ONE University addresses strong, but perhaps too lofty propositions

The ONE University ticket “is based on the idea that students of every background should have the opportunity to represent the student body in its government.”

The four candidates do indeed come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences: Ben Blair is a second-year law student running for president, juniors Saad Saghir and Samantha Israel are running for vice president and vice president for congress, respectively and sophomore Andrew Dolinsky is the ticket’s candidate for treasurer.

ONE University’s platform focuses on five areas of interest: students’ rights, technology and facilities, sustainability, community service and transparency and accountability. Per the first point, they want to distribute literature on rights of students and add a formal Bill of Rights to the IUSA Constitution.  

This is probably their weakest point, as information on student rights is already readily available.

They have a wealth of strong ideas, however, in the area of technology and facilities. We are most excited about their goals to allow the use of meal points at the Indiana Memorial Union, putting all course evaluations online and available for review by students, and making the online course schedule more useful by linking to course descriptions, faculty pages and grade distributions.

As spring arrives, their idea of a bike share program seems like a great one, and we’re also happy that they’ve made expanding healthy eating options on campus a priority.  

In the area of community service, ONE University wants IUSA to start taking an active part in the incredible service atmosphere on campus. They would like to start hosting charity events of their own as well as expanding service learning opportunities for every
major.

While their plan of expanding college credit options for service learning is a great one, it seems odd that they think “no student should have to work without pay or credit.”

Call me crazy, but isn’t that kind of the definition of volunteering?

Overall, ONE University seems like a well-thought out ticket with many beneficial ideas for our campus community. As is the case with every platform ever, one has to wonder how many of these things they could actually accomplish, but they definitely seem to be on the right track.