Two campaigns are vying for the presidency and vice presidency of IU Student Government — ACTION for IUSG and EMPOWER for IUSG. Voting will be open to the student body starting 10 a.m. March 3 until 10 p.m. March 5. Students can vote by logging in to their BeINvolved accounts.
Each semester, IUSG holds campus-wide congressional elections, but the executive election takes place alongside the legislative one in the spring. Meet each ticket:
ACTION for IUSG
The ACTION for IUSG ticket aims to create a more engaged student body by strengthening IUSG’s presence on campus and making sure they can benefit each individual student.
Presidential candidate Zach Goldberg and vice-presidential candidate Ava Smith, both sophomores, believe they would be the best ticket to bring those values to IUSG.
Goldberg is studying finance, business analytics and law, ethics and decision-making at the Kelley School of Business. He’s now the secretary of financial relations for the FUSE administration. He said he has also founded several campus organizations, including a corporate law club and an undergraduate law journal.
Smith is studying healthcare management and policy and has a minor in human resources. She is a member of the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority, is involved in IU Dance Marathon and gives prospective student tours at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
“If we can do one thing to make — even if it's one student — feel better about being on campus and more proud of their school, then we're happy to do that,” Smith said.
Their three main pillars are safety, community and success. In their official policy document, they detail initiatives to support each of these pillars.
Safety
ACTION’s safety measures include preventing sexual assault through an improved reporting system, fixing damaged blue lights and reimplementing Proclamation 112, which calls “on all four Greek councils to implement mandatory sexual assault prevention training,” according to the ticket’s policy document.
They want to improve traffic safety and flow by adding walk signs at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs crosswalk and the intersection of Seventh Street and Woodlawn Avenue. The ticket also wants to add a crosswalk between the Kelley School of Business and the Fee Lane parking garage and increase bike and car parking spaces.
ACTION wants to continue funding for free Plan B, implement free sexual transmitted disease and infection testing and expand coverage options at the Student Health Center. They also hope to grow mental health resources by implementing mental health days and partnering with Counseling and Psychological Services to “hire more inclusive and specialized therapists,” according to their policy document.
Under the safety section of their policy document, ACTION also stresses protecting students from all forms of hateful rhetoric while making sure they are able to express their beliefs freely. Their policy document discusses implementing more widespread implicit bias training for both staff and students to further this protection.
Community
ACTION’s community pillar focuses on uplifting all students and strengthening connections between the student body. Their policies include hosting cultural summits to bring together student leaders from cultural centers, increasing the number of prayer rooms on campus and enhancing accessibility. They want to host large-scale events like mixers and block parties to increase engagement and awareness of IUSG.
ACTION emphasizes strengthening connections with student organizations, especially those that they believe haven’t been involved with IUSG in the past.
“Open communication is huge but also connecting with those groups that aren't — that don't have a voice in IU government or feel afraid to,” Smith said during a Feb. 17 debate between the tickets. “So right now, like Greek life feels that they cannot come to IU Student Government for their issues and concerns on campus.”
Another aspect of this pillar involves improving transparency through forums, tabling events, office hours and a direct communication service between IUSG and its constituents via text or email, which ACTION is calling the “IUSG hotline.”
Success
ACTION emphasizes three types of success: organizational, financial and academic. From an organizational standpoint, they want to make it easier to create student organizations and streamline the funding and space booking process.
"At the end of the day, if you have a community of people that is set to do something, you should be able to create that community,” Goldberg said.
Financially, ACTION aims to work with local businesses on a platform to help students find employment opportunities and advocate at a federal level for more funding opportunities, like Pell Grants, by meeting with U.S. Congress representatives.
They also want to increase academic transparency and accessibility by enabling students to access past syllabi before they enroll in classes, recommending a standardized university-wide artificial intelligence policy, expanding campus tutoring services and continuing initiatives like the Calculator Loaner Program and EmpowerED Scholarship, which reduce the financial burden of purchasing course materials.
EMPOWER for IUSG
EMPOWER for IUSG’s main goal is to uplift student voices on campus, after several years of protests regarding the Israel-Hamas War, climate action and collective bargaining for graduate workers.
Omeed Mehrzad and Sarah Alhaddad, both sophomores, hope to bring those student voices into their administration if elected.
Mehrzad is a pre-med student studying political science and economics with minors in healthcare management and policy and biology. He’s also the co-director of university projects in IUSG and the chair of recruitment and retention for Phi Delta Epsilon medical fraternity. He also co-founded and is president of Students for a National Health Program at IU Bloomington. Alhaddad is studying international law and involved with the Palestinian Solidarity Committee.
“Because especially over the last year and a half that I've been here, it's been — student voices have been drowned out by unilateral administrative decision making,” Mehrzad said.
To remedy this, the EMPOWER campaign emphasizes incorporating students, faculty and staff into conversations that, to Mehrzad, have lacked non-administrative input.
Mehrzad said EMPOWER’s pillars — safety, community and prosperity — are similar to ACTION’s, but the issues they are focusing on are “DEI, financial accessibility and student rights and experiences,” which fall under their “prosperity” pillar. EMPOWER outlines these key issues and pillars in their policy document.
Safety
EMPOWER’s safety platform includes regular blue light testing and updated safety resources to show the location of blue lights and well-lit areas on the IU app. Similarly, they outline “safety walks” each semester to locate these blue lights, well-lit areas and other safety measures that need to be addressed. They also advocate for expanded sexual violence prevention programs and suicide prevention measures. Alhaddad emphasized the necessity of updates to IU’s Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Misconduct.
“That hasn't been updated since 2019 so it is very inaccurate, and we think that if we update that we'll be able to identify issues that are actually there and not a reflection of what it was like six years ago,” she said.
Like ACTION, their platform includes continued funding for free Plan B and STI/STD testing, expanded coverage options at the Student Health Center and increasing bike and car parking spaces for students. EMPOWER also supports the reinstatement of wellness days, revamping late-night transportation and adding heating lamps at bus stops.
Community
EMPOWER wants to focus on enhancing student outreach by establishing a Council of Student Governance, which would bring liaisons from various student governments — Kelley Student Government, Luddy Student Government and various residence hall governments — to discuss campus concerns and initiatives. They also propose hosting town halls and office hours, pushing for ethical university investments, expanding dining options for students with dietary restrictions and extending dining hall hours.
Prosperity
EMPOWER has made diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) a focus of their campaign. Their policy document expresses plans for a LGBTQ+ living-learning community and the establishment of a Southwest Asian, North African Culture Center and a Disability Culture Center. They emphasize protecting DEIA institutions and institutions, such as the Kinsey Institute, that advance research on DEIA in the face of targeted bills at the state level such as Senate Bill 289, which would crack down on DEI initiatives in state agencies, educational institutions and health professional licensing boards.
“I'm a Middle Eastern student, and so we certainly sympathize with students that are very stressed about this,” Alhaddad said.
Mehrzad also named financial accessibility as one of their key issues. EMPOWER outlines plans to create a meal plan scholarship, expand the EmpowerED Scholarship and Calculator Loaner Program, establish a bike loaner program and build upon a lease gap program that Mehrzad has been working on in his current IUSG position. This program would provide accommodations for students facing housing insecurity in between leases.
EMPOWER’s last key issue is student rights and experiences. They detail plans to improve the functionality of beINvolved, recognize the IGWC and, like ACTION, make class syllabi accessible to students before enrollment.
Their standout issue is a plan to continue the FUSE administration’s efforts to reform UA-10, IU’s Expressive Activity Policy, a policy they view as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
The policy, which the IU Board of Trustees approved in July, limits “expressive activity” to between the hours of 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. every day. It prohibits blocking vehicular and pedestrian traffic and building entrances, prohibits camping and requires the university to approve signs and temporary structures at least 10 days in advance. UA-10 was met with much pushback when it was first passed.
Mehrzad referenced a campus-wide survey the FUSE administration sent out in June in which they collected student responses to the policy’s initial draft. The survey data showed overwhelming negative attitudes toward UA-10, and the executive branch, under Study Body President Cooper Tinsley, submitted this report to the administration. IUSG congress voted against the initial draft of UA-10 in July and suggested changes to the policy.
The Office of the Vice President and General Counsel made “several key improvements to the policy,” Tinsley and IUSG Vice President Nicole Santiuste wrote in a statement following the approval of UA-10, but that it “remains deeply flawed and presents significant concerns.”
“It didn't end up having a lot of impact on the end result, but we would definitely push harder and work with faculty and work with staff to have our collective voices heard,” Mehrzad said.
This is one of the main areas in which ACTION and EMPOWER differentiate and one of the only contentious topics in their Feb. 17 debate, despite each ticket’s relatively similar responses on other topics.
When moderator and professor Paul Helmke, director of the Civic Leader Center, asked about each ticket’s attitude toward the expressive activity policy, Mehrzad began by critiquing the ACTION ticket.
“Unlike the other ticket’s policy platform, which mentions freedom of speech zero times, the expressive activity policy — we clearly see it as unconstitutional,” he said.
Mehrzad said, if elected, his administration would work and negotiate with the administration to create a non-restrictive speech policy. Goldberg responded by clarifying ACTION’s stance in that all students should have a platform through which they can use their voices for change, and that they stand against all hateful rhetoric and bias.
“We want to make sure that, you know, in line with expressive activity policy and editing those kinds of things and talking to universities, that we're doing so in a manner that not only allows students to express their opinions openly — because we do believe that every student has the right to free speech — but also in a way that protects students’ abilities on campus to enjoy college,” Goldberg said during the debate.
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More information about each ticket can be found on their social media, @actionforiusg and @empowerforiusg on Instagram, which links to their official policy documents and other information about the campaigns.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correctly reflect the extracurricular activities of the EMPOWER for IUSG ticket.
