Every year, a new administration takes over the helm of the ASUU student government and works to translate their campaign promises into governing policy with many of the priorities that students, faculty and administrators want addressed. 

Now working as an equity liaison for Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, Ephraim Kum served as ASUU president in the 2020-21 school year.

“Oftentimes there was just like a tug-of-war battle — the tug-of-war battle is kind of a metaphor for the presidency in general,” Kum said. “There are just a lot of directions we had to be pulled in … that definitely can make implementing stuff harder.” 

Kum had been involved with ASUU since his freshman year and felt the programming aspect of student government was overshadowed by the many constraints posed by COVID-19.

“It was very much stressful and it was taxing mentally and emotionally, to be candid,” Kum said. “Some of my biggest struggles with depression and anxiety occurred while I was president, and it’s definitely something that comes with the role in general, but I think that coupled with trying to navigate the pandemic, not just as a student government leader, but more so just as a person, I think it was definitely an incredibly difficult time in my life.”

U alum Zach Berger graduated from the U in 2018 and served as ASUU president in his senior year, 2017-18.

“I definitely think that we made an impact,” Berger said. “I think that it is just difficult to come into office because there’s so much going on and so much to learn that inherently, you can’t really be all that effective for your first few months in office.”

According to Berger, the two big achievements for his administration were reforming Redbook, the official guidelines, bylaws and procedures for ASUU, and improving resources for mental health on campus.

“Redbook was absolutely awful at that point, it had just been a long time since it’d been really updated,” Berger said. “It had gotten to the point that it was hampering the functions of ASUU internally.”

Berger said the issues with Redbook were mainly logistical and procedural problems which had caused inconsistencies within ASUU. “Whether that’s from different students, from the administration, from different offices on campus,” Berger said. “It was just a little difficult to balance a lot of those conflicting priorities.”

However, one problem with implementing changes is there is no guarantee the next administration will maintain them come the next election cycle.

“Probably one of the biggest systemic issues with ASUU is that every presidency and every administration comes in with their priorities, and they make a lot of changes, but it’s really difficult to ensure that those changes last throughout administrations,” Berger said.

Balancing different priorities is something U alum and former ASUU Assembly Chair Mitchell Kirkham also said was a problem when he served as head of the legislative assembly for two terms from 2018-20.

“You’re in one of your first serious circumstances where you’re making these big decisions … I would see a lot of situations where sometimes people would jump to assumptions about other individuals,” Kirkham said.

According to Kirkham, the learning curve when joining ASUU is sometimes difficult to overcome.

“Attempts would be made to impeach someone where I felt like the attempt was rushed,” Kirkham said. “There were two situations where two student representatives had no idea that they were going to be impeached. No one had talked to them. No remediation was done.”

Justin Spangler graduated from the U in 2016 and served as ASUU president in the 2014-15 year.

“Anyone who’s a part of ASUU and runs a second term has to forfeit their current position,” Spangler said. “So if the student body president wanted to run for a second term, they could, but they would cut their first term six months short … Whereas at Utah State, someone could be a two-term student body president.”

In his time in office, Spangler wrote the constitution for the student government at the U’s Asia Campus and implemented the “It’s On Us” campaign at the U.

“I think every ASUU Attorney General says that they’re going to revise the Constitution, and they do and they make awful changes 90% of the time,” Spangler said.

Spangler also disliked the reforms made to the ASUU election process, where candidates now run on individual tickets rather than with certain student political parties. 

“Now you have to run on separate ballots and everyone’s different and that was awful,” Spangler said. “You lose that kind of cohesiveness when everyone runs on their own ticket.”

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