Our 2023 ASUU Elections Report Card is officially live!
As we have mentioned in our previous Instagram and Medium posts, UnsafeU’s report card should not be read as an endorsement. Our report card project started as a way to help students become better educated about campus safety issues and consider how the U’s shared government model plays a role in safety issues. We appreciate the long history of collaboration with ASUU candidates to craft these information guides and hope that we will be able to continue to do so long into the future.
This being said, the results of this year’s report card are worrisome in a few respects. First, the average scores across the board represent less awareness, specificity, and innovation around campus safety issues than any previous year of our report card. Second, in using public data this year, our team realized how little policy substance has made its way into the elections process. Finally, we have concerns about the gaps between knowledge and practice that ASUU student leaders will need to fill in the coming year.
Several of our scorers expressed their concerns with the initiatives and policies discussed by tickets this year and summarized their two largest concerns: key issue area gaps and deep systemic issues.
“I will say I am a bit underwhelmed by the responses this year. I feel like there is a real lack of specificity. I am especially concerned by the lack of specific or innovative policies regarding disabled student experiences, racial equity and justice on campus, and policing. I was also disappointed to see not much innovation or awareness about accountability and transparency considering the lack of these aspects in both ASUU and University policymaking spaces.”
“I think we need to be realistic about some of the goals these tickets may have set out because there are definitely a few things that might not be accomplished within their year in office. There are sometimes institutional barriers that prevent change from happening. Frustrating but something to consider. The energy levels are great this election cycle, and I **sincerely** hope that that energy/motivation is sustained. I often worry about whether student leaders will let their positions get to their heads → student leader power dynamics bad.”
This second point about institutional barriers has long been a concern of UnsafeU and has factored into why we bother to run this time-consuming process each year. We believe that the more students know about the system and can anticipate these barriers, the more likely students are to hold administrators accountable to transparency and appropriate distribution of resources. However, we also know that tackling barriers takes bold ideas and deep values commitment. We hope that candidates reading our analysis will take the suggestions to heart while in office and also in serving in other campus leadership roles.
Methodology
This year, we only used publicly available data. We pulled this data from four sources: social media accounts (both stories and permanent posts), the Chrony Town Hall, public media coverage of the campaigns, and any additional information found on campaign Linktrees.
We did a content analysis of this information and provided short summaries of key ideas, themes, and policy or initiative ideas. 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. You can view this internal voting form. As you can see, these responses are completely anonymized as an attempt to reduce personal bias in scoring as much as possible and to keep the focus on safety policies. 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 analyst as well as the writer of this post did not participate in the internal voting.
After scores were received, these 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 13 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 65. We also calculated an average sub score and overall score.
Overall Trends
Areas for Growth:
Policing
This area received the lowest score across the board, averaging 1.5/5 for all tickets. Two tickets (Karabegovic and O’Leary) have no public commentary about campus policing while the third ticket, VKW, has some general statements and policies about improving the relationship between students and the UUPD. The O’Leary ticket has had periodic mentions of wanting to increase the numbers of UUPD victim crisis advocates (which differ from the Victim Survivor Advocates provided by the Center for Student Wellness), we scored their platform about this under IPV and Sexual Assault. Similarly, we scored Karabegovic’s policy idea about the 311 help line under IPV and Sexual Assault.
In general, we hold substantial concerns about the lack of policies in this area due to the substantial damage that UUPD has done in the past, the large sum of money this policing organization receives from the university budget each year, and reports we’ve recently received about backsliding in the culture and policies of the department. Further, UUPD has quietly eliminated its community service division and actively discouraged the use of alternative resources like victim advocates. UUPD has still failed to receive CLEA certification, has passed a hasty and poorly written body-worn camera policy, and still lacks expertise in handling IPV, sexual assault, and hate crime cases. In the aftermath of the Michigan State University shooting, campus police departments will be clamoring to make a case for their relevance. We must have student leaders who understand the history of the UUPD and the threats on the horizon.
Family and Caregiving
This policy area also averaged less than a 2, coming it at 1.7/5 average across all three tickets. As we continue to emerge from the pandemic, parents of young children are some of the most vulnerable professionally and educationally at the moment. The VKW ticket included efforts to promote service resources for caregivers, they are essential to promote student learning. O’Leary and Karabegovic did not include any information about these platforms, publicly.
LGBTQIA+ Issues
Of the policy areas for growth, we believe that candidates should urgently prioritize organizing efforts across students, faculty, and staff. Recent developments in Florida to ban LGBTQIA+ content and restrict academic content on race and gender in the curriculum — even going as far as banning gender studies majors — is something that we must be worried about in Utah as well. Just this past week, public universities in Florida turned over lists of trans students to the state. There are currently few protections that would prevent this same thing from happening in Utah if the legislature were to demand it. The University of Utah has provided no indication that it would protect trans people on campus if such a demand came to their doorstep. Perhaps the only way to prevent this is through strong student organizing and action so that the university will be forced to protect the lives of trans students. Our student government leaders must be knowledgeable and equipped to advocate for LGTBQIA+ students.
Racial Justice and Equity
The University of Utah has had an escalating number of hate crime incidents against BIPOC, Muslim, and Jewish students in the past several years. While this was an area that all three students provided commentary and content on, very little of this content gave scorers an idea of how support for racial justice and equity would be prioritized. The VKW ticket mentioned efforts to build solidarity across multiple historically marginalized communities and the Karabegovic ticket focused on the firstgen immigrant experience on campus and making it more inviting. These stances are certainly a change in direction from ASUU’s historical approach, which has been extremely centered on whiteness and designed around educating white people. As a result, BIPOC and firstgen communities have been left to their own devices to manage their experience at the U.
The O’Leary ticket presented one of the more concrete initiatives, which allowed them to receive higher scores in the specificity domain of this topic. However, scorers ranked this lower for several reasons. First, there is no indication that a multicultural center is something that students have asked for or want. For the context of the U’s campus, many have expressed the feeling of safety and comfort that comes from more protected spaces on campus given the PWI (predominantly white institution) climate. Second, a multicultural center would require a building bond, which would almost certainly be paid for (at least in part) from student fees. Locating it in the center of campus also presents issues related to space. Housing this center in the union remodel (whenever this is approved) may be the best bet, but the likelihood of this project even getting an initial proposal constructed within the year is slim at best.
Areas of Strength:
Transportation
Some of the strongest policy positions came from the transportation plans of the tickets. The O’Leary platform proposed expansion of safe ride hours in conjunction with parking garage counters so people are aware of the number of available spots in a garage. Similarly, the Karabegovic ticket discussed how they would like to expand the hours of safe ride. The VKW ticket had the most detailed plans which included accommodating student needs for parking, making safe ride student-led and controlled by extending their hours, tackling decongestion in parking lots, reducing predatory ticketing from Commuter Services, and efforts to promote SPIN scooters use on campus as a sustainable form of micro transit
IPV/Sexual Assault
IPV and sexual assaults are pervasive issues on our campus. While the campus community has built resources to try to prevent these issues (such as the McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention) and also support survivors (such as the Center for Student Wellness), there are is still much work to be done — especially in Greek Life. Sigma Kappa (2020), Beta Theta Pi (2021), and Sigma Chi (2021) have all had sexual assaults on their property within the past three years. Additionally, in the cases of Zhifan Dong and Lauren McCluskey, we learned that HRE staff were unaware of the appropriate mechanisms for supporting survivors.
The Karabegovic ticket seeks to move beyond a carceral system of support for IPV and sexual support survivors by developing a three-digit help line that would connect students with a variety of resources to meet their needs. The O’Leary ticket sees victim crisis counselors at UUPD as a critical resource to support survivors and would put pressure on UUPD and the administration to invest in these resources. Finally, the VKW ticket would focus on a Victims Bill of Rights for those who experience IPV and sexual assault as well as expanding the hiring of trainers to support victims and/or build the capacity of staff members to respond more effectively to these issues.
Accountability and Transparency
UnsafeU’s core values revolve around accountability and transparency, as we feel it is impossible to have any sense of campus safety absent these foundational aspects. We found the Karabegovic ticket’s three-digit help line as an innovation that could help with transparency by better tracking student needs and the departments responsible for ensuring the safety of students as well as a student organization forum where all students organizations can bring up student concerns. They would pair this with monthly surveys to the student body asking for feedback. The O’Leary ticket devotes substantial campaign time to demonstrating how they would create more friendly environments for students to voice their opinion, which would allow issues to come forward more frequently and therefore be addressed earlier. Finally, VKW would work to create more forms and mechanisms for reporting issues and breaches in departments outside of just UUPD. VKW and O’Leary both emphasized wanting to amplify student voices. VKW specifically advocated for ensuring a safe campus and community exists for first-generation students.
Issue by Issue Analysis
