Justine Hastings and Ryan Golden announced their campaign for president and vice president of Syracuse University’s Student Association on Monday.

Hastings and Golden are the first pair of candidates to announce their intent to run in this year’s election, which will take place in April.

If elected, the pair would support the demands made by the #NotAgainSU movement, as well as suggestions made by international, Jewish and indigenous students, Hastings and Golden said in a statement to The Daily Orange.

Hastings, a junior secondary English education and English and textual studies major, currently serves as secretary of SU’s Pride Union and is a resident advisor and an academic coach at the Center for Learning and Student Success.

She received an Unsung Hero Award at SU’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration in January. The accolade is presented to those who make a positive difference in the lives of others but are not widely recognized for their efforts.

Golden is a junior policy studies and religion major and was an SA assembly member between 2017 and 2019. Golden served as co-chair of the academic affairs committee between 2018 and 2019. He previously ran for SA president in 2019 alongside vice presidential candidate Kailee Vick.

“Students on this campus deserve leaders who will lead boldly and bravely, not those who are going to cave whenever the administration pushes back or worse, peddle bigotry and ignorance that threatens our campus community,” Golden and Hastings said.

The two are running because they believe “that the administration needs to be held fully accountable for their lack of action,” the statement said.

“In each student movement, where students have banded together to call for transparency and necessary action, the upper administration has attempted to divide, ignore and ultimately dismiss them,” the statement said. “This is unacceptable.”

The pair plan on officially announcing their campaign Thursday at the Pride Union’s Drag Show in Goldstein Auditorium, they said.

As SA president and vice president, Hastings and Golden said they would work to expand multicultural learning communities in SU residence halls, push for the university to offer an anonymous sexual assault reporting system and encourage the administration to hire more faculty and counselors with marginalized identities.

The two also plan on working on SA’s transparency, the statement said.

Finding new spaces for the LGBT Resource Center, Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Disability Cultural Center is another campaign goal of Hastings and Golden. All of these spaces are currently located on the fifth floor of Bird Library.

“Every student at Syracuse University deserves to feel safe, respected, and included,” the statement said. “This is the bare minimum. However, many students of marginalized identities have expressed that they do not feel this way.”

Published on February 18, 2020 at 1:48 am

Contact Chris: cjhippen@syr.edu