#CandidateSpeak : On the Role of The AAA President

Transcribed below are answers given by the candidates in the Presidential Debate and Discussion organized by The Edict in collaboration with the Ashoka Alumni Association.

What do you think is the role of the President of the Alumni Association? What will be your role in the next two years? What will be your first action item/executive order as President?

Ashweetha Shetty

I believe that any leadership position has to set the culture and the values of the institution. So I believe in the last two years we have not done much on understanding what is our shared culture and what is our value and what we stand for as a community. I think my role as a President is mostly on that- really understanding what is the value system we hold for ourselves and on that basis I wrote my whole manifesto.

My executive decision, if I become the President, will definitely be reaching out to all the alumni and really coming up with a solution to understand the values we hold. For example, transparency, diversity, inclusivity are the values I feel are already there. What more values are there? How can we make decisions for the future? I think that’s the role of a President and that will be my priority.

Jasmine Luthra

So how I see the role of the President is to sort of set the broad vision, set the broad direction in which the association is moving. Secondly, as an association we are dealing with three stakeholders. One is the University. Second is the community. Third is the outside world. For me, I see the President as setting the ethos and the relationship between these three communities and managing these three stakeholders and making sure how to keep everyone engaged. The beauty of our community is the love and the vibe that we share. How do we harness that, how do we harness our diversity and collective experiences and take it forward for each one of us. In the next two years, there is a two-fold role for the President. One is that the first Council has already done a lot of work. So taking that forward, at the same time, there were some lapses and gaps and issues that have come up in the last two years, how to address those and keep everyone engaged and set the tone for the future.

My first executive order would be to first to take forward from where the council left which is at the last weekender these two task forces were announced- the diversity increasing task force and the gender and sexual harassment task-force and the charter of these two task-forces have been in the making. So my first executive order would be to launch those two task-forces and get them started.

Lav Kanoi

So a couple of other candidates have mentioned this. The Alumni Association is positioned between various stakeholders. The first and foremost is the Alumni Body, then is the University and then you might say is the larger world. But within the University as well there are multiple (as it were) stakeholders- existing student body, administration, faculty and such. The role of the President as I see it would be to first and foremost to build consensus in a participatory manner about the scope of the Association. What does it mean to say that the Association mediates between these stakeholders? What are the different areas that the Association can actually effect action upon and where can it actually speak, what should be the protocols of speaking, how do we build those systems in place?

As a result then, I think the first executive order is to define the channels by which this would happen. This would involve for starters the communication protocols, both for sending messages out to the larger community and for inviting opinions in a structured cohesive constructive manner to be able to arrive at a largely consensus. The larger role of the President of course to my mind the Manifesto role descriptions have already defined this is to represent the Association but more importantly I think its about continuing to bring the community together. My personal point of view is that the President should be able to personalize what we are calling the family of Ashoka. So it’s about creating this family feeling and bringing everyone together in this respect.

Parushya

The role of President, as I have been able to understand, is that of a facilitator and someone who sets the vision of the community and the Alum Association. Every other individual, every person in the Ashokan Community. In the end it shouldn’t be something where only a particular view is harnessing more traction. Getting a facilitator role is the prime importance we should place on a President’s order.

Now about the executive order. I think something that was mentioned yesterday that did move a lot of us was the mail by the alums about the gender and sexual harassment issue on campus. While there is a case of prerogatives where the university stand and where the alum Association stand. But even in the case of alums the first thing would be how do we build a support system? How do we set things right on campus? A director from the alum council going ahead and involving with the issues raised on campus- that would be the first step I would really want to take there. The CASH has to be strengthened by the involvement of the alumnus. Someone from one of the batches mentioned that right now whether there is CASH or broader community, we do need a lot of training dealing with sexual harassment cases. So I think going ahead and involving the alumni who have the training and experience would be the first priority.

Simran Rana

I think as the President of the Alumni Association, my role would be one to really set the tone in terms of what the Alumni see themselves play in our organization. I feel that we don’t understand our responsibilities and the roles that alumni can play in building Ashoka, and must set a strong base on what we can and cannot do as Alumni and how we can better contribute to our community. There are things that we can’t change and what those things are needs to be more clear.

I feel that one thing I would like to do from the word go is to try and have a conversation with every alumnus possible to really understand what they understand by being part of the Alum Association and what they think it means to be an alumnus and what they think the Association does, because I feel there is a lot of mismatch in the two. So one is to really clear the air I feel that there is still some confusion as to what the Alum Association can do.

Gaurav Mohta

I think the role of the President of the AAA is primarily that of a builder as well as that of a hustler. Consensus- builder because the President needs to keep being a hustler throughout the process and at the same time ensure that there is effective communication happening. I use the word hustler because a President should do whenever whatever wherever is required to help other members of the council to function more effectively. Absorbing pressure. I think the role of a President is to help his team function more effectively. That’s how I’d define the role of the next council.

Things I’d like to do are strong integration between programs at Ashoka and between different batches. I think one of the things that has not been done effectively so far is the inter-batch and inter-group connect. If you look at the Whatsapp group, the UGs are not present. If you look at the mailing list, it’s hard to reach out to the UGs. Being in the first batch, I’m not connected to those in the 2016, 2017 batches. And I’m one of the most connected people in my batch and if I’m not connected, then that’s an issue. So this is one of the first things that I’d like to do as part of the council.

We are deeply thankful to Vedhika Anoora Krishnakumar from the YIF’18 batch for transcribing these answers.