Club Spotlight: Progressive Student Union

Every Tuesday from 12:30–1:30 p.m. up on the second floor of The Swiss Restaurant and Pub, the Progressive Student Union — referred to more commonly as PSU — meets to discuss current issues around the campus, as well as larger national issues. Having only started this quarter, PSU has already started attracting members.

The goal of PSU is to cover a wide range of campus and community problems. Part of their meeting time is spent brainstorming and discussing ideas on how to present solutions and push for projects and goals that will benefit students. Their current focus is on gathering more information on transportation around campus, such as how students arrive on campus and how far they have to commute. The biggest issue they face right now is how to make parking beneficial for more students — especially those who have classes for two hours but often have to park in the hour and a half areas and risk the chance of receiving a parking citation.

PSU hopes that by starting to take on issues like parking, they can help to alleviate students from many financial burdens which students have to face on a regular basis, such as receiving tickets. Andrew Belloso, a member of PSU, explained why they are currently focused on this issue.

“We believe that parking is a serious issue on campus, especially when it comes to 90-minute parking and also the parking tickets that are so predatory in nature with how they hand them out,” Belloso said. “We wanted to mention that we understand things like the ‘Anything but driving campaign’ and we understand what the goal is, but we as a union believe that the way they are going about it entirely wrong. We see all of this investment to making timed parking and making parking undesirable, but we see no investment into transit. They might say that there is, but we do not see them in the current results.”

Other portions of their meetings are dedicated to student outreach and engagement. During UWT’s Block Party 2019, PSU hosted a booth where students could play a game and learn more about their mission goals. President of PSU Sean Arent discussed how the group’s current goal of parking and getting involved within the campus works to achieve their overarching objective.

“The ultimate goal of our group is to lessen the economic burden on students,” Arent said. “We [students] are already massively in debt like any other school, and we are all getting ticketed left and right. Time is a luxury for people. You have to park 20 minutes up the hill just to get to class. We just need to lessen the burden on us and place it on the people who can afford to take it on.”

You can follow PSU on these social media platforms:

Instagram: @UWT_PSU

Twitter: @ProgressiveStu5

Facebook: Progressive Student Union of UWT