Sophomore Elijah Bader-Gregory, current SA vice president, will serve as SA president next year after beating first-year Sammy Randle III with 63% of the vote. First-year Aliza Lopez will serve as vice president.
After their victory, the Bader-Gregory / Lopez ticket plans to follow through on their campaign promise to push for accountability from the administration and from themselves.
“I would say the most important issue facing students right now is the lack of trust and accountability within administration,” Bader-Gregory told the Campus Times. To try to reduce that mistrust, he plans for SA to meet with members of administration more often, and to push for students to be in the room when decisions are being made.
Bader-Gregory plans to hold the administration accountable for promises such as lowering Hillside prices, making Rocky Bucks (the bucks formerly known as URos) available for use in College Town, and increasing SA and student cultural groups’ participation in the decision-making process for on-campus speakers (in response to student dissent against Meliora Weekend speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie).
“We’re going to hold them to that because we have that in writing. We have those relationships and we have those things that we can build off of to make sure that they actually do what they’re saying,” Bader-Gregory said.
He and Lopez also plan to push to get rid of Harvest Table, to recreate the UR Mobile app, and to mobilize student-created and student-led DEI training for faculty, a push that began during former SA President Adrija Bhattacharjee’s administration.
To achieve their goals, Bader-Gregory and Lopez plan for SA to be more proactively involved in student lives. They will send regular emails to keep the student body updated on their progress, and keep in close contact with the presidents of student organizations to hear from different perspectives on campus issues than just their own.
“We’re [both] from different class years, we have different majors, but we’ll never be able to sort of represent or always be able to think of the entire student body just in one go because that’s impossible for anyone to do,” said Bader-Gregory.
He added, “But we’ve already started to seek out, build that team, create these open positions, and see how SA can be a better resource for students.”
