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Justin Ratkovic ’20 and Ayana Dudley ’20 are running unopposed for Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) president and vice president, respectively.
Ratkovic currently serves as the Student Life Committee chair, which is broadly committed to improving students’ quality of life, and ran for the position of WSA VP last year. As WSA president, he hopes to focus on the relationship between the Resource Center and the WSA. He works as a gender and sexuality intern at the Resource Center, and he wants the Resource Center and WSA to partner further to support the student body.
Ratkovic’s connection to the Resource Center goes back to its founding in the fall of 2017. He served on the student advisory board that helped guide its creation and established the equity and inclusion sub-committee on the WSA to strengthen the relationship between the WSA and the Resource Center. He also wrote a resolution to give $5,000 to the Resource Center as a course supplies grant to begin its textbook library.
In the position, he hopes to continue to facilitate relationships between activist groups and the WSA.
“I really like to keep in contact with activist groups on campus, and my way of viewing how the WSA can help activism is being that inside support within the administration,” Ratkovic said. “I like to leverage that position that I have within these administrative meetings that I have every single week and use that for the advantage of other students too.”
Dudley serves on the Student Life Committee as well. As VP, Dudley hopes to amplify the voices of students of color and maintain the transparency of the WSA, while continuing to work on projects she’s been heavily involved in.
“[A] strength that I bring to this position is diversity of idea,” Dudley wrote in an email to The Argus. “Representation in this student government is extremely important, and I feel that as a woman of color, I can bring less heard, but equally valuable perspectives to the WSA.”
After joining the WSA her sophomore year, Dudley worked on a project to increase campus cleanliness by installing more menstrual product bins in bathrooms. Recently, she worked with the Wes Period Project to provide free menstrual products to campus and seeks to maintain this project over the next year.
In maintaining the transparency of the WSA, Dudley hopes to strengthen the relationship between the WSA and the student body.
“I think the WSA has had a bad rep around campus in…previous years, but I want to work on putting faces to names of those involved in the WSA, and hopefully work to strengthen campus view of the WSA as a working student government,” Dudley wrote.
Voting opened at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, April 22 and will close at 11:59 p.m. on Friday, April 26.
Jocelyn Maeyama can be reached at jmaeyama@wesleyan.edu.