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March 08, 2005
Candidates spar in final debate
Forty students attended the HUSC informal presidential debates held last Thursday.
In the debates, candidate teams were asked opening and closing questions by moderator and Political
Affairs Committee (PAC) chair Mike Mitchell. They also asked questions of each other and fielded audience queries.
Juniors Luke Nelson and Josh Sheldon continued to push involvement with student organizations through HUSC attendance at org events.
“Why can’t HUSC start going to the orgs?” Nelson said.
Their team, being all-male, explained how they would represent women, who make up 63.7 percent of the undergraduate student body, by stating, “We’re both a male couple.”
He went to say that female representation would begin with his executive board and by bringing more student organizations into HUSC, so more women would be represented.
Current HUSC vice president Mike Pesko, with running mate Laura Mann, repeatedly declared that their administration would build on the “foundation” Pesko and current HUSC president Shona Ramchandani built.
Pesko used the phrase eight times, which prompted a student to ask specifically what that foundation was.
Pesko responded by stating that he and Ramchandani have branched out to the student organizations and have put students on committees where there were previously none, such as the Academic Affairs Committee.
Pesko said this foundation was built off of the "mess" he and Ramchandani inherited from the previous administration. Pesko was asked to explain the "mess" he inherited.
Evens and Mulé began by discussing their plan to get a student representative on the Board of Trustees and setting up town-hall meetings for students to discuss issues without the formalities of Robert’s Rules.
The candidates were also directly questioned about their policies regarding diversity and racism and were asked to give a definition for each that an eighth-grader would understand.
Candidates also broadly defined diversity as the differences between themselves and every other person in the room and added that racism was the disrespect of those differences.
“Racism is oppression based on characteristics that have been given to them that have no value at all,” Mann said.
All three candidate teams mentioned the protest held by students of color and allies on March 2.
Nelson was the loudest of the candidates, calling HUSC's non-recognition of the group, both as they filed in and as they subsequently left, "disrespectful."
Evens said the protest was disrespectful to a new organization bringing its charter to HUSC.
The group was not given the proper attention and debate they deserved, Evens said.
HUSC elections will be held on March 9 from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the GLC and from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in Sorin.
Posted by msveum at March 8, 2005 04:14 PM
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