Maddy Melton is a 23-year-old junior majoring in sociology and women studies; she serves as chairwoman for the Oregon Statewide Student Equal Rights Alliance, vice-chairwoman of the
working class caucus for the United States Student Association, the electoral action trainer for USSA and she’s involved
with LGBTQA and sits on Multicultural Center board.
Eddy Morales is a 23-year-old undeclared junior who plans to triple major in planning,
public policy and management, Spanish and international studies; he’s worked with the Oregon Students of Color Coalition and MEChA and sits on the MCC board.

Oregon Daily Emerald: What’s your legislative agenda?
Melton: Legislative agenda for the upcoming year?
Emerald: Yeah
Melton: It would have to be tuition fees.
Emerald: And either of you guys can jump in on any of these — tuition based?
Melton: Tuition-based, both in the state and in the nation. Currently the
national legislature is working on reauthorizing the Higher Education Act,
which contains every piece of legislation that legislates higher education, like funding. So currently in President Bush’s proposed budget, he zero-funded a program called LEAP, which is a program
designed to match federal dollars to state dollars, so it’s $1 to $1, up
to $30,000 — no, $300,000 — and then after that,
the state has to pay two dollars for every federal dollar.
Emerald: What’s that for? Matching for what purpose?
Melton: For low-income grants.
Emerald: Oh, low-income grants?
Melton: Right, so Oregon Opportunity Grant money that the federal government
matches with the state of Oregon, but currently they zero-funded that
because originally the program was designed to just get states
committed to creating those types of program, and the president feels like
that time line’s up. We’re highly advocating to not take away that type
of funding in an economic crisis like the current.
Emerald: So you say your legislative agenda is tuition-based — what’s your
goal for tuition, then?
Melton: So, I guess I didn’t state that quite properly — the legislative goal
is to keep — would be to keep education accessible for all.
Emerald: What does that mean?
Melton: What that means is we have to keep tuition low enough that we don’t
squeeze out folks in the middle that are ineligible for low-income need-based grants, but we also need to keep need-based grants funded so that
folks that can’t pay for school even if tuition is reasonable have
access, right? But at the same time, we need to make sure the quality of
education is there, too, for keeping programs intact —
Emerald: If you guys were the pres and vice right now, what would you be doing
with the $10- to $13-dollar tuition surcharge?
Melton: As of now, I feel all we can do is let students know it’s coming and
help prepare them for it and work as hard as possible to make sure that
tuition in the next biennium doesn’t skyrocket on our students because,
really, the state of this state’s budget is one in which the options are
very limited.
Emerald: What are your campus initiatives?
Morales: So our platform basically? We have four issue we’re working
on — do you want to talk about it?
Melton: Sure. The first campus initiative would be student empowerment,
which essentially means having more student representation in decision-making bodies. So, for example, the general assembly — it’s an assembly made up
of over 15,000, excuse me, 1,500 administrators and
faculty members, yet there’s only 49 students, and we feel like, just for an
example, that students are drastically underrepresented there. So one of our
biggest issues will be getting students on boards that make decisions like
that.
Emerald: Now in this current election we have probably 20, a bit more than
that, 20 to 30 student seats open for election — there’s at least half
a dozen seats that are running uncontested or even a few that nobody’s
running for. Getting students more involved — how’s that going to work when
we can’t even get students involved in student elections?
Morales: Many times the reason why people can’t fill the student seats are
because they don’t fulfill the requirements for it, like you need to
belong to a certain major or also you need to have an interest,
and we hoping that people who are applying for these positions are
interested. So the senate is made up of the ADFC, the Athletic Department
Finance Committee, the PFC and also the academic seats and so I don’t
think that students aren’t interested, I just don’t feel like the seats
that open, people either meet the requirement or have half an
interest for those, and with other decision-making bodies on campus, I
feel like students would like to sit on them.
Emerald: Because there’s more relevance or what — why would they want to sit
on those more?
Morales: Right, for example like Maddy said the University Assembly I know
there’s a definitely — there’s lots of students, more then 49 students, that
were very passionate about the resolution that
was being voted on, so that would be one example of where students are
passionate about the issue.
Emerald: What’s your second issue?
Melton: Our second issue is fair housing contracts, which is pretty much
getting better and safer housing options to students in the residence halls
which pretty much speaks to there being no term, no grace period, for
students to get out of their res hall contracts, which you know, addresses
issues of homophobia, racism, and not only those — for instance, if somebody
wants to pledge and then becomes part of the greek system and wants
to live in the house and can’t get out of their dorm contract, we feel like
it’s not creating the type of community they want over in the dorms for
one, and it’s also not giving that student the experience they’re looking
for their
freshman year.
Emerald: OK, so what happens then, with the push the ASUO has had the past few
years to create a renters’ bill of rights or some sort of document that
would give renters more rights — is this more on campus?
Melton: This is more specifically on campus.
Morales: Campus housing on campus.
Emerald: Do you think this is something you could fully implement within the
next year if you were elected?
Melton: I think — yes, I think with hard enough campaigning, it’s definitely
something that can be implemented.
Morales: All of the issues that we have picked were promises that we felt we
could accomplish in our year.
Emerald: Okay, so if you’re elected, these four things are four things you hope
you can fully accomplish.
Morales: Yes.
Emerald: What’s the third one?
Morales: The third one is graduate and law school student advocacy, and
basically what that is building stronger ties with our post undergraduate
students.
Emerald: How will you do that?
Morales: Well, for example, the way we’re going to do it is create a position in
our office that will advocate for that student. An example as to why
that’s needed is that law school and graduate students pay the same amount
of student fees, however, they don’t receive cover-worth services for them.
Many times at the rec center, the schedule is based on the undergrads where
law students have different academic years. So just taking them into
consideration when making decisions like that.
Emerald: OK, and what’s your fourth one?
Morales: Our fourth one is — how many have we covered so far? I’m
sorry —
Emerald: Grad and law school, campus-housing initiative for housing contracts
and student empowerment.
M
orales: Okay, sorry — so our fourth one, our last one, is supporting
international student issues, and what we’d do with that is foster a
campus climate that can address international students.
Emerald: How would you do that?
Morales: One way of going about that is we have an international student
advocate in the office, and as we know, international students pay the same
amount of money to go here as out of state students, yet don’t receive or
don’t have access to the resources that they do, as far as monetary value
goes. So right from that what might be a good idea is to create a
scholarship for those students to help them through the times of
increasing tuition and the lack of resources.
Melton: And quickly on that, that’s something that we’re currently trying to
do in the ASUO in coalition with the current international student
advocate and the nontraditional student advocate, but it’s something that
we want students to know that we’re invested in continuing and fully
implementing that type of program.
Emerald: How would you interact with the community this next year?
Morales: With the community? I feel the University plays such a big role as
one of the larger institutions in the community and it’s a resource for a
lot of people. Many times students here apply for internships or do a lot
of work in the community and so we do have a community outreach person
in the office position and just keeping that position there and make
sure that they’re still continuing to go to City Council meetings and also
just bringing that back to our campus and creating any awareness issues
that will affect our University or our University affecting the community.
Emerald: What are your current ties with the community at large — just
name a few things that are helping you be tied in with the larger
community right now.
Melton: Well, I actually lived in the Eugene community two years before I
started school so I, you know, worked for a local small business owner, for
two years was the assistant manager at Chevron, which is actually
Sherlock oil, but take it as franchise; just my involvement and
interaction the community on that level when I was working. Also before
I became a student I was involved with, not directly but a member of,
involved with Youth for Justice which is a community organization based out of the Whitaker; pretty much, high school youth from
around the community get together and work on issues of social justice
— there was something else I wanted to touch on.
Emerald: While you’re remembering, Eddy, what sort of community ties do you have?
Morales: Right, so I also live in the community, of course, and I participate
in my church and know a lot of social issues that are going on. Because of
that, some of that has affected me as a part of the community and
something I would like to see work done on is the party ordinance issue
and making sure that that is being addressed.
Emerald: Party patrol?
Morales: Party patrol.
Emerald: What about it?
Morales: Well, it was reinstituted this year.
Emerald: Right, what do you want to do with that?
Morales: Well the way that it stands is like, if you have four people in one
social gathering that are isolated with a certain group then it could be
traced back to that, and so I know that being such a small community,
you’ll find yourself in situations where there will be four or five
other people who are related to the same organization you are, and I think
just being very specific as to how that is worded and just addressing that
issue as far as getting to know more about it and how it’s affecting our
students, more of our students, would be something I would like to work on
as far as community goes.
Emerald: Did you remember your other thing Maddy?
Melton: No I didn’t
Emerald: Okay — how would you make the ASUO relevant to students?
Melton: Making the ASUO relevant to students — well, I think that to make
something relevant, you first have to make is accessible and I think that
this year’s administration has done a great job in making the office
accessible to students. But I think you can never do enough work around
making the community that you serve feel welcome in that environment.
Emerald: What’s the next step there — what do you do after you make it
accessible?
Melton: You work on tangible issues that actually affect people’s lives — like
tuition, like making sure that there’s students representing the rest of
the student population in decision-making bodies you work on — I mean, I
feel like our platform really speaks to what we’ve heard students really
need right now. So I think that’s how you make it — what’s the word you used?
Emerald: Relevant
Melton: Relevant — the way you make any, you know, government relevant to the
people it’s serving is by working on the issues you’ve heard your people
say they need worked on.
Emerald: Anything to add to that Eddy?
Morales: I would just ditto Maddy. I think our platform speaks to student
relevance, addressing issues that are current.
Emerald: Well, that’s all the questions I have — do you have anything brief to
add?
Melton: I don’t think so.
Emerald: Great.