Voting for the Ryerson Board of Governors and Senate opened online Monday. Students can vote for who they want to represent them among faculty and alumni via the my.ryerson portal.
The Board of Governors is in charge of the financial well-being of the university and is involved in its budgeting process. The Senate oversees academic issues such as cases of academic misconduct, academic standing and grade appeals.
Victoria Morton, who is running for re-election on the Board of Governors, said students need to be more involved in the financial decision-making process.
“[The] biggest thing we want on a broad level is to create consultation processes as being the expected norm when it comes to governance of the university,” said Morton. “So that means when we change policies, it’s expected that [we] go to the students to see what they think.”
Morton is running on team Motion with fellow candidates Nav Marwah and Neal Muthreja. The Board of Governors is accepting three student representatives, which team Motion hopes to claim.
If elected, team Motion hopes to gain funding to turn unutilized spaces, such as the third floor of the Rogers Communications Centre and the abandoned Pizza Pizza in Eric Palin Hall, into usable group workspaces for students.
Motion is running against other candidates including Sie Mee Cheng, Malek El-Kawas, Dylan Freeman-Gist, Jason King, Daniel Lis, Gajanan (Musa) Raveendran, Roya Rezaee and John-Charles Vaughan.
But for that goal to be reached, students actually have to vote in these elections.
Angela McLean, who is running as at-large student representative on the Senate, understands it might not be students’ top priority to vote.
“The first two years I’ve been here at Ryerson, I’ve realized that a lot of people don’t know what the Senate is or what it does,” said McLean. “That’s definitely a problem because the Senate does a lot of stuff for academics that is really important and affects all of us.”
Voting closes at 4:30 p.m. this Thursday. The results of both elections will be announced on Friday.
“This is the time for your voice to be heard. It’s not everyday that people get to elect students to represent them in such big decision making bodies,” said McLean. “So if you have the opportunity, take it.”
Brooklyn is a Toronto-based journalist with a bachelor degree in journalism from Ryerson University. She is currently a freelance reporter for a variety of news outlets, covering business, tech, lifestyle and entertainment.
Her goal is to provide an authentic voice to all her stories and push herself as a journalist each day. She is fascinated by all mediums of news, from print to digital to broadcast, and tries to evolve herself with each outlet.