With the University still in search of a new president, student organizations from all over the campus have started the #MySruPresident on twitter to decide what kind of President SRU needs.
The hashtag was started primarily due to the failure of the presidential search last semester. According to Dallas Kline, vice president of student outreach, APSCUF and SGA wanted to join forces to get more students involved and to make sure their voices are heard during the second attempt of the campaign.
“APSCUF wanted to get 3000 students to get involved, which SGA decided to help out with,” Kline said. “We thought, how can we get this many students to participate? So, we decided to create the #MySRUPresident.”
Kline said that there are many goals of the hashtag, with the awareness being paramount.
“We wanted students to know that the search was happening and that it was coming quickly. They only gave us a week or two notice of when the candidates would be here. This got people talking about the search,” Kline said.
The second goal is that SGA and APSCUF want the students to care. The hashtag allowed each student to think about what they want to see in the next president.
Kline said, “Through this we are hoping that students would be more willing to participate to show these candidates and the search committee what we expect in our next president.”
Lastly, with all the tweets and paper forms filled out, SGA and APSCUF can present the data to the search committee to show them what students want to see in a candidate. The two groups hope that the candidate the COT sends forward will match the results of the students.
SGA and APSCUF have had hundreds of forms filled out to present to the Council of Trustees and the Search Committee. The first that was launched about the campaign received 16 retweets and has 8,571 impressions on Twitter with 1,669 engagements. The hashtag has been tweeted about 90 times and has also been shared on Snapchat and Instagram.
SGA is attending all sessions to be able to represent the students’ voice, and according to Kline are hoping that students come to each session as well. Kline said that even those outside the campus community, including Slippery Rock Mayor, Jondavid Longo, have taken notice of the hashtag.
“We are glad that everyone has jumped on board from students, to clubs and orgs, to staff and faculty, even the university official social media pages have started to use it,” Kline said.
