After a successful campaign and a landslide win for the ASUI elections, The Argonaut would like to extend a hearty welcome to incoming President Tanner McClain and Vice President Madison Fitzgerald.
McClain and Fitzgerald’s platform is supported by Vandal pride, representation and student services, all of which are important on the University of Idaho campus. As sophomores and members of the Greek community, both of them have a lot of support behind them.
Though some of their supporters took to an anonymous, location-based social media platform called Yik Yak to share their not-so-nice thoughts about McClain and Fitzgerald’s opponents, Katie Hettinga and Olivia Niemi.
While we will always support our campus community, part of The Argonaut’s way of doing that is to provide honest, accurate information for all of our readers. McClain and Fitzgerald promoted an excellent platform and have great values, but we aren’t sure they should be the priority.
The first part of their platform is Vandal pride, which has been a desired but hard to achieve goal of the university for years. With increasing interest in events at the core, McClain and Fitzgerald plan to encourage Vandals to wear their pride every Friday. This is a great idea that is already being implemented in some ways, such as a note at the bottom of the Daily Register newsletter sent to university employees.
In addition to possibly raising interest in campus events, there may be hope for rekindling UI pride with the hiring of a new football coach, but Vandal pride and athletics are closely related. Some of the most popular sports teams at the university haven’t had the best performances in recent years.
We hope that McClain and Fitzgerald will be able to get students more excited about being Vandals and give them a much-needed energy boost after enduring the pandemic. Representing the school’s colors on Fridays is a good way to start if students participate.
Speaking of representation, out of 1,470 votes that went toward the election, McClain and Fitzgerald won 900 of them. That is, as we said before, a landslide win of 61%. But UI has a student body of over 10,000 students, and according to the enrollment numbers for fall 2021 there were 11,303 students attending the university.
From those numbers, roughly 7-8% of the student body voted, which is a low voter turnout compared to other elections. In 2020, 66.8% of the voting-age population in the nation voted in the presidential election and in Idaho’s elections 81.2% of registered voters cast their ballot.
This means that while McClain and Fitzgerald won the election, only a small percentage of the student population actually voted. With representation being one of their platform’s pillars, McClain told The Argonaut a large part of that meant uniting colleges across Idaho and communicating with our state legislators.
We’re glad to hear that McClain and Fitzgerald are interested in continuing the conversation about what’s really happening on Idaho’s college campuses with our legislators, but there are some potential issues in how they want to go about that.
“I think conducting more student surveys and getting actual data that we can send to legislators to state this is not what’s happening here on campus,” Fitzgerald told The Argonaut.
The issue with student surveys is if only 8% of students on campus are voting for their own representation in a quick, simple survey, it’s likely the surveys being sent out will get a similar turnout. Showing legislators what 8% of Vandals think is great, but we need better representation than that.
Finally, to the best part of their platform, McClain and Fitzgerald want to improve student services by cooperating with Vandal Uber and Parking and Transportations Services to help provide more free public transportation as well as a safer campus. Negotiating for cheaper parking passes for students who sign up as Vandal Uber drivers will help students all across campus save money and have a safe way to travel.
Overall, we’re glad to see McClain and Fitzgerald continuing conversations with our state legislature and getting involved in truly representing our campus. We hope they look to all parts of campus for participation, including students in on-campus apartments, dormitories, Greek life and students who live off campus.
As students, part of our duty is to communicate with ASUI so they know how we want to be represented. ASUI can be reached at their weekly meetings on Wednesday nights during the academic year at 7 p.m. in the Whitewater Room of the ISUB. They can also be reached through their feedback page on the university website.
Contacting the students representing us will help them to really focus on the issues students prioritize, so whether they get a quick note or a full speech we’re all working as a community to represent ourselves.
- Editorial Board
This article has been updated with new information.