The Daily Illini sat down with new student trustee Mike Cunningham at the Illini Union and had a conversation about his views and goals for his term. Cunningham, junior in LAS, is originally from River Grove, Ill. His term starts July 1, but he said he has already been setting up meetings with different student leaders and administrators.

The Daily Illini: How would you characterize yourself?

Mike Cunningham: Energetic. Definitely proactive — through my experiences, I would call myself a leader. Outgoing. I love to joke around a lot. I’m not too serious all the time, but when I need to be, I can be. I like to have a good time; I like to work hard, play hard, sit down, have a good time, but at the same time get the work done.

DI: What’s your past history with politics?

MC: Sophomore year, I sat on the Illinois Student Senate’s internal affairs committee and its subcommittee on campus safety, and the past two summers, I interned for Cook County Commissioner Peter Silvestri and at the County Building. 

DI: What’s the first initiative you’d like to undertake in office?

MC: I want to create a bunch of ad-hoc committees (of RSOs) because technically there’s no governance underneath me. … I do want to create different focus groups … from different aspects of all University’s culture … and just get them together and start addressing the real issues that their members have concerns about. … I want to really create a culture where all RSOs can have a part in this. Obviously there’s no real way to sit down with 1,000 leaders, but if we can selectively pick different people from different aspects and bring them together, we can really start looking at holistic issues.

DI: Given that the administration has a pretty strong position on nonrefundable fees, how do you plan to go about moving toward refundable fees?

MC: That’s something I’m going to need to sit down and talk to them about face-to-face and ask why. I think some are pretty black-and-white. I’m not going to sit here and say, “Okay, the student transportation fee should be refundable,” because then everybody’s going to say, “I don’t use this,” but hop on the bus anyway. Something as simple as McKinley — if you’re not going to use this insurance system, then you literally can’t go to McKinley, so that’s a little more black-and-white. If we can’t get them all, I want to get as many as we can.

DI: You mentioned addressing real issues that RSOs are having on campus. What are some examples of those?

MC: I think one of the biggest common misconceptions is campus safety — a lot of people feel that sometimes the campus isn’t safe. I honestly would beg to differ. Just talking with the U of I police chief and the Urbana police chief, (I think) we have one of the safest campuses. I think they do an outstanding job, it’s an outstanding law enforcement agency with some of the best officers we have. I just think people need to be more aware. There needs to be more Illini Alerts, even if it’s just a backpack stolen at the Union or somebody lost their phone at the UGL. It may not have to be an alert, but maybe on a monthly basis, there’s an email sent out. … Academic programming is an issue. If you want to double-major in different colleges here, it’s one of the hardest universities to do so. I understand that we’re a very large institution, but I don’t think that creating a barrier and making it as tedious as possible is the proper way to go about that because the more well-rounded and better the students are, the better prepared for the workforce and the more they’re going to be able to give back and make a better name for U of I. We need to make that easier for our students.

DI: I’m sure you saw that the Chief referendum results were released — where do you stand on the mascot issue?

MC: I think we need to recognize that this was the NCAA. If we disobey them without proper cause, we no longer have the right to participate in post-season athletics. I think that would be detrimental to the University’s culture and spirit. … As of right now, I’m not in support of finding another mascot … I think we need to focus on our academics, our research, our educational policy and institutional matters that are internal or external, like involving more alumni, too. Those are more important than finding a mascot right now, and that’s simply because of the fact I’m satisfied with being the U of I Fighting Illini, and I can almost guarantee that a lot of other students would be, too.

Tyler can be reached at [email protected]