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Avula/Jones: Mondaire Jones and Hershey Avula
Hershey Avula ’08: ASSU Undergraduate Senate Chair (’06-present), ASSU Executive Committee (’06-present), Faculty Senate Rep. (’06-present), Branner RA (’06-present), ASSU Undergraduate Senate (’05-’06), Frosh Council and Executive Aide (’04-’05)
Mondaire Jones ’09: ASSU Undergraduate Senate (’06-present), Black Community Services Center Program Coordinator (’06-’07), ASSU Frosh Council (’05-’06), NAACP Natonal Board of Directors (’06-present)
Goals: More space for student groups in Old Union and Tresidder, promote graduate diversity, expand graduate healthcare, increase OSA staffing, more OSA communication, increase faculty diversity, revive Courseguide, expand study abroad, promote sustainability, create an airport shuttle, Big Game Bonfire
The Daily: How do you distinguish yourself from the other slates? How do we tell you apart?
Mondaire Jones: We have far more relevant experience, and I think our platform is also much more well researched and more practical.
Hershey Avula: We’re not making broad, general promises. We have specific plans on how to get things done. And we’ve shown that we can get results in the past year. In the Undergraduate Senate, we passed several resolutions on student advocacy interests.
TD: What kind of criticism have you received and how have you dealt with it?
MJ: The closest thing that would have manifested itself that way would have been a question about the draw and its absence from our platform. Our response pretty much clarified that the draw was already being reformed. We didn’t really need to address it.
HA: That’s a big frustration for us. Other slates are putting things on their platfrom that’s already getting done. For us, that’s malicious in its intent because it’s promising something that’s already happening and promising to take credit for it. I think that the Brett and Lakshmi slate is promising a three-tier draw, and that’s something that John Bravman has already talked to us about and is already in the plans for 2010.
TD: I’ve seen your table tents with your flyer on one side and Lakshmi and Brett’s flyers on the other side. If you look at them, yours has a lot of points and theirs is much simpler. Do you think that is a strength or a weakness?
MJ: I think that’s a weakness on their part. The criticism we received was that we had too much text and someone wasn’t going to read it. What I did was condense it and try to re-flyer different placards in different dining halls. Theirs clearly tends to be more social in nature than anything else. It’s frustrating and also, I think it’s pretty sad. We’re not running for class president, we’re running for ASSU Executive.
TD: Have you found any issues in this campaign particularly important or divisive or both?
HA: For us, diversity is a big thing in terms of pushing faculty and graduate diversity. And the entire student body seems to be behind this. But some of the things we’ve heard have been almost kind of racist.
TD: Like what?
HA: Like, “Why do you put diversity on there?” I mean, there’s clearly reasons why we put graduate student and faculty diversity as high issues because they promote education on campus. In the end, Stanford’s an academic institution. And if we don’t have diverse faculty to provide diverse viewpoints for students to learn from, what does that say about us?
MJ: And to provide role models for those who might be interested in pursuing certain fields but might think that because of their demographic that they’re somehow ill-suited for that, such as women in the sciences.
HA: These issues are very, very problematic to us, and we find it really offensive. It’s just one of those things, like how can you say something like that and feel okay about yourself after?