Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity. Any grammatical errors should be attributed to The Record editors and not to the candidates.
What made you want to run for co-presidents for Student Government in the first place?
Diego: We were actually thinking about running together during our 1L year, but other opportunities presented themselves, and we thought we would do those first.
Azucena: I’m co-president of La Alianza this year, and I knew that I couldn’t do both.
Diego: And I dove deeply into TFing and the National Security Journal. Azucena and I said that we would do those things first. Then, we sat down a month ago and said, “Well, it’s time.” It’s been in the back of our minds for a long time.
What drew you to student government more broadly?
Azucena: Seeing how many issues are on campus and how hard it is to get access to the administration regularly as a normal student. I feel like student government has a lot of power in that there are regularly scheduled meetings where you can push for the things that students want. We wanted to be the bridge to close that gap.
Diego: Being on Zoom created deep desire to build community and for law school to be more fun.
Azucena: Law school is missing a lot of [fun]. We’ve heard from all of our friends about how there are pockets of fun, but they expected the experience to be more joyous. And I think that’s an area where student government can step in and where it hasn’t historically the best job at doing that. Without community, everything else is harder to build up.
Much of your platform deals with ongoing, serious issues, such as SPIF, LIPP, and summer contributions. How do you plan on creating spaces for students to submit ongoing concerns?
Azucena: One of our big efforts will be to restart the cross-affinity group coalition. Prior to our time here, there were two representatives from every affinity group who were able to meet and communicate about things that were going on. The affinity group members who were part of this coalition received feedback from all of their students and brought it into this space. A lot of these affinity groups share the same concerns, and HLS capitalizes on separating us as much as possible so that these discussions don’t occur. It’s harder to fight alone, so creating those spaces with regular meetings is one of our priorities.
Diego: I think we’ll also have the challenge of communicating with the student body. We’re going to have to figure out this new email policy. [Editors’ note: Dean Ball has recently instituted a policy under which student government representatives must clear their schoolwide communications with his office before sending the emails out]. One thing is that we’re big social media queens, we want to leverage social media. But we’re going to have to be more creative about how we communicate to the student body.
Azucena: We’re also really big on transparency. There is a lot of gaslighting that occurs from the administration. We take a lot of notes, and we plan on doing that and being fully transparent abut the whole student body so they don’t feel like we’re hiding anything. I think everyone should be part of this conversation. So we’re big on institutional record-keeping and publicizing everything.
You both had leadership positions in other student organizations. What lessons are you taking from those experiences?
Diego: From our experience as section committee co-chairs and my time with the NSJ, we’re very keen on teambuilding. Sure, it’s the co-presidents who set the tone, but there are committee chairs, reps, and teams within those committees.
Azucena: At the end of the day, we think that everyone has to buy into this and work, and it’s hard to do if you don’t feel like you can lean on each other. So we plan on setting the tone from the start, because that goes a long way. And that work is going to start now—literally next week. We want to be as ready as possible for the ball so we can get started with all the things that we want, but we also know there are a lot of things that have to be done beforehand.
What do you anticipate will be the hardest part of your platform to implement?
Azucena: The push-and-pull between SPIF, LIPP, and the summer contribution policy. Those topics are very in conversation with one another. And even in the past week and a half, we’ve received feedback about how we plan to approach those. There’s a sentiment that if you decrease the summer contribution policy, students will be further incentivized to pursue BigLaw instead of going into public interest, when HLS already does that enough. So making sure that measures to support public interest students—namely, SPIF and LIPP—are put in conversation with the very real detriment of the summer contribution policy, especially for low-income students whose families depend on them.
Diego: Community is one that we can hit really hard next year and that we can be successful in. The other plans are multi-year, including the SPIF/LIPP issue and mental health support.
Undergirding all of these issues is the lack of student involvement in the decision-making process. If you involve students in the decisionmaking process and you disclose how you make decisions, students are more receptive to that. I think the administration thinks that they lose if they do that, but actually they would gain a lot if they just got students more involved—or even if they just had those conversations and explained their constraints.
Are there any other goals that you hope you’ll accomplish within your tenure?
Azucena: We think we can increase the amount of money available for faculty to meet with students for lunch outside of class. We had a professor last year who did a good job of inviting students for small-group lunches over Zoom. That money should be available, and it should be used up. We want to push for that and set up a culture where the expectation is for professors to be interacting with students a bit more.
More broadly, a huge shortcoming this year was the fact that funds were frozen until late September. Alianza weren’t able to throw events until September. What do you do with all of your 1Ls who are excited to be here, but we don’t have the money to do anything? The money should be available to welcome everyone back on campus early on.
What are your thoughts on the amount of support for upper-level JD students?
Diego: One thing that has been on my mind has been how the school goes about advising students regarding course selection. I want to think about how to improve advising resources. We could pass a resolution to hire a specific individual dedicated to doing academic supervising. There are other models for faculty to help guide students as well. Course selection is messy, so maybe having the registrar having a much more public persona. At the very least, we can think about what the best intervention for that is.
Azucena: In 2L and 3L, a lot of the burden of supporting students falls on affinity groups. The truth is, student group leaders didn’t receive a lot of support this year. It was a lot of work. It felt isolating. But we had a really productive conversation with Dean Monroe yesterday, and we do think that student leaders will be better prepared and supported, and that we’ll see DOS lifting them up instead of pushing back.