Editor’s note: On Friday, The Daily Texan Editorial Board interviewed each team of candidates running for Student Government president and vice president. The following quotes are from our interview with executive alliance candidates Madison Gardner and Antonio Guevara.
“Our main message is to really unite Texas.”
— Gardner discussing his goal to bring UT students together.
“Another thing we want to do is just increase tradition and spirit here on campus. One of the things that we see is really lacking is there’s not a sense of the large Longhorn community.”
— Gardner describing one of the main planks of his platform.
“The most important thing that Student Government can really do is be down at the Capitol, whether that’s lobbying for funding, whether that’s trying to get a voter ID student ID exemption, whether that’s lobbying for financial aid, scholarships, domestic partner benefits, things like that, making sure there’s no guns on campus. I think those are kind of the main issues that we really want to advocate for.”
— Gardner on SG’s potential role in the upcoming legislative session. Gardner opposed domestic partner benefits in 2010, when he told The Daily Texan “I do not support domestic partner benefits … I do not believe that is right. I believe strongly in my moral values, and I will not sacrifice them.”
“We have some bipartisan contacts, so, you know, where [Madison] may have contacts in one area, I have contacts in the other.”
— Guevara on the team’s strategy to lobby at the Legislature.
“Even if we don’t have a direct effect on tuition, we can really help with changing our budget and making sure we get the most money as possible back to UT so that next year we won’t have to raise tuition.”
— Gardner on how he would fight against tuition increases despite that next year is not a tuition-setting year, as the UT System Board of Regents sets tuition every two years.
“Speaker circuiting, and it doesn’t get any simpler than that.”
— Guevara on the most effective way to educate students about the tuition-setting process.
