Photo Provided by Emily Chen

Emily Chen, current Student Union (SU) President, sat down for an interview with Avi Holzman, StudLife’s Managing News Editor, following last Friday’s release of the SU Executive Board’s term-goals document. The discussion ranged from SU’s relationship to student groups to internal changes, advocacy, and goals for the upcoming year. The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. 

Student Life: 

What has been taking place over the summer in regards to SU? What has been going on within SU since the start of the school year?

Emily Chen: 

Our financial team worked hard on regrouping and checking the financial guidelines to make sure all of them made sense. [Mishka Narasimhan, Vice President of Finance,] has worked really hard with the business staff to make student-group spending a little easier and more transparent. They completely updated the Student Union financial-bearings Trello board. 

Our website was hacked and went down last year. We unfortunately lost everything on it. I have started to meet with administrators and [have started] re-forming those connections because we definitely have lost a lot of relationships with [the] administration. 

SL:

A decent amount of the term-goals document is spent talking about the financial restructure that was taking place. What was going on behind the scenes? Do you think there’s going to be another restructure? 

Chen: 

The financial restructure started when I was in Treasury, which was my freshman and sophomore year (2020-21). When I first came into SU as a freshman, we transitioned from five categories back to three categories in terms of the categories [that] student groups could fall into. I think the five-category structure makes sense for a past Exec and financial leadership, and it helped student groups gradually get access to more funding. However, some people realized that that was also stopping some groups from reaching their potential — because you can only upgrade one category a semester. So we’ve transitioned back to that three-category structure, which is [what] we have now. Category One gets access to appeals and flat funding, Category Two gets access to flat funding, and Category Three just gets access to all the SU resources. 

We got rid of caps based on travel items, like hotels, and instead placed a $850-a-year cap per traveling member of a student group, which allows for more flexibility. 

Another huge back-end change was phasing out the old SU finance website and transitioning to Workday. 

SL: 

Another one of the things that is emphasized in the term goals is identifying disproportionately underfunded cultural and affinity groups. What is the process SU is using to identify these groups, and beyond identifying them, how does SU plan on working with these groups? 

Chen: 

Every group is categorized once they gain SU recognition. There are political groups, special-interest groups, [and] sports groups, and there are specific cultural diversity and inclusion groups, which we are primarily emphasizing funding for for this year. Previously, every student group received funding for one non-mission social. Now, if you identify as a cultural diversity or affinity group, your social event can be potentially categorized as a mission event because for these groups, a huge part of their mission is to build that sense of social belonging for students on campus. By making that policy more lenient for those groups, we’re hoping they will be able to do larger group on-campus programming [more frequently] to bring together the community that they represent. Mishka is going back and searching up which groups are not as active and reaching out to them. A lot of the time, groups don’t appeal because they don’t know how or they have this preconceived notion that because they’re a cultural group, they won’t get money. 

SL: 

You talked a little bit about programming spaces. Are there current spaces that you think are not being used properly or not being used to the best of their abilities?

Chen: 

Something I am slightly irked by is [that], because of how decentralized this university is, our current space-usage agreement with Student Affairs gives student groups access to Graham Chapel, Homes Lounge, all the rooms in the DUC, and the dance-rehearsal spaces — but Knight Hall facilities all belong to Olin, so we don’t have agreements with them. Even if you want to use that space as a student, it is the same price as if you were an outside vendor. Same with the Clark-Fox Forum, which is also thousands of dollars for student groups to use. Since the Brown School is separate from Student Affairs, that space belongs to them. In my opinion, it is ridiculous that, as WashU students, we don’t get lower prices to use certain WashU spaces because of the way the University is set up. I am interested in looking at the possibility of negotiating space-usage agreements with Olin and Brown so that it’s cheaper for our student groups to use those spaces — or to potentially put together a list of off-campus venues that they can use. 

SL:

In the document, you discuss the first-generation, low-income (FGLI) student experience. What steps has SU taken to improve that particular student experience? What are the measurable goals? 

Chen: 

The plan is to use more data-driven advocacy and work with the Taylor Family Center directly to learn about their needs. An active project that we are currently working on is providing sustainable laundry sheets. The ultimate goal after they move past the pilot that is running right now is to give FGLI students free access to those sheets. Additionally, [Executive Vice President] Hussein [Amuri] is reaching out to financial aid to see if the work-study amount can be increased.

SL:

Since there is a new group of first-years on campus, how else do you plan on educating them about the role and functions of SU, besides the current website and term-goals document?

Chen: 

We definitely want to do some town halls throughout the semester to try to get more first-years interested. We also have a really great partnership with the undergraduate representatives [to] the Board of Trustees — Johnathan [Smith] and Guinter [Dame Vogg] — who Hussein and I have met with, and their goal is also to get more student engagement. Senate is planning on doing more tabling in the Danforth University Center. I think this freshman class especially is very active in terms of applications and getting involved, so we have a competitive applicant pool to select from. 

SL:  

How have the goals for SU changed from last year to this year?

Chen: 

Overall, we’re trying to focus on more tangible projects and change. We can try to change an entire university-wide policy, but we are only here for a year in our Exec roles, and Senators and Treasurers could be involved in SU for an even shorter period of time. We are trying to take advantage of smaller projects to work towards the bigger picture. 

In addition to that, we are trying to unify SU as a whole internally. There is a kind of competition and conflict between Senate and Treasury that is always going to be there as a fun little thing, but we can’t let that conflict turn into actual conflict. We have to work together and stick together. I think that’s something our entire Exec board is trying to work on — everybody should feel like they’re part of one student organization, and that’s something that I want to emphasize this year. 

SL: 

How are you planning on bringing student feedback to administrators? 

Chen: 

The administrators need data to justify the actions that they’re making. Something that we’re hoping to get started [on] is working with Tim Bono — because he is both an administrator and a professor with experience in creating surveys to gather data. 

SL: 

In the term-goals document, it says you want to improve coordination between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. How was communication between the different parts of SU lacking in the past, and how are you looking to improve that communication?

Chen: 

An example of this is Senate often works internally on different advocacy projects. We didn’t have the best communication last year, so a Senate project on the last Exec meeting was sprung on us, and nobody on Exec was prepared for that. We had a ton of questions, but it was also a lot of pressure because it was the last Exec meeting of the year. This year, I’ve requested to be copied on all the emails that go to administrators, and where [they] are going to be emailing administrators, [they should] bring it to Exec so [that] we can discuss it first. That way, we know where the Exec Board lies and also how that project can receive support from us. For me, personally, that means going to all the Treasury and Senate meetings; I bounce between both to make sure I capture important things on either end to make sure we’re all in the loop. We don’t want anybody to be surprised, and [we] want to make sure information is always flowing.

SL: 

Has SU made a statement about WashU’s decision to halt all gender-affirming care for minors? In general, how is SU planning on responding to larger social issues over the course of the year?

Chen: 

That topic has, surprisingly, not come up in Exec yet. I will definitely bring that up in our next meeting. 

In terms of large social things, for Exec to stay unified, every board member has to approve the message. For example, with the affirmative-action statement, all of us edited that together. The legislative branch leadership is allowed to sign on, but they’re not required to. 

SL:

In the term-goals document, you express a desire to interact more with the St. Louis community outside of WashU, especially through the Gephardt Institute. Are there other ways SU is planning on reaching out to the St. Louis Community besides the Gephardt Institute? How are you working with the administration on this, given your similar goals?

Chen: 

One thing off the bat: Campus Life recently hired someone to be the first In the Lou coordinator to build on the whole idea of “In St. Louis, for St. Louis” to get people out into the community. There is a lot of potential for working together with them. The Gephardt Institute is a group that I met with last year, as well, to basically try to improve their engagement with the student body because they were having trouble getting people to show up to their events. So by partnering with them, they bring a lot of speakers from the local St. Louis community and have those connections so that, through them, we can emphasize more engagement — civic engagement. Beyond that, [Vice President for Engagement] Andrew [de las Alas] has a lot of great connections with the local Asian leadership, so there’s a lot of unexplored potential there. In the past, we haven’t done much in terms of community engagement, so it is definitely a facet of SU that we are looking to build out, and we’ll definitely work with administrators on that, especially if it involves going out into the community. 

SL: 

How will you know that this term was a success in the spring? 

Chen: 

I would deem this year a success if, as an organization, we’re able to take a step forward to operate with less conflict within ourselves and our work with administrators. I think last year, a lot of relationships were broken both internally and externally. And if we can end this year with most of those relationships repaired, such that the next Exec board is set up for success, I would deem this term as successful. I think [that] if the student body’s general opinion of us goes up, I would also deem that as a success. That means that we’ve done our job of outreach and that we’ve done our job of educating more of the student body on the hard work that all of us do.