Mohkam Singh Malik (ਮੋਹਕਮ) is a second-year student running for student senator-at-large on a platform centring support for commuter students, upgrading equipment students are provided and reducing the cost of books.
Malik wants courses to better accommodate commuter students. He said all classes should be recorded to ensure commuter students don’t miss anything if they are unable to attend class if something goes wrong during the commute.
Malik also believes UBC should continue to open more spaces and spots on campus for students to learn. “Because that, in my opinion, is what makes our university so great, is that we provide these opportunities to people,” he said.
He wants to push for students to no longer pay for lab equipment. Malik also said a priority is to reduce book costs — according to him, some professors are mindful of textbook costs, but other classes include mandatory textbooks which can be expensive. Malik said open education resources are a way to approach learning, especially in courses where the materials don’t change.
“The university could just as easily get licences for those materials rather than students having to pay for it out of pocket.”
When talking about the current Senate’s performance, Malik said he supported the Student Senate Caucus’s goal to move add/drop deadlines for courses till the last day of classes. However, Malik also said “chaos” in the Caucus, and lack of updates to the Student Caucus website are troubling.
“They changed co-chairs a couple of times, and there was lots of internal squabbles,” said Malik. “The fact that things are moving slowly now because [the student senators] are bickering, I think is a big issue.”
“[The Caucus] clearly aren’t doing what [it] should be doing, and [they] are obscuring it in darkness.”
To Malik, Caucus has prioritized “lofty ideas” instead of “reasonable” change. Malik referenced the motion to cut ties with Israeli universities, which to him “spectacularly failed.”
Malik said it was an “ideological goal that we knew wasn’t going to pass.” Instead, Malik believes the momentum for change could have been used for incremental change — like the lack of courses focusing on non-Western perspectives, or having more courses on religions and South Asian and Middle Eastern history.
However, Malik did not name specific ideas for new courses, as there are already courses on different religions and Asian and Middle Eastern history.
Malik did commend individual senators for posting updates of their work on social media. He said, if elected, he would provide updates on either Caucus website or his personal social media.
When asked about his qualifications, he said he had worked on all three levels of government. Emphasizing his ability to work out compromises, which to him lacks in the current Caucus.
“I’ve sat in meetings like this with people who are twice, sometimes three times my age and had to work out compromises,” said Malik. However, he did not detail exactly what his position in government was.
Malik said he’d like to sit on either the Curriculum Committee to push for more diverse courses, or the Teaching and Learning Committee to augment courses to better support commuter students.
This article is part of our 2025 AMS Elections coverage. Follow us at @UbysseyNews on X (formerly Twitter) and follow our election coverage starting March 3.
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