Ali Bhatti and Chichi Makasi are putting Trojans’ needs and administrative transparency at the forefront of their Undergraduate Student Government campaign.
The two are running on a ticket that includes four central tenets: Advocacy and Listening, Action and Leadership, Accountability and Leveraging and Aligning and Leaning.
“That’s kind of the core of our platform — more transparency, getting more student voices involved and hearing [from] students about what they want,” said Bhatti.
The campaign began with a rocky start. Bhatti’s original vice presidential running mate, Parliamentary Secretary of USG, Luisa Luo, dropped out of the race on January 27, citing personal issues related to her status as an international student.
However, one of the items on Bhatti and Makasi’s USG ticket, “Know Your Rights” legal workshops designed for international and LGBTQIA+ students, aims to help Trojans like Luo.
“It motivated me to keep running,” said Bhatti. “I definitely was not going to drop out because of a very unfortunate circumstance that me and Luisa were fighting to protect international students against.”
Bhatti, who is currently a USG senator, said that one of the reasons that he chose Makasi as his new running mate was because of her status and experience as an international student from Canada.
Makasi is a sophomore majoring in pharmacology and drug development. She is also the current president of a USC Panhellenic sorority, Alpha Phi. She said that because of her work with Alpha Phi, she was already familiar with the candidates for USG president, vice president and senate.
“It has definitely been a game of catch-up for me, for sure,” said Makasi. “But it’s interesting to come into this process actually being a candidate of the race and seeing it from a different perspective — I’m enjoying it so far,” she said.
Bhatti and Makasi both emphasized the importance of monetary transparency between the university administration and the student body as one of their main goals if elected as USG president and vice president.
Organizations around campus have felt the effects of USC’s budget cuts as the university has tried to compensate for their $158 million spending deficit during the 2023-2024 fiscal year — USC has slashed funding for student organizations, cut certain tuition assistance benefits for its faculty and staff, lowered the amount of money given in National Merit scholarships and reduced the hours for on-campus libraries.
“At the end of the day, it’s really what you’re paying for, and you deserve to get back for the funds that you’re putting into your tuition,” said Makasi.
Despite the budget cuts in student activities and scholarships, USC tuition increased by nearly 5% this academic school year. The university also received $802 million in philanthropic donations from the 2024 fiscal year, marking its most lucrative fundraising year since 2016.
“We want to work with the new administration to increase opportunities for transparency from USC regarding where all of our money is going, what programs it’s going to and how we can help better increase student programs specifically for students like the dining hall and the libraries,” said Bhatti.
To increase financial transparency, Bhatti and Makasi plan to form a Financial Aid Advisory Committee with faculty, students and administrators to facilitate conversations about tuition increases and the university’s finances.
On Bhatti and Makasi’s ticket are other ways to improve Trojans’ daily lives such as introducing more customizable dining hall options, creating a free laundry policy for Trojans in on-campus housing, getting more vending machines in university libraries and booking more high-profile musical artists for USC-sponsored concerts.
The two have worked together before — they helped to establish the USC chapter of the Mustard Seed Project, a California-wide organization that volunteers with unhoused communities. Makasi and Bhatti both serve on the executive board of the organization.
Another priority on Bhatti and Makasi’s ticket is to improve the recognition process for Recognized Student Organizations (RSOs) by Campus Activities, a process required for RSOs to manage their funding and use university facilities. Earlier this school year, RSOs experienced difficulty in the recognition process with little communication from Campus Activities, including the Mustard Seed Project.
“I can definitely tell you getting in that application was like going in circles with campus activities… We had hour-long calls with campus activities, making the whole process, in my opinion, significantly more difficult than it had to be,” said Makasi.
Makasi said that their plan to simplify the RSO recognition process is to make the application more streamlined and straightforward.
Their plan also includes “discounts for getting venues and rooms on campus” and getting more resources “to host activities and to do outreach in the greater L.A. area,” according to Makasi.
A more technological item on Bhatti and Makasi’s ticket is the introduction of ChatGPT Edu to USC, a version of the AI platform “built for universities to responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations,” according to the program’s creator, OpenAI. However, neither Bhatti nor Makasi believe that students should rely on ChatGPT for academic success.
Bhatti pointed out that Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, has already partnered with OpenAI to introduce AI resources to students.
“Right now as an institution for higher education, we have to think about the future careers for our students, and that definitely involves AI,” he said.
Both candidates will participate in the USG debate on February 11 from 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. in TCC 450, with Annenberg Media and Daily Trojan leadership moderating.
“I think that’s what really sets us apart from other candidates — we’re a very expansive platform and we want to go directly to students and serve the students and have them know that USG is serving them,” Bhatti said. “That’s really our platform.”