From May 30th through June 2nd, students can vote for the University Student Council (USR). Vox interviewed the leading candidates of both participating parties. Hugo van Bree of AKKUraatd wants the university to be ‘a place for everyone’.

Spatial Planning student Hugo van Bree (24) has the ambition to change something about Radboud University’s current policy. After his job at the programme committee, he became a member of a political party and thanks to a friend eventually ended up at AKKUraatd. There he put himself forward as a candidate for the student fraction. Which number on the electoral list he wanted to be? Number one.

Immediately first on the list, that is quite something.

‘Yes, but I know for sure that this truly is my calling: I find it fun to do and I want to give all I have for a full year. When I put myself forward as candidate, I noted that I wouldn’t mind being first on the list. But I do find the team more important than the individual, so I also said that the spot could go to someone else. But now we’re here.’

What do you want to tackle?

‘The university needs to be a place for everyone. I do not mean that everyone simply needs to be able to take all courses, but that students can really study any way they want. We should not be pigeonholing. Someone who is unable to come to campus physically, should also be able to study. I also want students from all years to be more involved with the university.’

‘Sustainability does remain a very important subject for us’

How do you want to do that?

‘By making the introduction market more accessible to senior students. That can have really positive effects, because students can connect more with people in later study years and associations, and because the campus becomes livelier this way. That will cause students to feel less lonely – an important part of prevention when it comes to mental wellbeing – and they’ll be happier, which will improve their study results. That is fun for the university as well.’

Your election programme also pays a lot of attention to inclusion. For example, you want to make pronouns compulsory in the profiles of teachers and staff members on the website. What do you hope to achieve by this?

‘In society, there is a trend in the use of pronouns, and we think it is important to go along with that trend. This way, you make sure that everyone feels comfortable. It can be very annoying for someone to be addressed the wrong way. Adding pronouns is a small effort, but it can prevent a lot of trouble.’

Aren’t you afraid that students or staff members will feel some resistance and you will achieve the opposite?

‘I can imagine that it might cause resistance, but that is the case with any change you make. And you have to start somewhere. We hope that this will just create a bit of awareness.’

First on the list in your programme is sustainability. That seems like a rather strange priority for a political party that is there to improve the quality of education.

‘You shouldn’t see that as our main priority, because all our pillars are of equal importance to us. But sustainability does remain a very important subject for us. As a university, you simply have to do something about it, we think.’

‘We want to get rid of plastic packaging’

To what extent do you differ from asap in this respect?

‘Unique to us are the student gardener’s plan and the progressive approach. Such a student gardener would be responsible for the plants in the university buildings. This would give students more attention for greenery and create the involvement I mentioned earlier. We also want to get rid of plastic packaging and we want to increase the vegetarian options at campus facilities. There should be less meat at the university.’

According to you, more attention to privacy is important. Why?

‘As a student, you often work with personal data: you collect them for your thesis, for example, or you enter your own data in other surveys. However, we do not give this enough thought. You often don’t know where you can store the information from your thesis properly, or what happens to your data. That is why we want the education system to pay explicit attention to digital privacy, so that there is more awareness.’

A substantial programme with many goals. Will it all work?

‘Our goals are very ambitious, but this is what we stand for. First we focus on the campaign. What we are going to do exactly is still a secret, but our goal is also to win as many seats as possible.’