Christa Shively is a senior double majoring in history and women and gender studies, with a minor in Spanish. She serves as chairwoman of the EMU board and ASPAC as a board representative and third year as board chair (board chair on both EMU and ASPAC), and will have an at-large seat on the ASPAC board to finish out a two-year term.
Greg Bae is a senior triple majoring in math, economics and political science.
He was treasurer of APASU and was also on board for OSPIRG. He has also served as programs director for OSPIRG and the Multicultural Center, and is a member of Delta Sigma Phi fraternity.

Oregon Daily Emerald: What’s your legislative agenda?
Shively: Our legislative agenda? You mean specifically for the state legislature or our platform in general?
Emerald: Your platform and how it relates to higher education.
Shively: Okay. Well I’m going to broaden your platform just a little bit because that’s part of our platform, part of what we want to do. Do you just want me to say — are you going to basically just walk us through the platform or what?
Emerald: I’m going to ask follow ups if I don’t know info, so go ahead and start.
Shively: Okay, so basically we’re really concerned about not only the economic crisis in Oregon and the budget crisis but how that has had a ripple effect in higher education, specifically with losing the Opportunity Grant and the Child Care Block Grant, so we will definitely be continuing to lobby at the state level mobilizing students. I think this year the Executive did a good job of actually transporting students up to Salem, and we’ll definitely be continuing with that here on campus. We want to focus also on having the increased tuition and increased fees in general be more transparent to students, so we’d like to work with the administration on making that happen.
Bae: At the same time, we want to keep working with the Oregon Students of Color Coalition to increase minority access to higher education. They do a lot of things by lobbying, and also grassroots organizing.
Emerald: Now, Christa, one of the platforms of Pilliod and Buzbee was to keep tuition low and to watch surcharges, and to their credit they fought very hard against the surcharge — it happened anyway. What do you guys think you’ll be able to do — either of you can answer this — what do you guys plan to do to make sure it doesn’t increase more?
Shively: You know, quite frankly I’m not sure. I’m not aware of many options, unfortunately, because of financial constraints. In order to maintain the current level of service at the University, someone had to be paying more and unfortunately the burden happened to fall on students. What we want to advocate for is that students — I think that what Pilliod and Buzbee were able to do really well this year was to make sure that students were well informed on when this was going to happen, the time line, all the contingency factors, so we want to continue doing efforts like that because I think they were very affective. Specifically our concerns are not only with tuition, because tuition gets a lot of attention, but their are a lot of fees on campus that students aren’t as aware of, specifically with the resource fees that are tied to departments. Certain departments are getting more and more costly, specifically music departments, science departments, art and architecture — we’re afraid that students are being kind of priced out of these areas of study, and I don’t think there’s a lot of attention given to that right now.
Emerald: Are you just taking the lead then from what Buzbee and some others in the ASUO are focusing on right now?
Shively: Yeah.
Emerald: Taken to some idea.
Shively: Absolutely — I don’t think we’re going to be changing that course dramatically, but we would kind of like to refocus efforts so it’s not just on tuition, because tuition is pretty strictly controlled by the state in a lot of respects. However, fees are not legislative as much; it’s kind of been a back-door way of increasing what students have to pay imposing these fees and Nilda and Joy faced that when the energy fee was implemented it was kind of a back-door way of charging students another $40 a term and they were able to fight that and at least decrease it, so that’s just one example of the fees that are being imposed on students.
Emerald: So you’re going to focus more on the fees…
Bae: And if I may add to that, it’s not to say that the resource fees are bad — in fact, I think, we both think, that they were necessary to keep the current standards of education where they are for University of Oregon. It’s that we want to increase transparency of these fees so that people are well informed before going into their classes of what they can expect to pay, and we as students have a right to know what our financial burden is.
Emerald: Right, but the huge book full of fees, though, how do you expect to make this information available and get students to look at it?
Shively: Well, some of it can be as simple as as soon as you declare a certain major, you’re automatically charged a resource fee. When I declared my major, nobody told me, just so you know, this is a fee that is going to you know, show up. I think it has to be done at a departmental level, I think that book should be more accessible to students, possible available online, and I think timing is really crucial, because if you declared your major before you filled out your financial aid application, then the burden of those fees will be included in the overall total of your financial need on campus for that next year. However, if you declare your major after you’ve already filled out your financial aid information, it’s not included at all. So for instance, if you were to find out after you filled out your financial aid information that you got into the honors college, if you applied late the honors college, it’s $400 a term — I believe now it’s $400 — that’s not factored in to your financial need.
Bae: Another thing to answer your question — part of our platform is outreach and education, and one facet of that is we’d like to collaborate with the Emerald in creating a biweekly newsletter that would keep the campus at large abreast of what the ASUO is currently working on, what are the key issues that affect us as students and something like the resource fee and increasing the transparency for that would be something we would address in this biweekly column.
Emerald: How would you plan on implementing that? A column in the Emerald?
Shively: Yeah, we would like a column, basically a biweekly column and, you know, based on availability, based on I don’t know what it takes to have something like that happen with the Emerald, but something I’m sure would be up for negotiation or having a regular interview or something like that.
Emerald: Right, OK, and actually most specifically, what are your campus initiatives — the last one actually was more legislative — we can get back to that as well. Do you have any other campus initiatives you didn’t cover?
Shively: We have lots of campus initiatives.
Emerald: Name a few — top three.
Shively: Top three, OK. To begin with, we want to continue the leadership development center initiative. I don’t know how much the Emerald has covered on this, but Ben Buzbee, Hillary Arhocky and I wrote a proposal that is part of the capital campaign project and we want to continue efforts on that, and potentially have that mobilized as soon as possible.
Emerald: What is that?
Shively: The leadership development center would be a center on campus where people could receive leadership training in a non-biased, non-political environment so it would be teaching skills, not ideology. A lot of leadership opportunities on campus right now are very politically charged, however that doesn’t necessarily allow membership for all students. So we want to create more of a learning environment when it com
es to leadership skills, skill building.
Emerald: What’s your second one?
Shively: Second one — which one do you want to do?
Bae: Another one would be…
Shively: Point system?
Bae: Yeah, the point system. Our focus on that is to increase the quality of life for residence hall students. There are lots of complaints about the quality of dorm food or even the variety of it — so in instituting a universal point system, we would spearhead a campaign to be able to use those points for EMU vendors.
Emerald: So would the current dorm food system be applicable at the EMU?
Bae: And, of course, this is a steady stream of revenues for the residence halls and for the University and there’s a lot of pressure from the ASUO Exec and other coalitions working with the ASUO — something like this is going to be hard to implement.
Emerald: What’s the time line on that? Do you think you can do it, and if so, how long do you think it would take?
Bae: Well, Christa has an understanding of what the board’s feeling on this is.
Shively: The EMU Board has looked at doing this for the past couple years, but we never really had the leverage to get it done. I think it’s something the board is still interested in pursuing and a partnership with the EMU Board as well as the Residence Hall Association. The Resident Hall Association is very interested in this, so I think if we can get the momentum going, I’m thinking possibly a two-year thing. I don’t think it could happen in one year, especially because of the financial burden, but definitely I think within two years we could get something get some changes made.
Emerald: What would happen in the first year that would get things rolling enough that the next Executive would be able to do that?
Shively: I think just the negotiations that we’d have with the housing director — his name is escaping me right now — we’ve talked about it, I’ve talked personally about this with him. I think we’d have to look at models on campus.
Bae: Eyster
Shively: Mike Eyster — thank you! Working with Mike Eyster and coming up with an action plan of some sort to ease — I think it would have to be eased in incrementally, so maybe only part of our vendors would be available to students, something like that so that it wouldn’t be a technology it would be more working with housing budget to make sure that everything added up.
Emerald: So we would be able to see some tangible results of that next year — at least one or two vendors would have it?
Shively: I’m hoping.
Emerald: That would be your hope?
Shively: Yeah. But, I mean, really the ball is not really in the Executive’s court — the ball is in housing’s court. I think if we were able to mobilize enough pressure from a broad base of students on campus, then housing could be persuaded.
Emerald: What’s the third campus initiative?
Shively: The third is — oh, go for it.
Bae: Well, like I said I’ve been working with the MCC and APASU so issues that pertain to students of color is something that really hits home with me. In previous campaigns, people always talked about diversity and how important that is to campus — well we simply define diversity as recognition of differences among people, whether that be economic, social classes, sexual preferences or obvious racial differences, and Christa and I believe we have an understanding of these differences and that those understandings, the understanding of these differences, can be fostered by having the ASUO facilitate kind of cross-culture and collaborative planning, and one way we plan to do this is to introduce a new staff position — the student events coordinator. This person would bring the campus at large together by having one place where information on the student union events, greek related events and sporting events can be accessible to the campus.
Emerald: Will that be something you can implement within this next year?
Shively and Bae: Definitely
Emerald: How will you interact with the community?
Shively: Just in general? Okay, well I think Greg and I are pretty approachable people and I’m always looking for current events going on. I think just being, creating, an environment in the ASUO office that is open to anybody walking in so it’s not cliquish or exclusive in any way, I think is really important.
Bae: There have some criticisms about the atmosphere, not necessarily in this administration but in previous administrations, about how approachable the ASUO office is, and we want to — it is our goal to make it a more user-friendly administration.
Emerald: Be specific.
Shively: Well specifically, with the event planning coordinator having student groups actually, I mean it would not be mandatory in any respect, but creating a forum where they can sit down and discuss what events they are planning, when is that going to happen, making sure events aren’t, you know, conflicting with one another — I work in the scheduling office, I see this all the time where student groups just don’t really know what other groups are doing because they are pretty focused on their own dynamics. So just creating an atmosphere where people are kind of looking at what else is going on on campus. I also think outreach on our part is really important, so having that weekly column where it’s like almost like having a discussion with the student body.
Emerald: Weekly or biweekly?
Shively: I’m sorry, biweekly. We’re almost having a discussion with the students on campus for what we’re working on why this is important — why paying us $700 a month is worth it and why fees in general are going to a good use.
Emerald: How would you make the ASUO relevant to students?
Bae: Relevant to students. I think relevance has to do with knowledge and knowledge of what the ASUO actually does. I think, generally speaking, other than the people who are intimately involved with student programs or the ASUO, there’s not a lot of knowledge of what the ASUO does and how it affects campus and the student events coordinator or the biweekly column or just talking to people would increase the awareness of how the ASUO is relevant to their day-to-day lives as students.
Shively: I think it’s important also to emphasize the importance of our staff — I mean, we’re two people. I mean, we’re definitely the ones elected, but we will be appointing a staff of, I think this year the staff is about 15 people, and I don’t know exactly what the budget is for next year but our staff is incredibly important for the success of the Executive office, and so making sure that our staff has the mentality that we are represented as students and that every moment spent in the office is a moment that is being paid for in some respect and ensuring that we are looking out for the best interest of students, whether that be for students in the resident halls, students who are, you know, being priced out of a higher education, whatever those issues are, housing issues, blah blah blah…
Emerald: But how do you target students who say never wander through the EMU and don’t see your office, maybe they don’t even read the Emerald, shockingly enough — how then would you get these students to care?
Shively: I think, last year there was this really great, I don’t know if you saw it, but it was a house in the middle of the amphitheater. It was part of the renters’ rights campaign and people could write down concerns they had or complaints they had with landlords, property management companies. It was very visible, I think it was a great example of ways that students could see what student government is about. I worked for Jay Breslow, and when the presidential campaign was going on, we had the biggest ballot box in the world. I think that those are just ingenious ideas for visible ways to reach out to students on campus — students shouldn’t always be coming to us — we should be going to them as much as possible and like you said, sometimes they don’t read the Emerald, but standing out ther
e on 13th and trying to register people to vote with clipboards — I know I did it this year, I’ve done it in years past. I think this year the Exec has been very good at getting out there and trying to get out there and reach the students on a personal level, mobilizing the interns and trying to create some dialogue on campus.
Emerald: That’s actually the questions, what else would you guys like to add before we close?
Bae: You were talking about earlier — Christa was talking earlier about staff, nothing that speaks of that, we definitely feel that staff is very important and something that would help our efforts at recruiting quality staff members is the depth and the breadth of our experience. Using our combined experiences in a diverse collection different student programs, what have you, I think that would really help our efforts to find a really solid staff and a core group of people that can …
Shively: Spearhead our initiatives.
Bae: Exactly.
Emerald: How many years of student government experience do you guys have combined? I didn’t actually add it up … do you guys know?
Shively: Do you want me to count internships? I was an intern my freshman year in the ASUO I worked on staff as a community outreach director my sophomore year I’ve been on the EMU Board for three years; I’ve sat on a variety of committees.
Emerald: You’ve been involved all four years, basically?
Bae: And, I’ve been involved my freshman to junior year on a more official level and this year, as a senior, I’ve been trying to focus on school and being a triple major and all and one of the things that I do is I tutor a lot on campus. I’m tutoring five people right now; in addition to that I’m the fiscal consultant at the SSIL, which is the Social Science and Instructional Library and that’s on the fourth floor of McKenzie and I help with econometrics.
Emerald: And, I don’t know if I actually did I get where you were from as well?
Bae: Yeah, we actually went to high school together.
Emerald: Oh yeah?
Shively: Yeah.
Bae: And that’s one thing that I feel sets us apart from other candidates is we have a long history together. We went to high school together. We know how we feel on different issues, and I think we have a really good working relationship.
Emerald: Were you both born in Portland?
Bae: I was actually born in Korea, I moved to Beaverton or, more specifically, Aloha, Ore., and we went to Aloha High School.
Emerald: And what city in Korea?
Bae: Seoul.
Emerald: Christa, were you going to add something?
Shively: Oh, just talking about how we’re different from other candidates, I think, well, I think Greg, indirectly but my intimate experience with the incidental fee process — I think it’s really important that the Executive know and understand the governess documents all the rules, all of that stuff, when it comes to the incidental fee, because, I mean, it’s upward, I think it’s $8.4 million this next year. It’s a lot of money that proper procedures and rules surrounding that are really important. I was one of the members of — I don’t know if you know about the Clarks document committee — but we met for numerous and numerous hours on redrafting the Clark document so that it would be compliant with Southward and so I just want to kind of underline the importance of understanding the incidental fee process and its relevance to the Executive office. Although we do a lot of campaigns that are very visible on campus, at the end of the day, we’re the ones who look at all the budgets and make sure that everyone’s following the proper guidelines.
Emerald: Well, thanks.