Hail to the chief. Chico State has a new Associated Students president, Michael Pratt. Pratt recently sat down with The Orion to answer some questions and talk about his plans for his presidency.

How long have you been attending Chico State?

Pratt: This will be the completion of my fourth year here at Chico.

What are you majoring in?

Right now I am a master in public administration student. Just finishing up my first year.

Why did you run for A.S. president?

People ask me why I didn’t just continue for a third term as the director of University Affairs. As A.S. president, you kind of have a stronger voice to represent students and so still continuing a lot of the work and expanding student rights and representations on campus, but with the added bonus of having a little bit of a stronger voice. So just continuing the same kind of work and expanding on it in a variety of different ways, working more on diversity and all of these other areas. I’m one of the few people who have been here for this long.

You have been apart of A.S. government for two years now. How do you feel what you’ve accomplished in your past positions affected students?

The most significant contribution I think I’ve been able to make is the establishment of the Student Academic Senate. So for really the first time allowing all the different students from all the different colleges to be represented.

What do you hope to accomplish as president?

It’s great that Gayle Hutchinson is coming in because I think we can make a lot of progress in looking at shared governance. One of the central issues that seemed to be at the root of a lot of issues that students are having is shared governance, that their voices aren’t being heard. So when it comes to matters of diversity or student safety, their issues aren’t being heard because they don’t have a seat at the table, and so ensuring that we can expand that and be as cognizant as possible about student voice and making sure that we actually capture that voice and propel it to administration.

Have you been in contact with Gayle Hutchinson and what are your plans for working with Chico State administration?

We will probably continue to have meetings with Gayle Hutchinson. Working with administration we really need to sit down with them and really go about tangible goals. Part of it in shared governance is we are trying to develop the solutions together that are amenable to both the students, administration, faculty – all the different stakeholders on campus.

Michael Catelli can be reached at [email protected] or @michaelcatelli on Twitter.