Jaiya Panchi is running uncontested for the role of AMS VP academic and university affairs (AUA). We think you should vote for her, though we were unimpressed by the many repeated promises and notable omissions of her platform.
Editor's Note: The new Editorial Board is a pilot project launched for this year's elections. From now on, that term refers to the group of journalists who write their views as a collective in the newspaper's name, linking us with centuries of newspaper tradition.
Our pilot Editorial Board consisted of Features Editor Elena Massing, Politics Columnist Maya Tommasi and AMS Columnist Quyen Schroeder, who served as the board's chair. Over the past few weeks, they contacted every candidate, held interviews, attended debates and studied platforms before deliberating among themselves who The Ubyssey will endorse. Their deliberations were private and isolated from the rest of the newsroom, including from me, the Opinion Editor, until drafts had been filed. Like all of our journalists, they practiced according to the Canadian Association of Journalists' Ethics Guidelines.
— Spencer Izen, Deputy Managing Editor and Opinion Editor
Panchi repeatedly emphasized two overarching goals of her platform. The first is continuity. Panchi plans to continue the advocacy of current VP AUA Zarifa Nawar, of whom Panchi is a self-described “fangirl.” This continuity campaign will ensure that initiatives like the exam database and sustained food security funding are “pushed across the finish line.”
The second overarching goal is ambition. We certainly agree that her campaign is focused on continuity with Nawar. Yet, we didn’t find much ambition in her platform. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: an advocacy role like VP AUA requires consistent pressure across multiple years, not just a couple months of passion.
Her campaign goals are an amalgamation of years of past Senate, Board of Governors, AUA and presidential goals. There are the standard promises about opposing tuition increases, adding 3,300 beds on campus by 2050 and extending the course withdrawal deadline. She plans to continue the Textbook Broke campaign — and hopes to break the record set by Nawar.
Also included in her goals is a mainstay of AMS politics since 2024: the oft-promised exam database. Panchi wants to land that plane. While completing the technology for the database would be a significant milestone, that’s only half the battle. We had an exam database before, in 2015. However, uploading exams was optional for professors and many chose not to. An exam database without exams is just a database.
We asked Panchi how she planned to address this problem. Her solutions weren’t policy-related, but cultural, relying on convincing professors to upload their exams — the same technique that failed a decade ago. She also wants to advocate for a syllabi database and research opportunities portal, which may encounter similar issues.
We asked Panchi about the role student food security groups should play in allocating funding — an ask of the failed food Security Initiative referendum petition run by campus groups like UBC Sprouts. She was noncommittal about how influential these groups should be, but said she’d ensure an “$800,000 multi-year commitment for food security.”
Panchi’s experience as AVP administration gives her experience working within the AMS, but the administration office is separate from the academic and university affairs office. While the AUA office focuses on advocacy to the university, the administration office is focused internally: on the operations of the AMS Nest and supporting internal organizations like clubs.
Panchi missed the mark on several issues during the Great Debate. When asked about harm reduction, she said her platform was “not entirely inclusive of harm reduction in particular,” but described advocating for extant resources like drug testing strips. On sexualized violence policies, she said it is important to be “communicating with [the Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC)] and ensuring that services are provided.” Given SASC is an AMS service, it’s unclear how she’d be advocating to the university on sexualized violence policies — if at all.
At the Indigenous forum, Panchi had little to say. Other than her introduction, she was entirely disengaged with the conversation — disappointing for a candidate who would be advocating for Indigenous students.
If you loved Nawar’s tenure as VP AUA, we expect you’ll be rather satisfied with Panchi. If you were hoping for more ambition, however, you’ll be unlikely to find that in Panchi’s continuity platform.
The Ubyssey endorses a yes vote for Panchi.
Editorials are opinion essays, and while they represent the views of the Editorial Board, they may not speak for every person at our newspaper. They are subject, however, to the same standard of fact-checking as anything else in our report.
