Cruz/Macgregor-Dennis Announce Chief of Staff and Answer Questions About Transition

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New ASSU Executives Michael Cruz and Stewart Macgregor-Dennis are appointing Emma Ogiemwanye ’12 as their Chief of Staff. Ogiemwanye is currently at Stanford in Washington, but will presumably be Skyping into transition meetings in preparation for the selection of the rest of the Cabinet and the beginning of the Executive’s efforts to complete all of the action items on their platform. Ogiemwanye is majoring in Urban Studies and has been involved both on- and off-campus in social justice work at the intersection of poverty, education, and criminal justice. On campus, she also worked most recently with the previous ASSU Service Chair to restructure the ASSU Service Ambassadors program for freshmen. In an email, she said, “When someone has a great idea that could impact the rest of campus (and even the greater community) I want ASSU to be what they think of to help them scale up and sustain. On our side, my goal is to give more students more of what they want and evoke a culture of compassion and engagement on campus through what we do.” It’s interesting to see the mention of the broader community, especially given her prior involvement – we’ll see if this Executive ends up having a more off-campus mission than has been originally hinted at in their platform.

Cruz and Macgregor-Dennis also responded to several questions over email about their vision for their Cabinet and the transition. Their answers (in full and unedited) are below.

**1. What is your vision for the Cabinet? What size are you envisioning?**
> We envision an agile and adaptable Cabinet that can need find and respond to a variety of needs, both ones that we can see now and ones that might arise in the future.
**2. Considering the size of your existing platform, how much independence are you going to allow your Cabinet members to pursue other ideas?**
> We want our Cabinet members both have the freedom to pursue their own ideas and initiatives and are excited by the ones we have proposed.
**3. How will you be transitioning from the Cardona/Cruz administration? How will you build on Michael’s (and Stewart’s) existing relationships with administrators?**
> Transition between the Cardona/Cruz/Wharton administration and the Cruz/Macgregor-Dennis administration is going very smoothly; Angelina, Michael and Stewart are working closely together to shape and strengthen our relationships with administrators, faculty and the greater Stanford community.
There’s honestly not a lot of substance here, most notably the lack of an attempt to put bounds on the size of the Cabinet. I didn’t expect much out of the other two questions (what else can you say besides that “transition is going very smoothly?”), but it will be interesting to see the actual balance between independent initiatives and an attempt to deliver on completing every “action plan” on the original [114 point Cruz/Macgregor-Dennis platform](http://blog.stanfordreview.org/2011/04/01/cruzmacgregor-dennis-releases-far-reaching-campaign-platform/).