Peris JonesThe vice-president (academic) (VPA) race in the 2026 University of Alberta Students’ Union (SU) elections has been a relatively quiet one. With only one candidate, Susan Huseynova, there isn’t exactly much competition. But that’s not to say there isn’t room for critique.
Susan Huseynova
Susan Huseynova’s performance over the length of her campaign to become the SU VPA has been a solid one. While she’s made a couple of mistakes here and there, she still presents as the best (and only) candidate for the job.
Her best performances were at the Indigenous Students’ Union (ISU), Augustana, Interdisciplinary Science Students’ Society (ISSS), and Myer Horowitz forums. In these forums, she showed that she has a lot of prior knowledge and that her experience working as VPA for ISSS provides her with additional expertise. She had concrete ideas to improve students’ academic lives and really tailored her statements for each forum.
She’s shown a lot of good ideas, such as her plans to restructure the Council of Faculty Associations (COFA) into a more senate-like format. She’s also shown that her values for transparency are applicable in multiple different scenarios, such as her desire to create a public action tracker to keep herself accountable. Huseynova’s main points throughout every forum have been to increase the reliability of advising for students, to increase transparency, and to make the academic system easier for students to navigate.
While it might have been better to provide more details on how she’s going to accomplish this, the ideas themselves are good and well-suited for a candidate running for VPA.
Huseynova did have struggles with specificity at the Campus Saint-Jean (CSJ) and the International Students’ Association (ISA) forums. Her performance at CSJ was rather lacklustre, with not a ton of focus on the issues that are specific to CSJ students. The ISA also presented as a bit of a challenge to her, with her ideas not always being specific to the forum topic. In addition to that, she’s also suffered from not having a campaign platform released to give students a better idea of what she plans to accomplish in office.
The reason for this seems to be that Huseynova believes her ideas are applicable to almost every scenario. While that’s not a bad mentality, given how large-scale some of her ideas are, it doesn’t give her the opportunity to show that she knows the struggles of the different groups on campus.
Who should win?
It must be said that because Huseynova is in an uncontested race, she is the candidate who should win the race. However, it’s still necessary to understand her platform, her strengths, and her weaknesses.
Despite that, it’s clear that she wants to help make the academic system easier for students to navigate. She’s consistently clear, competent, and concise in her statements. Her ideas are all student-centred, and her plans all revolve around improving life for students. If Huseynova can actually deliver on the commitments she’s campaigned on to make the academic life easier for students, she’ll be a very good VPA.
