Campaign promise broken

Last week one of ASPSU’s campaign goals of holding a week of events for students regarding togetherness and community health failed to happen. Leaders cite a lack of planning and a reprioritization of campaigns.

When current ASPSU President Jonathan Sanford took office last June, he did so with three campaign goals: shared governance, more student housing and the idea of “truth and reconciliation for campus healing.” Sanford’s last campaign goal was slated to commence last week. However, scheduling and staff issues interrupted the event.

Sanford’s conception of the Truth and Reconciliation campaign was inspired by a speech given by Archbishop Desmond Tutu on May 4, 2009. Tutu’s message was simple—if a society would go through the process of reconciliation, it would be able to identify problems within its communities. Such problems that Sanford hoped to address include women’s, minority and gay rights, as well as issues that are hushed, such as sexual abuse and rape on campus.

The Truth and Reconciliation event was designed to promote unity amongst PSU students and the community that would hopefully translate to the city at large. 

After winter term Sanford began to refer to the event as Health and Healing.

The week-long event would have been ready to commence last week if other ASPSU priorities and conflicts among staff members had not interrupted the campaign schedule, according to Laura Morency, ASPSU’s communications director.

Morency also considered time to be a factor in pulling the event off, and said that Sanford’s idea for the event would have needed at least a year of planning to do it right.

In an e-mail from Sanford, he said that “health and healing have been mostly pushed aside to focus on the transition for [president-elect] Katie Markey.”

As of now, other ASPSU priorities have resulted in the discontinuation of the Health and Healing campaign, and no set date has been scheduled for the event in the future.