Publicity high on agenda for ASLC candidates

Anne Walkup, Staff writer

Three of the four candidates for next year’s ASLC president and vice president positions mentioned making the Linfield student government better known on campus during their speeches last week.

The two candidates running for ASLC president were junior Jose Madrid Beltran and junior Kainoa Cuttitta. The two running for vice president were junior AnnaMarie Motis and junior Dave Nagaji.

The four were announced to the public as official candidates at Tuesday’s ASLC meeting, at which each gave a brief speech stating his or her goals and intentions for 2018-19.

While each candidate presented a different platform, the topic of improved publicity for ASLC was a recurring theme.

Nagaji expressed concern that many new students are uninformed about their school’s student government.

“I’ve talked to a lot of freshmen this past week who said they don’t really understand how the ASLC system works.”

“I’d like to see us being more directly involved with the students and not just a foreign student body that sits the office,” Motis said while discussing changes she’d like to see in the current student government.

Beltran mentioned the importance of ASLC members being accessible and familiar to the Linfield community.

Cuttitta was the one candidate who did not explicitly mention a lack of knowledge about ASLC in her speech. However, she did discuss the importance of “spreading the word about ASLC and LCAT events more.”

The Linfield Director of College Activities Dan Fergueson asked both presidential candidates how they plan to effectively spread knowledge about ASLC.

Cuttina mentioned continuing to use and publicize the ASLC Instagram page that was created this fall.

Beltran said he plans to schedule time each day in a public place (such as Starbucks) so that he is more familiar and easily accessible to students.

Fergueson said that ASLC is already quite involved with the Linfield community; the problem of being unknown stems from not always accrediting themselves with the work they do.

“ASLC doesn’t always claim credit. Students tend to think of [ASLC’s events] as ‘the college.’”