The FGCU Student Government President and Vice President spent the summer preparing for incoming students and working to uphold the three pillars they committed to when campaigning for their positions.
SG President Emory Cavin and Vice President Dayton Buxton have been working with the FGCU Board of Trustees to establish a legislation that will contain any public visitor on campus using a microphone device to display their message to the Veterans Pavilion on the library lawn, which would include the campus preacher. They see this as a way to provide a quieter and more respectful environment for students who may be walking to class with these loudspeakers on the pathways.
“It’ll be easier to avoid him in the future, which is really exciting,” Cavin said. “I mean, it’s not a final solution, but it’s a really good first step and I’m working with President Timur on seeing if we have more options to go beyond that.”
This was one of the points he included in his campaign when running for the presidential position.
Cavin and Buxton also took the time to attend any possible orientation tabling sessions. Between the two of them, they were able to attend almost every session, which they saw as an opportunity to “welcome a whole new class of eagles,” as Cavin said.
“They know that they have us as a resource, now, and that reciprocity, that relationship can be there going in both directions, and we can get involved with them just as much as they can with us because we’ve taken the time to get ourselves acquainted with them and actually start that foundation,” Buxton said.
Buxton was appointed and confirmed by the Student Government Senate in April, after the regular elections due to the vice president-elect stepping down from the position. She said the position was hard to adjust to at first due to joining the team later in the term, but said that once she adjusted to the position, she now feels confident in the decisions she is making.
“So that was a little bit of a struggle in the beginning, but it was a lot of working on myself to make sure that I was confident in the choices that I was making right off the bat, not having the transition period and not really having a firm direction,” she said. “But once I, like I said, got confident in myself, I think it was something that I could pick up and actually really keep that wheel turning effectively.”
Cavin is keeping the pillars of his campaign in the front of his mind as he goes into this semester. One of the things he is currently working on is increasing BIPOC representation in student government. He expects to have a full Cabinet soon as he sees applications coming in for the current vacant positions. Before the semester started, they had 21 vacant seats in the Senate.
“Right now, we have Senate vacancies, but we’re actually filling them up really quickly, which is really exciting, and we’ve seen a lot of diverse candidates come through that pipeline. So I’m really happy to see the people that we’re bringing on to the Senate right now, but I do want to try to see if there’s anything systemic that we need to look into, to kind of solidify that into the future years,” he said.
In the first few weeks of the semester, Cavin and Buxton planned on strengthening their team and setting a cohesive standard for the rest of the year.
“In terms of, you know, behind the scenes during the first few weeks, we’re going to be creating a cohesive team within our branch, because we’re going to have several new Cabinet members that [were not yet] appointed over the summer. And we’re going to be working together creating a good positive work environment to set ourselves up for success in the future for the rest of the year,” Cavin said.
A petition was brought to their attention to bring solar benches to campus. These would be a sustainable way for students to be able to sit outside, covered from the sun, and still be able to charge their phones or laptops.
“The solar bench project started through a student reaching out to us and so we’re more than willing to see those things come in,” Buxton said. “That’s what we’re here for is to elevate students’ voices and to see what projects are they passionate about, what things do they want to see that are physical, tangible, that can come to campus that we can, through our means, mobilize our efforts to make those things happen for students?”
Cavin and Buxton have been working closely with the newly elected 26th president of FGCU, Dr. Aysegul Timur to work together on being involved on campus and making sure students know they are accessible to make sure they know their voices are heard.
“Though I will say that something that I have seen that’s really exciting about President Timur is that she seems very interested in getting student input in general about how she’s doing, how she can communicate better. Things that are important to students. She’s been asking us a lot of questions about those things,” Cavin said. “I think that the relationship that we have already established so far is a really high quality one that I think is gonna serve us well through the rest of the year.”
