Student trustee candidate Morgan Campbell said if elected, she’ll hit the ground running and start pushing for changes she thinks the student body needs to see immediately.
“To get things done you need to establish really strong relationships with certain Board members. As the undergraduate student trustee, you’re only one vote out of 44 members,” she said. “If you want to be able to vote in change, you need to get other people on your side. You’ll need to learn where they’re coming from, why they believe what they believe and see if there’s a middle road between the two interests.”
Campbell, ArtSci ’11, said after focusing mainly on academics during her first year at Queen’s, she became heavily involved in a number of extracurricular activities this year. Currently serving as the ASUS 2011 Vice-President, a member of the Queen’s Project on International Development and a bartender at Clark Hall Pub, Campbell said she decided to run for undergraduate student trustee last semester after talking to current undergraduate student trustee Michael Ceci.
“I had been more interested in getting further involved in ASUS, but when I kept thinking about it, we talked more about some issues that are brought up by the Board of Trustees, what’s under their jurisdiction versus what’s under ASUS, and I realized that was a better fit for me.”
Acting as a liaison and communications officer between
the administration, the Board of Trustees and the student body, Campbell said she’ll work to incorporate the interests of all the different faculties when reporting back to the Board of Trustees.
If elected, Campbell said she’s looking to increase awareness of sustainability at Queen’s, including presenting to the Board of Trustees the idea of a revolving fund.
“It basically talks about upfronting the initial capital costs to implement certain environmental retrofits that by the end of the year would have paid for themselves, which will result in more money being saved by the school,” she said.
When it comes to racism and diversity, Campbell said she wants to see more involvement from the Queen’s administration and Board of Trustees on the issues.
“As of now the administration stepped back and said ‘This is student issue. We don’t really want to get involved,’” she said. “We were a bit concerned about that as far as we felt the administration and the Board could be making a stronger stance and moving forward as a unified body.”
Campbell said engaging the University’s students in a retrospective glance at how they operate as a community would be beneficial. “I know there are a lot of professors and staff at Queen’s who would want to volunteer their time in this regard, but there isn’t a lot of support at this point to do that for them.”
Regarding Homecoming and the Aberdeen Street party, Morgan said she’ll advocate for the reinstating of fall Homecoming, but with an emphasis on making student-alumni connections rather than an illegal street party.
“To take it away and put it in May takes a lot of the student empowerment out of it and the student ownership of that tradition. We should be having what MAP is talking about, the student-town assemblies to generate more ideas about other events we could be implementing at that time.”
To read Morgan Campbell’s platform, go to votecampbell.ca
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