Ashley Rees – President
Age: 19
Major: Political Science
Hometown: Portland
Year: Sophomore
Jael Anker-Lagos – Vice President
Age: 20
Major: Accounting, Economics and Spanish
Hometown: Portland
Year: Sophomore
Emerald: What qualifies you for this position?
Rees: We both have a lot of experience working in the ASUO and with student groups on campus, so we’ve seen first hand what works, what we can change and how to make those changes. I’ve worked in the ASUO as the legislative intern, co-legislative associate and currently as the federal affairs coordinator.

Anker-Lagos: And I’ve been working with the Oregon Students of Color Association since my freshman year. This past year I gained a lot of finance experience on the Programs Finance Committee. I’m also currently on the diversity advisory committee, working with members and conferencing.
Emerald: Why do you want the job?
Rees: Well we think we both have a lot of experience — experience not only in the ASUO but with the broad groups on campus. It’s a really diverse campus there’s a lot of different interests and we think we represent those interests well. We’re also really excited about some of our platform issues because we have the experience to be able to advocate for students and actually get our platform issues won.
Anker-Lagos: And these past few years we’ve learned so much in the ASUO. We know it takes a lot of time to learn everything about the office — the way it runs, how things operate. And so with that experience we know what changes to make and actually how to make those changes.
Emerald: If you could sum up your platform in one sentence or maybe just a couple words what would you use?
Rees: Shine the light on campus, strengthen student voices, improve campus climate and advocate for affordable education.
Emerald: And in light of the ASUO retreat to Sunriver in October what’s the best way to ensure accountability from student leaders next year?
Anker-Lagos: Well one thing, I know we’ve thought… it was a huge, great learning process. We need to move forward. First off, we need to avoid the situation. We need to make sure everyone — all programs, are aware of the rules and when, and if this problem does occur we plan on having students sign a contract saying that they understand the consequences of the retreat, so that they can be held accountable for their actions.
Rees: We would like to have a contract because we feel we should have not only the standards of the University, but we should have a higher set of standards that we should want to live up to as student leaders. We want to have a list of expectations of behavior and the consequences if they’re not met at the beginning of the year for us to sign and say they understand it and again before going on any retreat or conference.
Emerald: How would you organize your staff if you were the Executive to kind of reflect your priorities?
Rees: Well we both have a lot of legislative experience so we want a leg. associate — legislative associate — to continue to work on the tuition freeze that seems like we’re going to win but we want to make sure, we just need advocacy on that. And then we also want to maintain the outreach positions to continue to advocate for student rights. And also with the conduct code changes we want to make sure that a broad group of students are involved in knowing what’s going on, that there’s outreach on those issues and that students have input on that.
Anker-Lagos: Also we want to continue outreaching about past victories, for example — renters rights. We need to make sure that the community’s aware of their rights and what they can do if they have any problems and we want to give them contact information as well.
Rees: A programs administrator is very important and also, mostly similar positions that we have this year and also making sure that we have as well (recording unintelligible).
Anker-Lagos: We’ve actually discussed a lot about having a chief of staff overlook the entire staff.
Emerald: Well that’s it for the questions. I don’t know if there’s anything that you want, that you’re focusing on in your campaign that you’d like to talk about, maybe there’s like specific areas of your platform that you didn’t get to address here that you have, I mean you have a good five minutes to talk about it.
Rees: Excellent. Well we mentioned that we want to shine the light on campus. And that we want to do in three ways. We talked about strengthening student voices, improving the campus climate and advocating for a more affordable education. Just specifically in terms of what are the actual concrete things we will do — we want to see more ASUO accountability. We talked about that briefly when you mentioned the retreat. But we think that there really does need to be a much greater emphasis placed on having clear expectations. And that goes not only for behavior on retreats and that kind of thing but also there needs to be a clearer transition for members of senate, PFC, just knowing what those expectations are. We want to make sure that we can avoid some of these problems that have happened this year. We also are really excited about course syllabi and course evaluations. There’s been — a lot of other schools around the state and country have made their course evaluations more accessible and more comprehensive. So more questions available online that we can see. We’d also like to see course syllabi online before you register so you know more about the classes you’re signing up for.
Anker-Lagos: And more just on the campus climate. We need to make sure that all students feel welcome on this campus at all hours and all places as well. So we need to shine the light on campus again, literally, by making sure this campus is accessible. Also we want to implement a student-initiated walk program, maybe students live a couple blocks off campus, they don’t really want to call a van to come take them home but at the same time they might not feel safe walking home alone. So they can call this program and have someone come and walk them home. Also this campus needs to be safe and accessible to all students regardless of their race, gender identity and so forth. So we need to hold the administration accountable for the five-year diversity plan. We hired a vice provost under institutional equity and diversity; we need to make sure that this plan gets rolling.
Rees: And also we want to advocate for a more affordable education. Currently we’re both working with the ASUO to lobby for a tuition freeze, and it’s looking good but we’re going to need to continue to work on that likely over the summer and into the fall maybe as well. So we (have the most) experience working on this out of all the other candidates, and we think that we can win this victory and continue doing that work so that students don’t continue getting priced out of an education. Also resource fees as majors — we want to see itemization and accountability with that. Accountability’s one of our big things. So we’d like to see itemization of where every dollar goes and what we’re paying for with each resource fee. And a lot of this, we know we have a lot of issues in our platform but we also have a lot of experience working on campaigns — both legislative at the state and federal level. And also just working in the ASUO and knowing how things get done. So we think that we can get these issues done because we know what to do, but with that we also have the insight on, we’ve seen first-hand what changes we want t
o make within the organization, we’ve got kind of that unique perspective.