Ajani Husbands and Alyssa Schwartz are familiar with the inner workings of the ASSU Undergraduate Senate. Husbands, a junior, served on the Senate last year, and helped develop the ASSU arts grant. Schwartz, a sophomore, is currently the chair of the Senate Advocacy Committee. Both candidates are also involved in a variety of student groups on campus. On their Web site (http://withyou.stanford.edu/), they have outlined a program of reform in areas such as diversity, student life and communications.

The Daily: Looking over your Web site, it looks like you have a lot of issues that you would like to address. If elected, how likely is it that we’ll see serious changes in all of these areas?

Ajani Husbands: The thing that Alyssa and I worked hardest on was finding real solutions to real problems. I don’t think that there’s anything in our platform that couldn’t be done if elected. We’ve taken the things we have already accomplished as student leaders, and used them to put together new goals.

Alyssa Schwartz: Also, what is unique about our campaign is that we’re combining both long-term goals and short-terms goals. For a lot of the issues, work has already started. We hope to touch on everything we said we would do. And I think it’s definitely possible to make real progress on all of these issues.

TD: Are there any issues that you would put as a

top priority?

AS: For me, bringing in populations that have previously been underrepresented, both in the larger Stanford community and in the ASSU, is really important. Freshmen, queer students, students with disabilities, international students — their voices aren’t always as loud as other student populations, and I think it’s important to make an effort to bring them into the ASSU and to work on issues important to them.

AH: Two of my bigger priorities are the publications community and the arts community . . . For the arts community, I’d like to see a rotating gallery on campus. It would be similar to the Art Affair on campus last week. With publications, we should have common spaces to place publications so we don’t have to deal with door-to-door distribution. Additionally, I have always been a big advocate for students of color.

TD: Can you tell us about your motto, “With you, for you”? How does that summarize your campaign?

AS: Over the past two years for me and three years for Ajani, we have tried to work very closely with students in the things that they are most concerned about and for students as advocates. We’ve both been on the Senate — I was the Senate Advocacy Committee Chair this year — so working for students is a priority. In the last month or so, we’ve met with probably every major student group on campus to find out what their interests are.

TD: What about special fees? One of the solutions you are proposing is lowering facilities costs to groups. How do you plan to go about doing this?

AS: In the ASSU constitution, if you receive student money, you can’t go ahead and charge for events. A lot of groups are faced with costs of $1,000 to $2,000 to rent a space like MemAud or Dinkelspiel for a three hour concert. One of the things we hope to do is lower the amount of money student groups need to get by lowering the money they need to pay. This will be done by encouraging the University to subsidize the cost of those buildings.

TD: Do you think the University would be willing to do this?

AS: I think what the University is going to find next year is that groups are not going to be able to put on the kind of events that attract a lot of attention because they can’t afford it.

TD: What are your tactics for winning

this election?

AH: One thing we have been doing is meeting with various student groups. We were at the [Graduate Student Council’s] last meeting and the [Asian American Students Association] extravaganza, and we have plans to meet at the next Black Student Union meeting and the list goes on and on. We’re trying to get a feel of what students want, what student centers want. In addition, one of the more hard tactics is to flyer everywhere and get the word out to individuals.

AS: We’ve been talking to students. We’ve been to a number of dorms on campus. We have pretty large grassroots organizing going on.

TD: What have your past leadership experiences brought to the campaign?

AH: I think the past leadership positions I have held in many different student groups or centers on campus have taught me how to utilize resources and taught me that there are many different avenues to follow other than the conventional. Sometimes it’s best not to go through the conventional routes. If you have connections to other people then you can get things done much faster, and people respect you because you have worked with them in the past.

AS: Being deeply involved in the ASSU, there’s no better preparation. We’ve both been on Senate, and I was an executive aid my freshman year, so having worked with two consecutive executive offices, we don’t have to have such a long preparation period. We’ve seen how it works.

TD: Does your campaign have a particularly strong appeal with some groups?

AS: We are endorsed by the Students of Color Coalition, so definitely students of color have the feeling that we would be the best candidates. And I think, unlike our opponents, we have made an effort to reach out to the international students, the queer students, the students with disabilities as well as the Greek community, the arts community and publications. We’ve talked to all of these groups and we know where their issues are and we know where we can help them.