Note to readers: The VanderToolen campaign has made the following request: “If you decide to publish our answers in any format, we ask that you state that we responded to [redacted name] (a student’s) inquiries and concerns.” The responses submitted to [redacted name] were input into our Google Form survey originally provided to the VanderToolen campaign to streamline communication and allow for easy/standardized distribution of responses.
Edited 6:40 MST: A previous slide posted under the mental health issue erroneously repeated a factual inaccuracy. The VanderToolen ticket implied that the advisors were graduate TAs and not full time professional staff. This is incorrect. The incorrect slide has been deleted from this post. We apologize for not fact checking this point prior to publication.
UnsafeU has chosen to not provide an endorsement for the sole ASUU Presidential Ticket, the VanderToolen Ticket, this year. They have earned a score of 57% and averaged 2.1/5 for their responses. Previous endorsements made by UnsafeU have been higher than 70% and averaged at least 3.5/5 across responses. In the sections below, we provide an overview of their strengths and areas of growth, issue by issue breakdowns, and a comment on communication with VanderToolen campaign staff.
Methodology
The survey was sent to the VanderToolen ticket on February 10th. Responses were requested back by February 13th at 11:59pm MST. The ticket requested an extension until Wednesday, February 16th at 11:59pm. This was granted, but UnsafeU requested that the first part of responses be submitted by Tuesday, February 15th at 11:59pm so that our team would be able to begin analysis. The first set of answers (captured in Part 1 and Part 2) were submitted via email on Thursday morning. The second set of answers (Part 3) were submitted on Friday morning. Our student representative took the document versions of the answers submitted and input them to the Google Form. Copies of all three Google Forms were sent to the VanderToolen campaign email for their records.
Once the answers were input, UnsafeU generated an internal voting link via a separate Google Form that asked students to rate the ticket on the awareness, innovation, and specificity regarding of issue area. Normally these responses are anonymized, however, given that there are no other tickets running this year it was not possible to create a double-blind scoring process. The ratings were done on a scale of 1–5 (Least to Most). The survey was sent to student members of UnsafeU as well as invited students who are external to the organization. The analysts and writers of this post, as well as the student representative provided to the VanderToolen campaign, did not participate in the internal voting.
After all scores were received, the scores were averaged across all respondents to calculate an overall average out of five for each issue area. To calculate the total average out of five for the ticket, each averaged score for all 14 issue areas was averaged. Finally, the percentage score was calculated by taking the raw points (averages out of five for each issue area) and dividing by 70.
Finally, in writing the analysis for this piece, we discovered that two sections were accidentally skipped when documents were compiled. The campaign did not notify us of this — we found it in our own quality checks. These responses can be read in Part 4. This may render some of the scoring in the policing and lighting categories to be inaccurate and may have led to a small decrease (.1-.2) in the overall average for the ticket. Please keep this in mind as you read responses.
Areas of Strength
- This ticket understands that the ASUU presidency has limited authority, agency, and influence throughout the university. This is helpful because understanding the boundaries and limitations of the office allows the administration to focus on issues that are more within their spheres of influence.
- The ticket provided one of the clearest answers regarding awareness of barriers for disabled students that we have seen in several years. Given the urgency of disability accommodations related to COVID-19 (and recognizing that COVID-19 is a mass disabling event), we find this to be a step in the right direction for policy action.
- We appreciate the desire to coordinate on IPV and SA across campus and involving all campus partners working on these issues.
- This will be one of the first (if not the first) Indigenous students to hold a position in the presidency of ASUU. This may help cultivate stronger relationships between ASUU and the Inter-Tribal Student Association (ITSA) as well other Indigenous groups across campus.
- We find the desire to more fully include groups focused on identity as well as racial equity and justice to be a positive step.
- This ticket seems aware of how dire the need for care giving support is for many students and seems committed to financial support.
- We are excited to see an innovative approach to environmental justice by linking the work of the Diversity Board and the Sustainability Board.
- The VanderToolen ticket seems to have a good start to identifying issues regarding material support for mental health and identifying the action steps needed to provide better access and care through these resources.
Areas of Growth
- Although it is important for candidates to have a realistic understanding of their roles, they are shooting too low to have any hope to move past the status quo. The University of Utah has whittled away student power over time. The only way that we have our voices heard on bigger issues is to continually make demands on the institution and take up space. Many of the answers provided seemed to reflect a desire to be friends with administration, which cause us to pause and consider how and when these candidates will show up and hold administrators accountable when needed.
- The answers provided by the campaign were the last batch that we received and seemed delayed, rushed, and uninformed. They did not identify any measurable benchmarks or goals around IPV and SA, did not articulate any particular formats of trainings offered that they were aware of or have participated in, and did not identify much of an actionable plan for professionally developing on these issues. Given that IPV and SA are among the biggest campus safety concerns (as well as racism and specifically anti-Black racism), this is concerning to us that there was not more care and attention paid to these issues. We look forward to seeing much more specificity, growth, and commitment on these issues.
- They continually misspelled Lauren McCluskey’s name. We want to note this so that the administration will take care to spell her name and entities named after her correctly moving forward.
- We had several communication issues with the campaign staff (detailed below). We look forward to hearing more specific discussions of initiatives in these responses in the future.
- Many of the initiatives lack specificity. While leaving room for student input and ideas is important, we also know that the time in office that students have is short. With no clear end goal for initiatives, the likelihood of policy passage or programming being implemented is low.
- There is no recognition of graduate students or international students in any of these answers. These two student populations comprise a significant percentage of the student population and often lack resources specifically targeted to their needs.
- While we support the idea of an internal ASUU Campus Safety Board, the VanderToolen ticket does not acknowledge that any changes to the composition of the Executive Cabinet (ECab), which would be necessary to hire and pay a director to oversee the board at the same level as other ECab Directors, requires a change to Redbook. This means that they would need to pass Senate, Assembly, and COSA bills as well as have the Board of Trustees vote on these changes. While the Board of Trustees does meet monthly (with some exceptions), legislation needing BoT approval from ASUU is traditionally seen once per year, usually between April and August. With no legislative efforts in motion right now, it is unlikely that the Campus Safety Board would be operational before the 2023–2024 school year.
- In the responses from the ticket, there was some muddiness with caregiving support. We would like to respond and clarify this to help the student body be more informed. Although ASUU has an ongoing (and Redbook mandated) financial relationship with child care services across campus, the core issue that the on-campus childcare centers are facing right now are critical staffing shortages. While funding can remediate some of this, it cannot be solved solely with infusion of funds. Additionally, there was some implication that the current ASUU administration has cut financial support for child care. In our fact checking, we have learned that this is not correct. The Wojciechowski administration has earmarked $41,000 in funds for the childcare center (this is over the amount required by Redbook). This funding is traditionally deposited at the end of each fiscal year. However, the Wojciechowski administration has chosen to allocate funding as needed through presidential discretionary spending and e-journal transfers to allow the childcare facility to access these funds more efficiently. It is possible that the VanderToolen ticket could be discussing the elimination of the School Life Fund (which provided subsidies to student caretakers for child care purposes). This fund, which was directed by the SLI Director and Associate Director of Finance for SLI to be dissolved, was reconstituted this year as the ASUU scholarship fund. The same amount of money was awarded overall. Students with caretaking responsibilities were prioritized in the award of these funds and the overall amount per student increased to $1,000 per student. Taylor VanderToolen and Benvin Lozada sit on the ASUU Scholarship Board as the ASUU Director of Finance and ASUU Assembly Treasurer, respectively.
- The VanderToolen ticket seems unaware that University of Utah student sit on the USHE Commission on Safety and Equity and are meant to be an independent source of oversight on issues of equity and safety in the state. Given repeated institutional failures a the University of Utah, it is important that student leadership support and enhance the work of the commission to ensure that there is a reliable and effective external agency who can investigate policy and procedural concerns about campus safety and equity issues.
- We find the campaign response that “we will not support increased policing if better options exist for creating a safer campus” to be a bit dodgy. We would like to see a more abolitionist mindset that will commit to fighting against expanding police presence. Additionally, the ticket turns the question about what they will do to protect vulnerable groups on the student population itself. Students are, frankly, tired. We need to know that those who are in the rooms we are not invited to will unequivocally fight to limit the expansion of policing on campus. This ticket does not promise that.
Issue by Issue Analysis
A Note on Communication with the VanderToolen Campaign Staff
This report is meant to analyze presidential candidate ticket responses to our ASUU candidate survey and provide UnsafeU’s perspective on these responses. However, we find it important to highlight our communication experiences with the VanderToolen ticket before, during, and after receiving their responses.
Following our initial invitation for the VanderToolen ticket to submit their responses to our survey via Google Form, the campaign manager requested that UnsafeU provide them with the name of a student representative who they would communicate with. UnsafeU provided the name of a student representative, who was the primary contact for the VanderToolen ticket, but made it clear that this student would be communicating with them through UnsafeU’s channels to protect the privacy of the student. Despite this and the request to submit responses via the provided Google Form, the VanderToolen ticket proceeded to email UnsafeU’s student representative via their university email to submit their responses. The VanderToolen ticket made the following request: “If you decide to publish our answers in any format, we ask that you state that we responded to [redacted name] (a student’s) inquiries and concerns.” The responses submitted to [redacted name] were input into our Google Form survey originally provided to the VanderToolen campaign to streamline communication and allow for easy/standardized distribution of responses.
The student representative responded to the VanderToolen ticket via UnsafeU channels, requesting that they not email their university email as student members of UnsafeU have concerns of harassment and targeting by university administration. In response, the VanderToolen ticket requested they not be contacted by UnsafeU: “We have committed to working with RSOs, which UnsafeU is not. Nevertheless, if any student member of UnsafeU would like to contact the ticket in their capacity as a student, not a member of UnsafeU, we would be delighted to hear from them. We are working to create a safer campus, and we want to hear from students on how we should do that.”
This interaction with the VanderToolen campaign staff generated some concern and did not make the student communicating with the ticket feel safe. Often, students turn to ASUU for a safe and protective environment to speak about a variety of student concerns, such as DV/IPV or issues with the university administration, where they will be supported and not outed. Given that these interactions were with the campaign staff and not members of the ticket directly, we hope that this was a fluke that will be swiftly addressed moving forward.
We include this in our evaluation today because survivors and others in sensitive positions who may consider coming forward to this ASUU leadership with similar safety concerns may experience similar risks. We strongly urge the VanderToolen ticket, if they take office, to revisit this communication with their campaign staff and to understand that students in vulnerable positions need to have their communication and safety concerns respected.
