At 11:30 a.m. on March 26, Emporia State’s Associated Student Government held its presidential debate outside the Center for Student Involvement. ASG Senator Joel Franz and incumbent president Azwad B. Arif presented their visions for campus government before the election takes place April 1-3.
Former ASG senator and current president Arif explains his planned changes to the campus governance in terms of four “pillars” of leadership, the first of which is listening. He intends to solidify connections between ASG senators and registered student organizations to ensure that his administration listens to their needs. One way he hopes to address student involvement needs is to oversee the redesigning of the RSO central web page to make it quicker and easier for students to contact student organizations. Arif also suggests instituting regular meetings between senators and department leaders from each school so that student representatives understand decisions made within departments.
His second pillar is empowerment. Arif plans to expand involvement scholarships and initiatives for RSOs to incentivize students to get involved and mitigate financial burdens. He also intends to empower campus organizations to create “larger and more exciting events” on campus to foster connection between students. He discussed expanding student engagement at Live at the Hive by making the experience more affordable and collaborating with RSOs and local businesses to provide food to student attendees. He also plans to expand cultural shows beyond the experiences of international students, creating events for athletes, domestic students and fraternity and sorority life.
Franz, ASG’s chair of the Fiscal Affairs Committee and the second-term president of Sigma Tau Gamma, also hopes to empower students and campus organizations. He plans to enhance existing leadership training programs under campus organizations like athletics, fraternity and sorority life and RSOs. He also wants to increase communication among staff and students via email in cases where internal decisions affect departments as a way of opening up dialogue between students and administrators.
Arif’s third pillar is action on continuing campus issues. To combat the difficulties of international students seeking rides to and from the airport, he suggests providing affordable shuttle services for international students. The shuttle service would also be available to students going to bars on weekends to ensure their safe transportation.
Arif’s fourth pillar is delivering on his campaign’s promise to engage in conversation with students. He proposes to improve transparency on ASG spending and pose questions to students about where they believe their student fees should go. He suggests that student government should more closely examine line item organizations to maximize their resources in a way that accommodates student needs and interests.
Franz is also an advocate of line item analysis, and he has been making budgetary adjustments to student organizations in his role at Fiscal Affairs. He says that he is already working on these adjustments in the organization and has recently rearranged the budget to reduce student fees by four to six percent. He also explains that his presidency would invest in better financial reporting from line item organizations to streamline the process of communicating and giving evidence to organizational needs. He would also include yearly meetings with RSOs to review their spending.
Arif argues that financial reporting falls short of genuine communication, and that “if we create more processes, more procedures, it will just make it much more difficult for us to keep track of the things that are happening.”
Another major point of emphasis in Franz’s campaign is the notion of service. By examining the school budget system, he decided that his presidency would focus on enhancing campus resources’ ability to serve ESU students. He discussed plans to improve student-facing submission forms including IT requests, service hours and ASG allocations. His campaign is aimed at streamlining the front and back ends of document and information transfers. He also plans to increase line item funding for the ESU student newspaper.
Franz also stresses the importance of unity. He hopes to promote deeper relationships within the community and help ESU organizations reap the benefits of collaboration. He emphasized the idea of encouraging students tailgating at athletic events to attend the games to build communal connection among students. He also discussed the possibility of implementing a student social media workshop in which students could rent equipment to enhance their social media presence and overall connectivity.
Arif sees discourse as the core of his campaign, and he believes that to be especially important in the current educational climate.
“We’re at a defining point in the future for Emporia State University, where we see a lot of transformations happening in the state of Kansas, as was in our campus,” said Arif. “A lot of them are really helpful at creating self development and student support, but a lot of them are also creating division between us, and therefore it is more important now than ever as student representatives for us to really talk to people and listen, and that has been the core of Josh and my campaign.”
Franz is optimistic about the people around him and the support he has from the community.
“(Vice presidential candidate) Hailey Gant and I are really blessed with a great team of people, both from around Emporia State to kind of around the nation,” Franz said, “of people that are supporting us, and then people on campus that have seen our ideas and things that we want to improve and sometimes replace programs that exist.”
Editors Note: Azwad Arif and running mate Josh Manahan were elected to office for the 2025-26 academic year following the April 1-3 student government election.
