The second Student Senate presidential debate of this week took place Thursday night.
The debate was held by AVW and The New Political in the Radio-Television Center in Studio C for the three candidates — Zainab Kandeh, Action’s candidate, Jordan Ballinger, One’s candidate and Megan Marzec, Restart’s candidate.
The debate lasted one hour and was broken down into different sections.
The first section featured general questions about how each candidate would make changes to the Senate Appropriations Committee and why the senate elections have a historically low voter turnout. Candidates were also asked to argue what makes their tickets unique.
The candidates were also asked how they felt about university topics such as student trustee voting rights; “OHIO guarantee,” the university’s term for its new tuition model; faculty compensation; and OU’s culture.
About 60 people attended the debate.
Action’s platform emphasizes improving campus life at Ohio University.
“Improving student life is something that is vital for me,” Kandeh said.
To go about doing this, Kandeh would create a scholarship foundation, provided by student fundraising.
“I saw it as something very important that I wanted to put at the top, that I wanted people to see right off the bat (to show) that we really care,” she said. “Win or lose the student foundation is something that I want to see because we all know someone who has left the university for financial reasons.”
Kandeh described her ticket as “student-centered and “student-focused.”
One has made some changes to their ticket since campaigning first began March 17. One executives want to help alleviate the rape culture on campus by requiring consent education courses as part of the university’s learning communities, Ballinger said.
“This is not like the final frontier essential of beating rape culture, it’s at least taking a step to combat it,” Ballinger said.
It wasn’t initially a goal for One, because the ticket wanted additional feedback about the topic before declaring it something they wanted to help improve.
One would also like to add more voting positions in senate.
“Our platform is a legitimate platform with legitimate goals that we will accomplish,” Ballinger said. “There is no ‘we will try and attempt to do this,’ this is ‘we will do this and we will work on this.’ ”
Restart’s platform is brief and consists mostly of bullet points — goals based on urgency, Marzec said.
The platform has three “pillars,” the first of which is restarting senate as a body.
“In order for the second and third pillars to be addressed, the first must be,” she said. “We need a democratic system to make positive change.”
Marzec said students need to be able to make decisions together in order for the second pillar, students standing together to demand respect, to be accomplished.
The third pillar of the platform is based on social and environmental change.
“We don’t have has much power in the third pillar until we have democracy,” Marzec said.
@mariadevito13
md781510@ohiou.edu
