(Pirate Wires) Amid a stifled social atmosphere on Stanford’s Campus, a new group of executives is taking charge of the Stanford student government — the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) — after running on a “Fun Strikes Back” platform and winning the election handily. Sophia Danielpour and Kyle Haslett, neither of whom had prior student government experience, campaigned with a focus on reviving campus social life. They won by a margin of 674 votes, or nearly 20 percent of the electorate.
ASSU distributes funding to student organizations, which in turn host the majority of campus events. Its leaders also communicate directly with campus administration in order to advocate for students with respect to the cost of living on campus, the diversity of the student body, and the quality of student social life.
In the runup to the election, Danielpour and Haslett put together an online petition— which amassed 490 signatures — spelling out their case:
Danielpour was a freshman in 2019, before the rise of COVID, and she says the difference in the vibrancy of social life on campus before and after the pandemic is stark. In campaign speeches, she spoke about Stanford’s “crisis of community.” She noted that she’d never run for student government before, so she wasn’t “doing this to complete some Stanford political career.” She was running, she said, simply because she was “upset at what Stanford had become,” and she “decided to take action to solve it.
She and Haslett have drafted a 10-page plan for solving the problems stifling Stanford’s social life that prior ASSU administrations have failed to address. The plan’s major features include:
