At the end of each year, Stanford Politics highlights 10 undergraduates of impact, the Politicos. In the past, these Politicos have hailed from campus media organizations, activist groups, student government and more. This year, we interviewed a shortlist of over 30 students (selected from an even greater number of nominations by the student body) before our editorial board decided to recognize the following list of ten individuals and groups — profiled below by members of the staff of Stanford Politics — as this year’s most influential under- graduates at Stanford.
As a non-partisan publication, Stanford Politics does not endorse any particular agenda held by any of the Politicos.
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01. Shanta Katipamula (Senior, Environmental Systems Engineering)
As ASSU Executive, Shanta Katipamula has been an extraordinarily productive advocate for the needs of the student body. Most importantly, she prioritized using the ASSU Executive Cabinet’s power to advocate for both undergraduate and graduate students. One obvious way of doing this was choosing to run with Rosie Nelson, a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education, as the ASSU Executive Vice President. Additionally, their cabinet was made up of a diverse group of students from all over campus. The pair have been uniquely successful in tackling a variety of issues, including Title IX advocacy, FLI work, CAPS reform, and tackling the graduate student affordability issues. One particular reason for their success is Shanta’s extensive knowledge of university processes and levers of power. Shanta has been focused on appointing students as voting members of university committees, submitting official comments when given the opportunity, and recommending budget changes in the most important areas for the next fiscal year (for example, CAPS staff, increased AADS, and funding for OAE). Shanta has also led the way nationally among student body presidents in protesting and commenting on the proposed Title IX changes being pursued by the U.S. Department of Education. Over the last few years, Stanford Politics has emphasized the role of the ASSU Executive in curating institutional knowledge, and building long-lasting relationships with administrators it works closely with. Shanta elevates this knowledge and these relationships. She came into the role with solid working relationships and as a trusted student advisor to Vice Provost for Student Affairs Susie Brubaker-Cole and Provost Drell. Those relationships have only strengthened over the year. Shanta has normalized the practice of administrators seeking the ASSU Executive’s advice on budget matters, just one example of Shanta’s professionalism, poise, and effective advocacy. For her institutional influence in a complicated role, we recognize Shanta Katipamula as our #1 Stanford Politico for 2019.
02. Maia Brockbank (Sophomore, Political Science)
As Sexual Violence Prevention co-chair for the ASSU Executive Cabinet, Maia Brockbank took the lead in advocating for student survivors on campus. She fought to extend the amount of time victims are allowed spend with their lawyer, restructure Stanford’s Title IX unanimity requirement, allow students to file complaints for sexual harassment, and ensure rape kits are available at Stanford Hospital. She advocated for more transparency around every step of the Title IX process. Notably, she spearheaded the effort to ensure the administration enacted their promises around the AAU Campus Climate survey. She encouraged 1100 other Stanford students to write comments to the U.S. Department of Education about the importance of Title IX, and created a comment-writing toolkit that was used by at least fifty other schools to invite their students to participate.
03. Jianna So (Sophomore, Product Design)
Jianna So’s advocacy as a
04. Araceli Garcia (Junior, Chicanx/Latinx Studies)
Araceli served as an Ethnic Theme Associate in Casa Zapata this year, and led the campaign to fight for equal pay for all student residential staff members, whether they are Residential Assistants, Peer Health Educations, or Ethnic Theme Associates. She and other leaders have met with the ResX task force frequently over the past two years. These meetings resulted in a $1000 pay increase for Ethnic Theme Associates next year, and full pay equity in the year following next. The Ethnic Theme Associate campaign sparked campus conversations about racialized and feminized labor, localizing a national conversation about valuing all labor equally. Additionally, she serves as one of the students on the steering committee working on reforming the Cardinal Conversations speakers program. On the committee, she serves as a vocal advocate for communities of color who have felt unheard and unsupported when controversial speakers are invited to speak on campus.
05. Jeffrey Rodriguez (Junior, Political Science)
Jeffrey was a behind-the-scenes leader making waves on behalf of the FLI community this year. He served as the FLI Office Special Projects co-chair, the ASSU executive cabinet’s FLI Community Outreach Director, and a leader of the FLI Conference workshop committee. Jeffrey has focused his efforts on tackling expensive, burdensome course fees and material costs from multiple angles, meeting directly with administrators, writing policy proposals, collecting and presenting data on the issue. He’s part of a team of leaders continuing to press for an official FLI community center, ensuring food security for all students during the school year and breaks, and increasing the ability of all students to participate in dorm activities. Jeffrey is certainly not the only leader advocating for the FLI community, and he’d like to thank Josh Pe, Ian Macato, Mustafa Khan, Jessie Seng, Becky Liang, and Zak Sheriff, and other FLI community student leaders for their work. But this award recognizes his quiet leadership on issues that influence the daily lives of FLI students at Stanford.
06. Antonia Hellman (Sophomore, Political Science & Economics) and Christina Li (Sophomore, Economics)
Stanford students have a particularly poor record of voter turnout. Less than one-fifth of students voted in the 2014 midterms, placing Stanford far below the national average. Antonia Hellman and Christina Li resolved to change this trend coming into the 2018-2019 school year
07. Rebecca Behrens (Senior, Atmosphere & Energy)
After four years and a lot of patience, Rebecca Behrens engineered a strategy to get Fossil Free Stanford’s divestment request back in front of the Stanford Investment Committee. In 2014, Stanford divested from coal-related investments but announced later that they would not divest from oil and gas. Rebecca helped Fossil Free get back on Stanford’s agenda by focusing the group’s efforts on the long-range planning process comment period held last year and the school’s re-examination of its divestment standards. Over 450 faculty members have signed onto the official letter supporting divestment, and in last year’s referendum, over 75% of Stanford students support the effort. Fossil Free held a large rally during Admit Weekend to mark the official resubmission of their divestment request and report. We anticipate that Fossil Free will be vocal next year in building student pressure to influence the committee’s recommendation.
08. Gabe Rosen (Senior, Public Policy) & Antoni Rytel (Sophomore, Economics & Computer Science)
Antoni Rytel and Gabe Rosen are being jointly recognized for their efforts at increasing Stanford voter turnout. As a Senator, Gabe has been recognized for his deep institutional knowledge and ability to maintain ASSU’s financial viability. This year, his most important initiative was passing and instituting a mandatory voter registration course hold on every student’s Axess account in the fall, with the support of Provost Drell.
Antoni Rytel is the current Deputy Director of GovTech Polska in the Polish Prime Minister’s Office on top of his full undergraduate course load and activism He negotiated and created a program that works with European governments to fund Stanford students interested in participating in any European Union or national election to travel down to the consulate in LA, vote, and fly back, same day.
09. Carson Smith (Senior, Political Science)
As co-chair of the Stanford American Indian Organization, a Social Justice Fellow at the Native American Cultural Center, and a member of the ASSU Constitutional Council, Carson Smith has focused on bringing techniques and practices to resolve conflict used in native communities to campus. Currently, anyone in the Native community at Stanford can request to go through a Peacemaking process with a trained facilitator, for interpersonal issues and when handling larger issues within the community. This reform was put into practice when Carson facilitated a conflict resolution process between members of the Junipero Serra renaming committee and members of the Native community. When the decision about the renamings became available, the committee cited the Peacemaking circle as a critical part of the decision-making process.
09. Marisol Zarate (Senior, Political Science)
Marisol Zarate served in the ASSU Executive cabinet as the Director of Community Centers and Diversity. In this role, she helped begin to institutionalize diversity training for Stanford professors, helping faculty to understand the experience of their students in the classroom. Zarate is also working to evaluate possible ways to reform the Acts of Intolerance process, in order to mitigate future interpersonal conflict within dorm communities. She serves as a Residential Assistant in Zapata, was part of the Ethnic Theme Associate equal-pay campaign, and helped plan teach-ins and the May Day rally as a member of SCOPE.
Honorable Mentions
SERJ – Students for Environmental and Racial Justice
Formed as a coalition of members from different environmental spaces on campus, including Fossil Free Stanford, Students for a Sustainable Stanford, and SCOPE, SERJ has identified itself as the foremost group tackling environmental justice through student action. This spring, they circulated a petition calling for the hiring of five new faculty focused on environmental justice issues, which culminated in a large rally in White Plaza.
Matt Wiggler
Matt Wiggler used his term on the Senate to focus on anti-semitism, veterans issues, and ASSU election reform. Most notably, he developed a new discussion model in response to Cardinal Conversations, called Deliberative Dinners. Through his research, he identified six principles he believes foster safe political conversations in a polarized environment: community, continuity, inclusion, equality, accountability and a specific conversation topic. Wiggler’s deliberate attempts to reform sources of campus political dialogue and the success of Deliberative Dinners are hopeful signs for the future of the campus.
Hannah Zimmerman
Hannah is well-known around campus for her national political work: she played a large role in youth organizing on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, and serves in her local county government as the youngest elected official in the state of New York. On campus, Hannah has taken a more academic approach to advocacy. With the help of her advisor Bruce Cain, Hannah helped teach several classes this year, teaching students to become organizers and mobilize around political issues. Topics of these classes included labor organizing, (where students learned about and worked to influence the labor negotiations currently happening between the university and the local SEIU chapter) and campaigning in the 2018 midterm elections. We were impressed by her unique approach to advocacy and hope these classes will continue to help Stanford students learn about and pursue active participation in social and political movements.
PAST POLITICOS
2017 – 2018
2016 – 2017
2015 – 2016
2014 – 2015
The editorial board for this feature includes Daniela González, Jake Dow, and Maddie McConkey. This piece was coordinated by Maddie McConkey. Additional staff that contributed interviewing and profile-writing include Harrison Bronfeld, Allie Dow, Nathalie Kiersznowski, Thomas Pfeiffer, Lucas Rodriguez, and Julian Watrous.