The undergraduate Student Association’s (SA) advocacy committee elected SA Senator Aidan Sumrall as its chair in a landslide election Tuesday afternoon, with five out of eight members voting for Sumrall.
Sumrall — who nominated himself for the position — ran on a platform of increasing student participation in SA activities, through strengthening the organization’s relationship to student clubs. He suggested sending committee members to club meetings once to twice a month and having club leaders speak at SA meetings to increase accessibility.
“If we do our job correctly and actually go out and do the hard work for this year instead of expecting [the students] to come to us and spending all that time to figure out a way for them to come to us. Let’s just go to them,” Sumrall said.
There is no specific agenda for the advocacy committee yet, but regardless of the topic, Sumrall said that he believed that SA should pursue methods outside of passing resolutions to initiate change.
“There were a lot of times where resolutions came up where just them passing wouldn’t do anything. It looked good that we were doing them but they didn’t actually do anything,” Sumrall said. “What else can we do outside, use the resources we have, talk to these people, to actually make a change than just saying we want to make a change?”
The election comes one month after the SA Senate voted to create the ad-hoc Advocacy Committee, with multiple senators calling the election a solution to a disagreement that killed the SA Senate’s first attempt to form it. At the time, SA Senate Chairperson Gavin Krauciunas and SA Student Affairs Department director Tyler Herman clashed when both submitted nearly identical resolutions to form the committee, with each naming themselves the chairperson.
The other candidates who ran for committee chair Tuesday afternoon included Krauciunas and self-nominated SA Senator Joseph Pawelczyk. Herman withdrew his candidacy, citing other commitments.
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor and can be reached at mylien.lai@ubspectrum.com
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor at The Spectrum. Outside of getting lost in Buffalo, she enjoys practicing the piano and being a bean plant mom. She can be found at @my_my_my_myliennnn on Instagram.
