Name: Ryan Hartigan
Age: 22
Program: Neuroscience
Relevant experience:
R: I am a member-at-large right now so I’ve been working around the campus and I’ve been trying to increase the seats on Senate, not actually being on Senate right now, but I’ve been trying and the DSU has been trying to push forward. I sit on the DSU [council] so I know what’s going on and that’s the biggest reason why people should vote for me. I’ve sat on council and I’ve helped push certain things through council already.
G: Why are you running for the Senate position?
R: I’m running for Senate because I want to increase the number of student seats on the Senate because we don’t have enough representation. We have half the student voice of the national average of universities. We have seven student seats on Senate and the national average is 14.
G: What do you think the role of the Senate representative is?
R: The role of the Senate representative is to go to students about academic issues that they feel are important, to fight for those so they don’t get cut and to push for new innovative academic programs. The main thing is pushing for new programs and maintaining programs that the Board of Governors may want to cut, so just maintaining whatever students feel are the greatest programs and having as many innovative programs as possible.
G: If you were on the Senate this year, what issue would you have brought to the table?
R: Increase the amount of student seats on Senate. And I would wish to push for stronger representation of Senate in the sense that the Board of Governors now has the last say on most things that happens and it never used to be that way. The Senate used to have more power and the Board of Governors is made up of mostly administration, whereas the Senate is made up of faculty and students and less administration, so I feel the Senate should have just as much power as the Board of Governors.
G: What is your stance on NSCAD University being absorbed by Dal?
R: I honestly don’t know enough about the issue right now so I can’t really say.
G: What changes, if any, would you make to Dal’s plagiarism software/policies?
R: I don’t know anything about the plagiarism software. There is a sub-committee for people who plagiarize and I was intending to sit on that because I feel that students make mistakes without meaning to plagiarize so I was going to sit on that committee and do what I can to fix any issues I see with that.
G: What committees would you hope to serve on if elected and why?
R: I want to sit on the academic sub-committee and the discipline sub-committee and innovative programs. So we speak about new programs that are coming up and we pass new programs, like the master’s of fine arts at King’s this year.
G: Anything else you’d like to add?
R: I know a lot about these issues on campus because I’ve been involved in the past year, and the other people running haven’t been as involved as me. I’ve already sat on council and been elected as a member-at-large so I know how council works. I hope people run for me not just because they know who I am, but because they know I can get the job done.
Other candidates for Senate are: Alexandra Killham, Jay Fradette, and Rebecca Eldridge.
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