With less than a month before Student Government’s election day, the SPARC and Grad Gold campaigns dropped out of the race and are running under other tickets.
Grad Gold, a ticket composed of LSU’s graduate students that runs each year, rarely offers its support to an undergraduate campaign. This year, Grad Gold isn’t merely endorsing an undergraduate ticket — it’s withdrawing its candidates and running them under another campaign, It’s Time.
Mia LeJeune, the presidential candidate for It’s Time ticket, said she has wanted to partner with Grad Gold since she started running.
“Graduate students are the foundation of LSU as a research institution,” LeJeune said. “They have so many issues specific to them, and we spent hours on Zoom calls with graduate students talking about plans to tackle those issues.”
During one of those Zoom meetings, LeJeune asked graduate Senator Jordan Landry if Grad Gold would consider joining her campaign. After an hour of deliberation with graduate students on Grad Gold’s ticket, Landry told LeJeune and her running mate Angelina Cantelli, “It’s time,” signifying the start of an historic merger.
“We’d been keeping our options open, but after meetings with It’s Time, the students with Grad Gold decided that Mia and Angelina are not only willing but able to get graduate-specific problems fixed,” Landry said.
Landry said that It’s Time understands the systems that can affect change, but they know when to defy those systems. He said that LeJeune’s connections to the Governor’s office combined with her fervor to fight for students gave graduate students the confidence they needed to join It’s Time.
“SG is supposed to fight for the issues of all students, not only with administration but with the state legislature,” Landry said. “We see them fighting for undergraduate students’ rights, but rarely, if ever, are graduate students involved in those processes. It’s Time has already gotten us involved.”
“We’re honored, to say the least,” Cantelli said. “It’s hard to get them on an undergraduate ticket, so we’re proud that they believe in our ability to serve them.”
Candidates who were running on the SPARC ticket will appear under the Unity ticket in the Spring election. Former SPARC presidential candidate Ethan Lauvray and vice presidential candidate Kalie Gonzales now serve as advisers to the Unity administration under Amina Messelhe and Preston White.
“During the NAACP debate, we realized SPARC and Unity had the same ideologies, goals and plans to implement them,” Gonzales said. “Ethan and I realized that we would be better together, that we shouldn’t spend time fighting each other if we have the same vision.”
Gonzales said she’s grateful that Messelhe and White opened up spots in their ticket for students who were running with SPARC.
“We wanted this merger to be as fair as possible,” she said. “We asked our staff if they wanted to continue under different leadership, and everyone who wanted to continue with Unity got the spots they wanted.”
“We’ve been talking to them because they’re people we believe in, and we didn’t want to push them in any direction,” Messelhe said. “But when they asked us to work together, we were super excited.”
Unity is working with its new members on initiatives like implementing a Black marketplace on campus to highlight Black businesses and getting pet waste stations put on campus for service animals.
“They’ve brought so many new ideas to our ticket already, and we’ve increased our manpower and support,” White said.
Lauvray said that the ideals laid out in SPARC’s campaign aren’t losing traction because of the merger. He said that SPARC will register as a student organization that will talk with student organizations and help them work on projects separately from Student Government.
“One thing Kalie and I heard when we were working on our campaign was that several student organizations don’t want to work with SG,” Lauvray said. “So we want to create a space where they can engage on campus and grow their ideas without the drama associated with SG. SPARC isn’t running a campaign, but our momentum doesn’t stop here.”
