Micah Ryu is a fourth-year student from Innis College who is currently pursuing a double major in Economics and Linguistics with a minor in Political Science. He has served as an Academic Coordinator for the Korean Students’ Association and has been on the Ontario NDP Provincial Council.
Ryu believes that there are systemic injustices in student governance and that the remedy is to decentralize the UTSU by reducing the power of the executives and staff. He also wants to localize costs by having clubs run events in place of the UTSU and compensating them for it.
He’s proud that his slate, Reboot U of T, has come together without any existing networks or “institutional memory.”
Ryu wants to create a method through which students can directly influence the UTSU’s advocacy and political stances. Another goal is to provide professional faculty student governments the option to have a fee diversion agreement like the existing one between the Engineering Society and the UTSU, which is intended to prevent students from paying twice for the same or similar services.
“Building this campaign, we’ve been having to talk to a lot of people, trying to recruit them as candidates, and the sentiment that I had as an informed observer of student politics here at U of T… was echoed by a lot of students that don’t pay a lot of attention to student politics. It seems that everyone knows that the system is broken and we want to provide… an alternative option to try to fix it,” he said.
— With files from Alex McKeen and Kaitlyn Simpson
