Students at Colorado State University will elect new senators in the Associated Students of CSU election that runs April 7-9. This year’s candidate pool for representatives from the College of Liberal Arts is abnormally large, with a whopping 15 students running for the five available seats.
“There were zero senators running in last year’s election altogether across the board,” ASCSU Elections Manager Garett Lopez said.
The senate comprises representatives from each college and Cultural Resource Center, with the number of seats determined by the student population in each respective college. Senators are responsible for drafting legislation and influencing the allocation of ASCSU funds — decisions that directly impact the student body.
“People of all backgrounds and identities have representation of some kind within the senate,” said Hayden Taylor, current speaker of the senate and College of Liberal Arts senate candidate. “I think one of the biggest things that senate does is we have about $100,000 that we can allocate to anything that we want, and so we’ve seen funding of lots of amazing projects on campus.”
Typically, if there are not enough candidates running for senate, representatives for each college are appointed by their college’s leadership council. These councils consist of ASCSU senate representatives and other students who choose to participate.
Lopez said this pattern of appointing senators contributes to students’ apathy toward student government, with last year’s election garnering votes from only 11% of the student population.
“The appointment process is only meant to fill vacancies, except for in the last several years, there have been very, very few or no senators at all running for election,” Lopez said. “I think this is really something that contributes to low voter turnout.”
Vice Chair of the Elections Committee Lauren Davis said students are most concerned with affordability and protecting diversity, equity and inclusion policies from potential damaging federal initiatives.
“Keeping tuition rates low and making sure that CSU and Fort Collins itself is affordable is incredibly important because you can’t have student retention if a student can’t afford to live at or pay for CSU,” Davis said. “The other thing that I’ve heard that’s really big right now is (the) response to the federal administration and a lot of the impacts that DEI has on the community.”
The 15 candidates running for College of Liberal Arts seats are: Ava Fricke, Annelise Dusterberg, Ashley Watts, Lucy Estergard, Marisol Villa, Kristin Hempelman, Ian Catcher, Gavin Burchett, Charva Jamison, Andrea Flores Pereida, Cecily Mash, Priscilla Pauda Perez, Belle Hybertson, Aaliyah Hasan Rizvi and Taylor.
The Collegian reached out to all Liberal Arts senate candidates and gathered information from available online campaigns, but several candidates did not respond or did not have online campaigns that could be found.
Dusterberg, a candidate majoring in political science and zoology, said that as senator, she plans to address affordability, accessibility and sustainability.
“I hold a firm stance against the increase of tuition fees (and) will advocate for affordable education for all students,” Dusterberg said in a statement. “I also strongly believe in transparent budgeting, ensuring that all students know that their money is going back toward them and their education.”
Several other candidates also mentioned financial transparency in their campaign, including Watts, Catcher and Taylor.
“The investments and private equity owned by CSU is not currently public,” Catcher’s campaign website reads. “This along with their plans to fight back against DEIA, how much of our tuition is going to where and how the school intends to deal with the current presidential administration need to be made public. Without transparency, we cannot trust the CSU administration, and we all deserve to have trust in them.”
Beyond financial transparency, Catcher also aims to reform how technology fees are allocated within the College of Liberal Arts, advocate for larger class sizes and lobby the state government on key issues.
Watts, a political science major, plans to use lobbying to create state change as well.
“I want to continue to support the great lobbying work ASCSU does at the state Capitol,” Watts said in a statement. “I want to support ASCSU’s missions of keeping textbook costs and tuition low, as well as introducing new topics we can lobby on.”
Watts’ campaign also advocates for financial transparency, more robust academic resources and more tools geared toward career development.
Jamison, a music, theatre and dance major, is focused on uniting the student body above all else.
“When I am in main campus classes, it is clear just how disconnected our students are from others within their same college despite evident interest in wanting to find commonalities,” Jamison said in a statement. “I believe this incredible opportunity to run for senator in the College of Liberal Arts is key to bringing all voices to the table when having discussions concerning our students.”
Students can vote for senators within their college in the upcoming election through RAMWeb. Like last year, the system will utilize a ranked choice voting method.
“You’ll look through the entire list, and you’ll say, ‘Who do I like the least?’ and you click on that name, and the amount of people who vote for that person gets eliminated until all of the seats are filled,” Davis said. “Instead of it being top-down, it’s a bottom-up type of system.”
Voting in ASCSU senate elections gives students a direct say in their college experience, Lopez said.
“It’s just important for students to know that they can be involved and they can be represented by ASCSU and their college councils,” Lopez said. “There’s some really, really big changes that can be made through this avenue. There’s a lot of students very, very vocal right now about issues on campus. This is a direct avenue to get to speak to the some of the people that can kind of help those issues.”
Reach Chloe Waskey at news@collegian.com or on social media @CSUCollegian.
