The four candidates vying to become VP academic and university affairs (VPAUA) met last night to debate issues such as student safety, tuition consultation and the AMS’s role in publicly challenging UBC.
The candidates are Anushreya Arora, a newcomer to student government at UBC; Anisha Sanhu, the incumbent student senator for the faculty of land and food systems; Kamil Kanji, an AMS councillor for arts who sits on both the advocacy and governance committees; and Dana Turdy, the AMS strategy and governance lead.
Candidates agreed that the AMS should build on its campus safety audit that it initiated after two student pedestrians were killed in a single vehicle collision along Northwest Marine Drive last September.
Turdy said that as VPAUA, she would mandate “regular publicly available accessibility and safety audits on campus to make sure that every single student feels safe.”
“The onus should not be on students to have to do this work,” Turdy added, imploring UBC to do more on student safety.
Kanji followed that up by pointing out that 26 per cent of buildings on campus are inaccessible and that “consultations with groups on campus” was key to building these accessible spaces.
Sandhu said she believed the key to getting students engaged in work like the safety audit was “being open and honest” about what the AMS has done successfully and what hasn’t been achieved since the previous audit.
When asked about making sure UBC students are heard during the annual tuition consultation, Kanji said he supported the recommendation of a multi-year tuition framework from the Student Affordability Task Force, but that he still opposed all tuition increases.
Arora suggested that giveaways be used to increase student engagement with the tuition consultation as VPAUA.
Turdy said that tuition increases after overwhelming negative feedback from students shows that the Board of Governors “[does] not care about student input.”
Sandhu meanwhile suggested that the AMS use not just the feedback but also present the impact of tuition increases on students through an "artistic expression" to the BoG and UBC administration so they view students as people, not dollar signs.
When asked what role the AMS should take in challenging UBC, Turdy brought up the press conference held by the AMS on in-person exams last term.
“I think we need to be doing more of that as a student union,” she said.
Both Kanji and Turdy also brought up the idea of engaging with other student groups on campus with Kanji saying the AMS should be “making sure we're engaging more with our constituencies to make sure that [our advocacy] is there.”
Turdy suggested giving groups such as Climate Justice UBC, SASC and the Social Justice Centre non-voting seats on the AMS advocacy committee.
“We've seen that advocating more directly to the university and getting the entire student body as the population on board with the message that we're putting forward works” said Kanji.
Voting opens March 7.
Follow us at @UbysseyNews on Twitter and follow our election coverage starting February 28. This article is part of our 2022 AMS elections coverage.
This piece was updated to clarify Sandhu's proposal on opposing tuition increases.
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