As Northwestern’s ASG welcomes its new Senate body, its executive team is preparing for a year they hope will be full of structural, communicative and administrative change. The organization hopes new initiatives, which include the return of winter lights and installing reproductive vending machines, will better meet student desires.
Last school year, it became apparent to ASG members there was a prominent disconnect between the organization and student body. This issue was largely highlighted by a lack of student engagement in policy initiatives and overall attention on the organization. Prior to last Winter’s ASG presidential election, the organization was widely unknown among undergraduate students. As a result, ASG was unresponsive to student body demands, deepening riffs in undergraduate involvement.
Following a year also characterized by administrative issues, including budget cuts and federal intervention, ASG Co-President John Sisco said he hopes to improve the organization’s relationship with Northwestern’s student body.
“Ultimately, I think the point of a student government is to be responsive to the demands of the student body,” ASG President John Sisco said. “And I think, to address the elephant, the extent to which ASG succeeded in that activity was really the central question of last year’s election.”
The most recent campaign for ASG president has renewed attention to the organization’s presence on campus. The 2026 Winter campaign took an unexpected turn when now third year Alan Hu and fourth year Noah Cohrs, current ASG director of community relations, entered the race. During their campaign, they threatened to annex the University of Chicago and Cohrs plunged into Lake Michigan in January, resulting in a meeting with administration.
Through their attention-grabbing campaign activities, Hu and Cohrs told North By Northwestern in the spring that they hoped to highlight a perceived political apathy among Northwestern students. Cohrs said he believes this to be reflective of a greater disengagement from national democracy.
“I see this with ASG and with the normal government— they have the power to control a lot of people’s lives, and absolutely no responsibility attached to that, because we don’t have an engaging democratic system at the campus, at the local or at the national level,” Cohrs said.
ASG is the key organization for representing undergraduate interests and demands, including dining hall options, money allocation to student organizations and a wide variety of grant programs. Still, less than half of Northwestern’s undergrad population participates in ASG’s political processes.
“I think when I say I’m in ASG or I’m the co-chair of sustainability, people have no idea what that is,” said Sofia Casias, sustainability committee co-chair. “And I think that’s a big problem because ASG really kind of directs student life on campus.”
Casias said she thinks the disconnect between ASG and Northwestern’s student body stems from a lack of communication. She said this includes physical barriers, on account of South Campus being home to many ASG members, and staff, faculty and student connections.
In turn, one of ASG’s key initiatives has been expanding its social media presence. Since the start of the current board’s tenure, the ASG Instagram account has gone from roughly 200 followers as of last year’s election to 2.6 thousand followers. This has not alleviated all issues.
“The last couple of years were kind of rough to work in a student government organization because Northwestern’s leadership was in a time of a lot of transition,” Sisco said. “And ultimately, to get initiatives across the finish line, it requires ASG to collaborate with the university admin.”
Over the last few school years, the University has gone through historical federal interventions and a total of three university presidents. Because of this, ASG faced a multitude of challenges including funding shortages, a further decline in student engagement and little administrative assistance.
Moreover, executive members like Nur Yalinbas, speaker of the Senate and former senator, expressed concern about how administrative decisions and federal involvement have played a large part in the lack of student engagement.
“I think a lot of students here were just getting very disappointed with a lot of the decisions being made by the institution itself,” Yalinbas said. “I think it’s leaving a lot of students helpless in a way, and scared to speak out.”
In November of 2025, under the administration of former interim university president Henry Beinen, Northwestern reached a historic $75 million settlement with President Donald Trump’s administration to restore $790 million in research funding. The settlement included the installation of anti-Semitism training, redefined Title IX agreements and termination of the Deering Meadow Agreement.
However, with new University President Mung Chiang in place, plus an influx of ASG Senate members and a record 117 committee applications, ASG is hoping that administration and students alike can help them work towards change in the coming school year.
“I would say, every Northwestern student, or in a broader sense, every citizen, everyone who lives somewhere, has a responsibility to be a part of the governance of that place,” Cohrs said. “It’s as much an abdication of student responsibility as it is of ASG.”
In terms of internal changes, the current ASG hopes to streamline finance allocation, implement an online policy tracking system, rework their constitution, extend communication to the board of trustees and open free legal services to students.
“I don’t think we’re going to end up in a world by the end of my tenure, or maybe even a couple years down the line, that every single student on campus will vote in every single one of our elections and have an opinion on every single one of our issues,” Sisco said. “It’s their right not to care if they don’t want to. But for students who feel like they do need a representative body, our goal is to be there for them when they need us.”
