Executive candidates from Impact and UNITE met Thursday for the second and last time before elections next week.
Executive candidates from the Impact and UNITE tickets met Thursday for the second and last time before elections to debate campus issues and their qualifications for Ohio University Student Senate positions.
Multiple times during the town-hall-style debate, candidates from one ticket singled out a member of the opposing ticket.
At one point Jordan Kelley, presidential candidate for Impact, criticized Hannah Clouser, senate’s current treasurer and UNITE’s presidential candidate.
Kelley finished making a point that his running mate, Kiera Fletcher, a current member of the Senate Appropriations Commission who is running as treasurer on the ticket, started when she ran out of time.
“The treasurer of senate serves as the the treasurer for (the Senate Appropriations Commission), and not to throw any digs at our opponents, but Hannah Clouser has only been to one SAC meeting this year,” Kelley said. “Which isn’t something you’d find typical of the treasurer of a student organization.”
Clouser responded to the criticism, saying her class schedule has prevented her from attending several meetings.
“I wish that if someone on SAC had an issue they would speak to me personally about it,” she said.
During UNITE’s closing statement, vice presidential candidate Courteney Muhl spoke about Kelley, who she said asked Clouser and herself to run with him as executives before he ran on a separate ticket.
“Hannah and I talked about this our freshman year and it’s something that she continued to talk about and continue to engage with me on,” Kelley said. “But as the years went on, we grew apart and our ideas grew apart.”
Candidates from both tickets also discussed a variety of issues for students, including campus safety and the current two-year, on-campus residency requirement; campus sustainability, printing fees and issues for commuter students were also discussed.
For campus safety, Clouser said UNITE plans to support a bias incident report system, in which students could anonymously report incidents that make them feel unsafe, such as catcalling or situations of racism. She also said UNITE wants to push for more bystander intervention.
Kelley, however, said Impact does not want the bias incident report system anonymous.
“If the system is anonymous there is nothing we can do with that information, it’s just data going into a system ... there is no one we can follow up with,” she said.
On the topic of OU’s housing requirement, Kelley said juniors and seniors are deterred from living on campus due to limited space, suggesting a one year requirement as a solution.
UNITE stands “firmly against” removing the two year residency requirement, Muhl said.
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“The residence halls, as well as programing by the resident assistants, gives students a space in which they can be educated, in which they can feel safe and included on campus,” Muhl added.
Students can vote online March 29 and 30 using a link to the ballot sent via email.
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