OUSC 2023 vice presidential debate overview

JOE ZERILLI Campus Editor

Presidential slates met one last time before voting as vice president candidates and presidential candidates debated against each other for Oakland University Student Congress (OUSC) office. Moderated by Jeremy Johnson, candidates were asked questions about things like tuition, campus safety, food on campus and the relationship with administration.

Featuring Maris Ferguson of the Farooqi-Ferguson slate and Amir Mitchell of the Gojcaj-Mitchell slate, the debate kicked off with opening statements and then general questions for both candidates. The full debate can be found on OUSC’s YouTube.

Below are their initial responses to the topics.

General experience

Ferguson: “First and foremost, I want to say that my experience in SAFB and OUSC together have been really formative in my experience in engaging with the student body. I work with student orgs every single day, which means I interact with students constantly. And so I’m able to be in tune with them, listen to their needs, adapt quickly, and make sure that their voices are heard.

“I’m also aware of how OUSC works and on our slate you have a ton of experience as well. So, I’ve had my hand in writing legislation and that’s something that SAFB chairs hadn’t really previously been engaged in. Really being an advocate through OUSC is something I found a lot of passion for. First and foremost what makes me experienced for this is that I’ve been in touch with students and also I’m an advocate and an activist at heart, and this is a huge part of who I am as a person.”

Mitchell: I am a freshman, so a lot of people say, ‘Why you, why a freshman who comes to Oakland University in his second semester?’ And what I say is, this might be my first college experience, but I had a ton of experience abroad. I’ve lived in the Dominican Republic for over a year. I know Spanish. I’m intact with all different communities.

“I come from a less financial appropriate family that came up and we had our adversities there. And through this school I’ve worked with OUSC on several different initiatives on every single task force. And if I have the time, I work on it and I’ve made sure that I have a very good amount of respect and amount of integrity when it comes to this job. I believe that, you know, I would be a good solid candidate for this.” Improving legislature/job preparation

Ferguson: “So with my experience at SAFB I’m already managing a staff of my own, also with my experience in human resource management, I’ve been nothing but prepared this whole time receiving my education for managing staff, that’s recruitment, onboarding, mental retention, all those kinds of things. First and foremost, something that I improved when I first got to SAFB was our onboarding. There wasn’t really a structure for how to train people when they get into this job.

“And so that was my number one goal there. And that’s gonna be my number one goal in this position as well. I wanna make sure that the process is smooth because we have a lot of legislators, luckily this era of OUSC has a lot of engagement from students. And so we wanna make sure that the process for getting them in and getting their voices as soon as possible and getting trained to do their jobs. That’s my first goal.

Mitchell: “So I’d like to say first that I have an immense amount of experience, especially with business, managing teams, coordinating tasks and things like that. I’ve been in the restaurant industry for over 10 years now, so I definitely have an immense amount of experience and background with working with people, with getting tasks done.

“How I would be a better vice president I think is to completely stay neutral, to work with our legislature, to not isolate people and to make sure that everyone feels like they are welcome. Everyone feels like they have a space here in OUSC to conduct their initiatives and resolutions and things like that. “

Training new legislature

Ferguson: “Making sure everybody’s equipped to do their job with the tools necessary is incredibly important, if not the most important job of the vice president. And so I would say that to make sure that training is effective, we need to all look at it together as a team and say, what do you need from our legislators and how can we give them the tools to do that? One primary goal and duty of the job of legislator is to read and write legislation and then vote on it.

“And we need to empower our legislative body to give them the tools that they need to know how to write those pieces of legislation so they can make true change. It’s when we talk about it and do things here and there, but if we can make policy and if we can enact this legislation, it really gives power to our voices. It’s not just us saying wishes out there, it’s getting power to people and putting the power directly into students’ hands.”

Mitchell: “So we had a ton of new fresh faces this year. I came in during the summer along with Ms. Ferguson, and I do believe that over this year we’ve grown a ton. We’ve seen a lot of new people and we’ve had so much new diversity that I’m such a huge supporter of.

“And I believe that I would work with these people to not see differences in anything like that. I would bring everybody closer. I would see ‘Where’s our common ground?’ I don’t care what your political background is or how you feel about things personally. What we’re here for is to change things at this school. And so what I believe is to bring everybody closer and work with them everyday to make sure that we have a stronger legislature.”

Food on campus

Ferguson: “I think we all agree that the quality of food on campus and our dining experience is less than satisfactory, if not downright disappointing.It’s important that we keep these conversations going with Chartwells and holding them accountable and saying that because we’re paying so much to be here and support them, they need to support us just equally, if not superior.

“One of the first things that we need to address here is affordability. The prices for campus food are exorbitant. And not to mention when you pay for a housing dining plan, most of your meal swipes might go unused and expired, and there’s no cost that we get back from that.

“And additionally, the hours need to be expanded so that way we can increase accessibility to food on campus so students aren’t going hungry just because they can’t get there at a certain hour of the day. And finally, we need to enact Swipe Out Hunger to make sure that meal swipes can be donated at the very least to students in need across campus.”

Mitchell: “As an on-campus student, I eat there every day. You’ll never guess where I’m going after this. I’m very passionate about that. That’s why one of the biggest things in OUSC I’ve started is our Chartwells task force, meeting with them biweekly. Bringing their executives in the office saying, ‘how can we do better with this?’”

“I know you guys are losing money or there are alternatives that aren’t exactly practical that we’d like. You know, we would love you guys to have every single amenity here for food for us, but we understand what is practical for us.

“One thing that we laid the track for is meeting with them, setting those meetings up, getting those people in the room and allowing us to do things such as Swipe Out Hunger, such as expanding dining hours, adding alternative hot food and The Hive and Tilly’s and just getting better alternative situations that are practical and works for everyone.”

Reproductive rights and resources

Ferguson: “I think that Student Congress is responsible for advocating for all student needs across the board, and so I think reproductive rights absolutely falls under this category.I also believe that supporting women goes beyond just what happens in our bodies and our reproductive systems and so this is why I’m supporting the creation of a women’s resource center that is all encompassing beyond just reproductive rights.”

“But also to include things like what women experience in the world, professionally, educationally, socially, and so things like our menstrual product initiative is one example of how we’ve supported so far, we can take this so much further. Supporting women who need mentorship and when they’re experiencing discrimination and sexism and there’s all kinds of social issues we experience as women in particular that aren’t seen on this campus through an institutionalized program.”

Mitchell: “As an advocate for all students here, I definitely see a call for help for people who need reproductive resources. When I heard about Roe v Wade, I just, I’ll be completely honest, I saw somebody screaming at this guy and I said, ‘what just happened?’

“They said, ‘we lost.’ I said, ‘who?’ They said, ‘women.’ And immediately I was heartfelt and that hurt me. I said, ‘what can we do?’ And immediately, I got to thinking and we proposed the plan B issue to make sure you guys understand these resources are available, 90% of the student leaders didn’t know that plan B is available for $15 in the Graham Health Center.

“These resources were just not available and well, they didn’t know that it was. And so we wanted to make sure that everybody understands that these things are here and as far as advocating for things that would help.”

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