When the Associated Student Government first formed out of the transitional Northwestern student governments of the 1960s, ASG leaders were frequently seen around campus, rallying the student body to support or protest a cause.
Their use of that power steadily decreased as decades passed. When the 2005-06 Executive Board, led by Patrick Keenan-Devlin, came into office, ASG faced internal bureaucratic and financial problems that engendered apathy and distrust among the student body.
“Transparency” was a recurring word during Keenan-Devlin’s term as president. Restoring ASG’s honest reputation among students was one of his platform goals.
ASG’s financial transparency improved considerably during his term after budgetary reforms by other members such as former treasurer and SESP sophomore Ivy LeTourneau.
Some students still view ASG’s work as ineffective or secretive. ASG outsider Jason Chin, a McCormick sophomore who ran a write-in campaign against Schumacher in this week’s presidential election, emphasized his conscious lack of awareness of ASG’s activities as a reason more transparency was needed.
Keenan-Devlin’s other goals included improving campus safety and access to STD testing. The Music senior achieved his goal of improved lighting on campus, but a dramatic increase in assaults against students during the school year made campus safety a returning platform issue for other ASG candidates this week.
His efforts to provide free STD testing for students failed with administrators, but that goal morphed into an ASG plan to improve student access to condoms, he said. Condoms are now available in some dorm vending machines, with plans on the way to put them in more vending machines.
Schumacher, who was elected to the presidency Tuesday, said he will carry some of his old goals as executive vice president into his new job.
As EVP Schumacher lobbied for student groups alongside Keenan-Devlin, bringing them thousands of dollars in Student Activities Fee money they couldn’t receive before. He helped create a Winter Activities Fair to help groups better publicize and recruit during the school year.
Schumacher’s efforts to provide more working space for student groups failed because there is only a finite amount of room on campus, he said. The Communication junior’s attempts to help create transcripts of students’ extracurricular activities also has not succeeded yet, pending more work and evaluation of student interest.
The creation of a summer internship grant program was an ASG success. Former Student Services Vice President Whitney Gretz, a Weinberg junior, lobbied for the program, which will create funds and internships specifically for NU students.
The ASG Academic Committee, under the stewardship of Academic Vice President Jason Downs, did not achieve its goal of improving communication with students via a Web site. The initiative was one of Downs’ AVP platform goals. He said it failed because of an unsatisfactory first draft of the site and because of problems with the ASG server last fall.
Making Course and Teacher Evaluation Council surveys mandatory is a work-in-progress that the next AVP will have to complete, Downs said, pending faculty approval in two weeks. Students and administrators are working on the creation of a Latino Studies program, also on Downs’ platform.
“We had rallies by the Rock and a petition with maybe 2000 people signing it,” the Weinberg senior said. “We really showed (the administration) that students are interested in this.”
Reach Nitesh Srivastava at [email protected].
