A debate between the four candidates will be held at 4:00 pm in Meherry Hall on Monday, April 22.
Kaleb Anderson, for President & Kobby Van Dyck, for Vice President
“A vision with the people, for the people.”
Kaleb Anderson
Year: 2020
Hometown: Atlanta, Georgia
Major: Political Science & Africana Studies
Involvement on Campus: Current President of the Association of African American students, co-founder of Queer Students of Color, LGBTQIA+ Services intern for Center for Diversity and Inclusion
Student Government Experience: First-year senator, VP of Community Relations
Kobby Van Dyck
Year: 2020
Hometown: Ghana
Major: Physics
Involvement on Campus: Former President of African Students Association, SOCiS (students of color in stem), on multiple advisory boards for the Center for Diversity and Inclusion
Student Government Experience: Has served on multiple committees in the Senate: Student Committee, DePauw Values Committee and Day of Dialogue Committee.
On Student Government:
Kobby: I've been serving in the DePauw student government Senate since freshman year. I joined with the idea of representing international students. I want to amplify the voices of international students on DSG.
Being part of the Senate has helped me understand how the senate works, what white papers are, how white papers are processed, how resolutions are processed who to go to for and for every situation that should be catered for.
Kaleb: I understand how students could activate their voices and actually constitute change on campus, and I've done that by actually demonstrating and protesting last spring with my organization AAS. And I've also done this in the ways in which I've built relationships with administration and the Board of Trustees by advocating for our demands, by serving on the diversity equity community with other faculty. So I think that I am the best candidate for president just because I know the versatility of student resistance and change.
Kobby: Currently the white paper system and the resolution system works in a way that you identify a problem on campus. Then you do extensive research on the issue and you compare the issue and solutions being made on other campuses and how they've responded to these problems.
Issues:
Kobby: I was thinking to make white papers more personalized and more humanized by quoting students in certain issues, you have to put them anonymous because it might be a little iffy, but we're thinking of putting students and actually including students inputs in these white papers in terms of how they feel about certain things that have been going on on campus.
Another thing that I actually want to do is to strengthen the relationship between students and the Board of Trustees. I think this year we've realized how instrumental decisions made by the Board of Trustees actually play a big role in how the university is run. We're thinking of having a survey system at the end of the semester, or maybe bimonthly, because the President and the Vice President meet with the Board of Trustees bimonthly. We are hoping to increase facetime between DSG and the Board of Trustees. We are going to have these survey systems to capture student opinions on decisions that the board of trustees is actually making. At the open forum, they threw a lot of numbers at us, we are also going to send them a lot of numbers of how students feel. So from scratch, we are going to have boards around Hoover and Roy asking questions in general, and trying to capture the general idea of how students feel, and then we turn that into a survey to send around campus. So they know it's not just a certain group of students that feel that feel a certain way about issues, but a broad range.
We used to have class bonding events and these events were actually to promote inclusivity amongst classes. These events were ways to actually promote interactions with students of color. It was just a great way to speak to someone that you wouldn’t speak to ordinarily. Student senators actually organized this, so it is something that we are thinking of bringing back.
Kaleb: A big goal for DSG, if we do win as president and vice presidents, is to take over reproductive justice and sexual health on campus. The student insurance that will be formally enacted starting in September of this year has an effect to those who don't sign up for student insurance and having access to STD testing, STI testing birth control, right. So making sure that Women's Center is added to a list of centers that DSG is funding in order to have more programming around reproductive justice.
Another big thing that DSG will take up is it working with Public Safety and Putnam county police. I know that DSG has met with the mayor and with the County Sheriff to have beginning conversations about what that looks like, but I think that next year we'd really like to take it a step further and actually devise training Public Putnam and Putnam County police officers can take to actually be more mindful of how their practices going about speaking to students responding to students will better help have a safer campus.