Pictured above: (Left to right) Rughved Brahman, Tony Tran, Amy Pham and Nithin Palyam took part in Student Government’s first in-person presidential debate since 2020.
Courtesy of Aubrey Carr | The Crow’s Nest
By Molly Ryan
Despite an all-Tampa ballot, the candidates for this year’s University of South Florida’s student-body Presidential and Vice Presidential seats promise inclusion under “OneUSF.”
With consolidation still in its beginning stages, discussions have emerged regarding how St. Petersburg and Sarasota-Manatee might fare with Tampa’s apparent dominance.
However, both running tickets expressed plans to use Tampa’s influence for the better in a hybrid-style debate last Thursday, Feb. 17, at the Marshall Student Center’s Oval Theater and online through Microsoft Teams.
The Crow’s Nest Editor-in-Chief Sofía García Vargas and The Oracle Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Urban moderated the first in-person debate since before the COVID-19 pandemic, giving each ticket a chance to voice their ambitions for USF — among them, to foster a more unified cross-campus identity under consolidation.
The first ticket consists of candidates Deputy Chief Financial Officer Nithin Palyam for President and Relations Committee Chair Amy Pham for Vice President.
The ticket’s “HERD” platform focuses on and is an acronym for Health, Empowerment, Research and Development. According to their campaign’s Instagram, @join.our.herd, Palyam and Pham’s platform and its initiatives plan to “advocate for the health and wellbeing” of their fellow students, with a focus on “mental health, sustainability and food insecurity” and the importance of a relationship between students and Student Government (SG) across all three campuses.
Throughout the debate, the ticket expressed their desire to strengthen the USF St. Petersburg campus through expanding dining options for students, fostering a deeper sense of campus culture by expanding traditions — like St. Petersburg’s cardboard boat race — across all three campuses and bringing more branch-campus-inclusive discussions to SG.
“It is important that we are unified as ‘OneUSF,’ where we communicate and come together,” Palyam said during the debate. “It’s important to talk about the initiatives that we have planned for other campuses and see how we can expand those resources for all students.”
On the opposing ticket, Finance Committee Chair Truong “Tony” Tran runs alongside Circuit Court Associate Judge Rughved Brahman for President and Vice President respectively.
The ticket’s “UNITE” campaign lists specific initiatives intended to cultivate diversity, transparency and innovation under each letter of the acronym — Unification, Navigation, Integration, Transition and Exploration.
Like Palyam and Pham, the Tran and Brahman ticket plans to bridge the gaps between campus cultures by creating new traditions and upholding old ones while promoting communication and transparency within SG.
During the debate, Brahman expressed how the branch campuses may feel “left out of the picture,” and how the “UNITE” platform aims to “completely change this narrative.”
“We think upon our travels to different campuses, we’ve really experienced the campus traditions and we learned more about each campus, which is really important,” Brahman said. “As we said, going back to our main initiative of our first word, unification, representative of the ‘U’ in ‘UNITE,’ to bring different campus traditions to all our campuses. It’s a great way to raise awareness so that we can have a consolidated USF.”
So far, Tran and Brahman are the only ticket to receive an endorsement from fellow general election ticket holders.
Current St. Petersburg SG senator and candidate for Governor, Sean Schrader, and his running mate for Lieutenant Governor, Josh Rampertab, endorsed Tran and Brahman a day prior to the debate via their campaign’s Instagram, @unite.tr, at St. Petersburg’s Meet the Candidates Day on Feb. 16 — which gives general election ticket holders the opportunity to connect with and hear concerns from St. Petersburg students.
“[Rampertab and I] are super excited to endorse [Tran] and [Brahman] to be the next President and Vice President of the student body here at USF,” Schrader said.
“One of the biggest things I worry about is ensuring every student has a voice here across the USF community,” Schrader said. “It’s easy to talk about plans for what’s going to happen, but I know [Tran] has taken the steps to ensure relationships have been built across USF as well as continue to ensure every student has a voice for the future of [SG].”
Beyond the St. Petersburg campus, some of the main topics discussed were sustainability, parking and transportation, overall student accessibility and flexibility, food security, updating digital resources, incorporating new initiatives despite a tighter budget and transparency.
While each campaign had a different approach to many of these issues, both tickets shared similar priorities.
Both tickets expressed an interest in adopting more sustainable practices. While Brahman was “inspired” by St. Petersburg’s collaboration with Duke Energy to install solar panels, Pham emphasized that adopting a composting initiative would help eliminate food waste and be used in the botanical gardens in place of fertilizer.
To tackle food insecurity, Palyam and Pham suggested working with community gardens and expanding the Feed-a-Bull program. Similarly, Tran and Brahman expressed plans to offer food vouchers to every student each semester.
Tran and Brahman emphasized the need for the return and redesign of the schedule planner, more hybrid classes and to allow those with unique circumstances to learn from home.
Pham added that for virtual options, the “HERD” campaign would advocate for different software like closed captioning. She also underscored the need for more wheelchair accessible entrances and maps indicating where they can be accessed.
While consolidation allows students to take classes beyond their home campus, on-campus residents without transportation are unable to partake such opportunities. As a solution, each ticket seeks to develop inter-campus transportation, if elected.
While Pham expressed that the “HERD” ticket would first like to conduct a survey to gauge the demand for inter-campus transportation, Tran assured that, if possible, he and Brahman would work toward making the vehicles Wi-Fi enabled.
However, Tran suspected that a project like inter-campus transportation might be too ambitious due to its large amount of “moving parts.”
With growing concern for a lack of transparency between SG and the student body, each ticket plans to implement some form of outlet to receive student feedback.
According to Palyam, “there’s been a little bit of a rough of communication between the student body and the student government.”
At the end of the debate, Pham guaranteed that with Palyam, their administration would “maintain transparency with the students by making sure they know what we are doing” through weekly reports of things and updates, as it’s “important to have that open dialogue with students.”
While Tran did not believe there was a lack of communication on SG’s behalf, he assured that his administration would “have to work on it to make it better” and that “anything that is current can always be improved and made better.”
In a similar fashion to Palyam and Pham, Tran and Brahman plan to stay transparent by incorporating student recap videos and creating a OneUSF SG Instagram account.
Brahman added that with Tran, their administration would also work with SG internally to incorporate a “no nonsense policy.”
“Talking bad behind each other’s backs will have no place in our administration,” Brahman said. “Just being honest with each other, being nice to each other and being civil would be the most important thing.”
Voting for USF’s SG general elections will begin on Feb. 28 and end on March 3.
