Student trustee begins new IU responsibilities

Second-year law student Abbey Stemler has spent a majority of her summer reading the University’s budgets and manuals for policies and procedures the board of trustees has to follow.

Stemler was announced as the new student trustee July 1 and has since been meeting with University officials and voting on student tuition.

“Though you’re a student, you’re not really the student trustee. You’re a trustee,” Stemler said. “Same responsibilities as all the other members. That really makes me want to educate myself. I’m not going to be a passive player in the process.”

Deciding to apply

Stemler first thought about applying for the position when she was cofounding a student organization during her undergraduate years in the Liberal Arts and Management Program. She and a few other students were asked to present their organization, the Virtue Project, to the board of trustees.

“I thought it was really nice that the University respects students enough to give them a voice on the board,” Stemler said. “To have a student on the board who has full rights and responsibilities is huge.”

On the way home from the presentation, professor James Madison, the director of LAMP, told Stemler and her fellow students that if they ever wanted to run for the position, he would support them. The idea was born.

“She has a very good understanding of the functions of a University,” Madison said. “She really has a commitment to IU. She loves IU. She’s cream and crimson all the way through.”

When applying, Stemler had to meet in front of a student-chaired committee filled with students from the different campuses as well as A.D. King, the previous student trustee. The committee sent 10 names to the governor’s office, where she interviewed with them as well. Once it was narrowed down to three or four names, Gov. Mitch Daniels chose Stemler.

“It has been a long time in the making,” Stemler said. “I applied in January, went through a series of interviews, wrote a lot of essays, got a lot of letters of recommendations and studied up on the University, and here I am.”

Getting there

As an undergraduate, Stemler dedicated most of her time to the Virtue Project, an original social entrepreneurship program. The program is based off a mock investment portfolio in which members choose stocks and then ask for pledges from donors to invest in the portfolio. The donor will then give the project an actual donation based on the marketplace value and profit.

Last year, the project had about $400,000 in the portfolio and the students donated about $10,000 to the Timmy Foundation.

“It took a great deal of work and organization because it’s a very complicated project,” Madison said. “It meant recruiting students from LAMP and finding donors. There were so many different tasks she learned that you can’t learn in a classroom. They spent hundreds of hundreds of hours on it.”

Stemler also spent her time coordinating the Hutton Honors College mentor program, and she was president of LAMP’s student advisory board.

She came to IU as a first-generation college student and was unsure of her major. Through the Individualized Major Program, she received her degree in anthropology of mental health and illness before deciding to go to law school.

“It was a very last-minute decision to go to law school,” Stemler said. “Taking the LSAT in a rush was not a fun process. For law school, it was always IU. I had a strong network of people and I knew I was applying for the student trustee position.”

New responsibility

Pulling out her iPhone, Stemler has a calendar that already resembles that of a trustee.

Last week she met with 11 people, including IU spokesman Larry MacIntyre, Provost Karen Hanson and Athletics Director Fred Glass.

“They’ve been pretty intense with getting me oriented,” Stemler said. “I’ve met with the president, the board members and any other person I thought would help me get a grasp on this massive institution.”

Though Stemler met many of the board members when setting tuition last month, she has yet to meet the entire board and plans to do so at the Aug. 14 meeting.
“When we set tuition, that was my first move or piece of business as the student trustee,” Stemler said. “That was pretty difficult to wrap my head around the first few weeks.”

The next two years

Stemler was interning at Bose McKinney and Evans, an Indianapolis law firm, when she found out the news.

“I was writing a memo – it was due at 11 – and I got a call at 10:55, and I was like, ‘Are you serious?’” Stemler said. “So then I had to call my parents, but the funny thing was, I couldn’t tell anybody except my parents while they told the other candidates. I had to keep it quiet for five days, and it was awful.”

Though Stemler is already on the academic affairs and facilities committees, she said she doesn’t yet know what types of policies she wants to pursue during her two-year term.

“I think there were ideas I had about things, but getting more into it,” Stemler said, “I’m seeing that the board is at the 50,000-feet level, and any nit-picky policy things, that’s not the board’s responsibility. I’m sure in the next couple months I’ll find some area where the board can make a difference.”

Stemler said if she hadn’t gotten the position, she’d probably be spending a lot more time studying for the GMET, a graduate school test for business. Though she has a lot to catch up on, she said she’s confident in her abilities.

“I think Abbey would say she doesn’t know everything, but no trustee knows everything they need to know when they first start,” Madison said. “She has an experience of being a student and a perspective that the other eight members don’t have.”