USG announces new executive officer


USG president-elect Truman Fritz also announced next year’s executive cabinet that includes Sen. Hailey Robertson, discretionary fund co-director Mike Shao, and marketing director Olivia Frary and International Student Assembly director Jina Hur. (Ally Wei | Daily Trojan)

President-elect Truman Fritz announced the appointment of  International Student Assembly director Jina Hur as the interim senior director of programming and as next year’s chief programming officer at the Undergraduate Student Government Senate meeting Tuesday. 

Former Senior Director of Programming Montana Houston was removed from her position last week after several USG programming assemblies sent a joint statement to the executive cabinet with formal complaints on Houston violating USG policy with her amendment proposal to change the incorporation of new assemblies under the programming branch. 

The original bylaw proposed in February allowed organizations to become cultural assemblies if they provided either a petition with 50 undergraduate signatures or the signatures of five member organization presidents. Her proposal would remove the option for an undergraduate petition. 

Hur was selected following her previous experience in USG as ISA director and will hold the position until May 15 for Stone and Tahsin’s last two weeks and overseeing the incoming administration’s programming. 

“Her role on the [executive board] is to serve and advise functional programming, and making sure that is stable for the remainder of the year, and [oversee] the transition between the old and new [executive boards],” President Trenton Stone said. 

Later in the meeting, Sen. Randi Anderson presented updates on her efforts to help the Thornton School of Music be more sustainable. 

Anderson said she wants to encourage Thornton to take steps towards reducing paper waste, through methods of digitizing readers and doing homework assignments online. 

“Since I’m a student in Thornton, I see the amount of paper waste that’s going in landfills every day,” Anderson said. “I figured it’s close to home, I know a lot of people, I’ve talked to professors a lot and I just think that something needed to change because I know that we, specifically, have a really big carbon footprint in the University.”

Anderson has been in communication with senior lecturer Chris Rozé, associate professor Cristian Grases and Dean Robert Cutietta, who plans on sending an email to Thornton faculty with information on decreasing the school’s paper waste. 

She said she hopes to expand the initiative to the wider University community. 

“Just because I’m not going to be a senator next year doesn’t mean that I’m not going to keep working on this,” Anderson said. “I’m going to continue to do everything that I can to push it outward as much as possible.” 

Anderson also talked about attending a meeting about the creation of an on-campus LGBTQ resource center for victims of sexual assault last month. A grant is being finalized for the center’s creation during the next school year. She said she hopes to create a social media liaison position within the center to help promote its resources. 

“I’m trying to get the social media liaison position entered into the grant so when it’s all unfolding, that doesn’t get swept under the table,” Anderson said. “A lot of really good resources exist for students already, but students don’t know about them or have access to them because of the lack of knowledge, so I just thought that would be really important.” 

Sen. Angela Chuang gave updates on her work relating to transfer student housing. 

She found that at Portland Street House, 99% of the 44 residents are transfer students. Chuang plans to meet with Portland Street Housing and hopes to have USC Housing officially deem this location as housing specifically for transfer students.

“We’ve been talking about how we can make it official transfer student housing because even though they house the majority, it’s still not technically official transfer student housing,” Chuang said. 

Chuang, along with her senate aide Mackenzie Biles and Sen. Emily Johnson, has also been working on drafting a proposal to present to Vice President for Student Affairs Winston Crisp on professional fraternities being recognized on campus. In her last presentation, Chuang mentioned that professional fraternities did not have a source of central representation and was working to create a professional fraternity council. 

“[Professional fraternity recognition] is something that I’ve been wanting to do since last school year and for a while, we were getting told that it wasn’t going to happen, but [the Campus Activities Office] recently said that we could try to see if [Crisp] would be on board with it,” Chuang said. “Hopefully, we’ll have this done soon to show him.” 

Chuang also mentioned her work with Sens. Johnson, Omar Garcia and Christopher McMorran on voicing support for the UC-wide cost-of-living adjustment movement. Graduate students at UC Santa Cruz are currently on an indefinite strike in response to rent burdens as they ask for an adjustment to their salaries for high costs of living. Chuang has been in communication with a student government senator from UC Santa Barbara who authored a resolution in support. 

“As the Undergraduate Student Government, I know that [the Graduate Student Government’s] executive cabinet, with USG’s executive cabinet, recently released a statement on it, and we’re looking to produce our statement of support for those students as well,” Chuang said.  

The Senate also voted on and approved President-elect Truman Fritz’s choices for next year’s executive cabinet. Sen. Hailey Robertson was appointed chief of staff, discretionary fund co-director Mike Shao was appointed as treasurer and marketing director Olivia Frary was appointed senior director of communications.