has been created and a letter was sent out to members of the new committee last Thursday.
The seven-person committee, which will include one member of the ASUO, is charged with looking at whether other questions should be consistent among all course evaluations.
Axelrod said although he spoke with Academic Affairs and with the University Senate regarding his concerns with course evaluations at the beginning of the school year, he was surprised to hear about the formation of the joint committee.
A separate Academic Affairs committee, formed last year, is looking at how to move to a method of filling out evaluations online.
2) Westmoreland sold in July and is now operated by Bell Real Estate. The University did reach an agreement with current tenants to allow them to continue paying the University’s rental rate for up to two years after the sale date.
While not all students chose to remain in the complex, the University paid the difference in rent for those who did. Students now make up only about 35 percent of Westmoreland’s population.
3) Axelrod said he plans to ask the administration to hold open forums on the fees during spring term. On Feb. 6, the Vice Chancellor of the Oregon University System sent out information on the possible creation of a resource fee committee which would be made up of equal numbers of students and administrators. Axelrod agreed to sit on this committee. Axelrod is on the Oregon Student Association board, which brought up the issue of resource fees in several meetings and took their concerns to the OUS. Axelrod said he and Michael Olson, president of the Associated Students of Oregon State University, were the most vocal on this issue because those schools pay the most money in resource fees.
Axelrod said he has not worked with the Student Senate or the University Senate on this issue because the fees are assessed by the OUS and are a state-wide issue.
4) This fall, the ASUO worked with several organizations to register 6,855 students to vote – the highest number ever registered at the University for a non-presidential election.
In November, representatives from the Oregon Student Association (Axelrod did not attend this event) met with governor’s education workforce and revenue policy adviser, to discuss OSA’s ideas for the governor’s budget.
Gov. Ted Kulongoski released his budget in January and it includes several things the OSA lobbied for. The budget calls for a 12.5 percent increase for higher education and limits tuition increases to the increase in median family income (about 3.4 percent). It also calls for $8 million to go toward faculty salaries and $6.9 million to go toward decreasing student-teacher ratios.
Axelrod has met with Oregon state legislators to discuss the tuition issues listed as priorities for the OSA. These include financial aid issues such as tuition equity for non-citizens; the “shared responsibility model,” in which students work to pay some of their own tuition in exchange for more help from the state; and the ASPIRE program, which sends college mentors into high schools to help students prepare for attending college.
5) The deadline for submitting the diversity plan is March 23, Axelrod said. The ASUO diversity committee, led by Guzman, has met twice a week since week five of fall term and is currently working on the plan’s mission and goals, Guzman said.
Guzman said they will host open forums for members of the University community to voice their opinions. She said the committee will look at how student programs can contribute to the diversity plan and hopes it will also look at the outreach and work the programs already do.
6) Axelrod has worked with Hilary Berkman, director of student advocacy, and Ilona Koleszar, director of legal services and has made pamphlets describing the legal services available to students. He also said the ASUO held a “know your rights” forum fall term.
Axelrod sits on the search committee charged with finding a new director for the Department of Public Safety.
The revised version of the Student Conduct Code was sent to the state for approval despite students’ objections. This appears to be the same version posted under “New Student Conduct Code” on the Web site for the Office of Student Life.
Student Senator Jacob Daniels, who ran against Axelrod in the primary election last year, and supported his opponent in the general election, said he initially thought Axelrod’s presidency would be “really politicized.”
Daniels said that although he thought Axelrod’s youth would make him susceptible to the pressures of the office, he has been surprised to see Axelrod make some controversial decisions, such as looking objectively at funding for the Oregon Marching Band.
“I didn’t think Jared would be a very autonomous or sovereign president,” Daniels said. “He’s turned out to be exactly the opposite of what I expected.”
Daniels said one of his criticisms of Axelrod’s administration is that there haven’t been enough “fresh faces” representing student government.
Axelrod appointed
Daniels to his Senate seat, a move that Daniels said showed “statesmanship” because of their former rivalry. Daniels said he doesn’t want to “bite the hand that feeds” him, but said he would have liked to see new people coming into the government instead of appointees who have already served the ASUO in other capacities. Some empty seats have been filled by other Senators moving around to different positions or by former Senators who leave and then return to school, Daniels said.
“I really didn’t see a student government that reached out to the students as much as they could have,” he said. Daniels said that while he thought some of Axelrod and Guzman’s campaign goals – such as stopping the sale of Westmoreland housing complex – were “too lofty,” most ASUO presidents have made promises they can’t keep and Axelrod did not promise anything unreasonable compared with past administrations.
“He’s been as good as you can ever expect out of an ASUO president,” Daniels said.
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campaign goals: how have Jared Axelrod and Juliana Guzman done?
1) Increased access to student course evaluations:
a) We will create a student-faculty committee to re-evaluate the efficacy of current course evaluations charged with creating more comprehensive standardized questions
No
2) Fight the sale of Westmoreland Housing complex:
a) We must fight the sale through a comprehensive lobbying plan targeting Chancellor Pernsteiner and the State Board of Higher Education
b) Should the sale occur, we will demand that the administration fund and provide resource guides to assist student and student families with finding other housing and childcare options
Yes
3) Resource fee accountability:
a) Through a joint effort with the Office of Financial Aid and Academic Advising to increase awareness of these “hidden costs” of a University of Oregon education to ensure that students know exactly what they will be charged when they register for classes to enable appropriate planning
b) We will work with Academic Senators to outreach to their constituents about increasing fees and will work with the University Senate to develop standardized criteria to evaluate the creation or increasing of these fees
c) Should proposed fees not meet student-approved criteria, we will lobby the Oregon University System board to reject creation of new fees
No
4)Dynamic legislative advocacy:
a) We will successfully register, educate and turn out students to vote in the November election to gain electoral power needed to pressure state legislators
b) In order to impact proposed funding levels in the Governor’s recommended budget, we will lobby gubernatorial candidates to encourage them to prioritize higher education funding as campaign issues, and if elected, priorities while in office.
c) Prior to the legislative session, we will meet with key legislators to urge funding for the Oregon Opportunity Grant, Student Childcare Programs, and for the Oregon University System
Yes.
5)Student representation in diversity plan revisions:
a) Work closely with student representatives on the diversity advisory committee
b) Revisions to the plan must include input from students impacted by this plan and must include students and faculty from a variety of communities on campus
c) Accountability mechanisms for timely compliance with this plan must be clear and relate to issues raised by informational panels with students
Yes
6) Protect student rights:
a) Utilization of the ASUO advocacy and outreach positions will help the ASUO educate students about proposed changes that would limit their rights
b) Through the publication about resources available through the Office of Student Advocacy and Legal Services, we will increase awareness about students’ rights and the judicial processes on and off-campus, and ensure outreach about options for all parties involved in a conduct code dispute
c) We will vehemently fight against proposed changes that will limit student rights in the Student Conduct Code
d) Increased student involvement and representation in the Public Safety Advisory Group will ensure further student oversight of DPS and promote DPS accountability
No