Ilupeju reflects on historical ASUCD firsts, expansion on basic needs and election reform

By AALIYAH ESPAÑOL-RIVAS — campus@aggie.org 

Associated Students of the University of California, Davis (ASUCD) President Gaius Ilupeju’s 2024-2025 term was nothing if not eventful. Reports about alleged election misconduct and inter-ASUCD power struggles, plus a contested student election this past spring, has marked a challenging term. But, during his time as head of the student government, Ilupeju was a strong advocate for students’ basic needs and reform in the Executive Office.

Ilupeju sat down with The California Aggie on June 5, 2025 near the end of his term to discuss his time in ASUCD and where he hopes the leaders of the student body will move going forward.

Below is a transcript of Ilupeju’s interview with The California Aggie, edited for length and clarity. 

Q: Going off of finalities, today is your final Senate meeting. How are you feeling about the ASUCD and what you all have accomplished this quarter and year?

Ilupeju: I’ve been [in ASUCD] since my first year, and the reason I’ve stuck around is because year after year, I haven’t seen the fundamental changes that I believe should be made to make ASUCD a more student-centric organization that actually serves students, rather than talk about how it can serve students. I feel like this is the first year since my time here that we’ve actually hit that goal, truly being student-centric in the programs and initiatives that we’re offering.

I think I’m gonna be able to step away from the job with a lot of peace, clarity and pride in what we were able to accomplish this year.

Q: How was it being the ASUCD President? How would you describe your term?

Ilupeju: It’s honestly been the most anxiety-inducing and most rewarding experience I’ve ever had. There were many weeks when I came into this office excited for what could be done, but instead I was faced with student government drama here and there, or administrative difficulties with campus leadership. But overall, I think most days I came into office realizing that we had a really cool opportunity to get something done that day, or that week we had hit campaign goals. 

Sometimes I run into students, and I don’t expect them to know who I am. I think we’ve done more on the [communications] end this year. Typically people don’t care about student government. I’ve had people come up to me the last couple of weeks saying, “Oh, hey, you’re the president. Thank you for your service. Thank you for doing this or that,” or, “I was paying attention and I really appreciate the work that was done this year.” Those are some of the rewarding moments, especially when that person is able to tie it back to something that we’ve done, like a program or initiative that we created, and how that’s materially benefited them.

Q: This is a bit of a fun question, but if you had to summarize your term in one song what would it be?

Ilupeju: Wait, I was thinking of something similar a couple days ago. I was like, if I have to think of a song that summarizes how the world is, what would that song be? I think it would be Billy Joel’s, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” I really hope I’m able to write some expository piece about that one day and how the lyrics of that song capture a lot of the things in the world. But I think it really describes my term. 

I didn’t come into this role expecting to fix every single problem, but as many problems as I could. I also came into it knowing that some of these problems would persist after my term, but the whole purpose was to make a recognizable dent in these problems. 

If you’re adding up the actual days, you don’t have much time, and that thought in the back of my mind has pushed a lot of things that I’ve tried to do this year. I’ve tried to keep an upbeat tempo and be fast-paced. And, delivering on our campaign promises and signing off on projects. Well, it’s a tangent, but as it relates to the song; I didn’t start the fire, but it’s been going on ever since ASUCD was created. I’m just a part of that history. I’ve done the best I can.

Q: Thank you. You already touched on it, but is there anything in particular that you’re really proud of that you’ve done during your term?

Ilupeju: I am proud of three things in particular. 

First of all, I’m really proud of [June 5] Special Session. I’ve been working with campus leadership on different agreements since the start of the academic year to safeguard and bolster the basic needs resources offered here at Davis. We looked at all those agreements yesterday, and the Senate decided to reach an investment of nearly $1.7 million over the next five years to improve transportation, equity, healthcare access, housing resources and to even partner with the Davis Downtown Business Association to start a program that will give students a baseline 10% discount on individual transactions at participating businesses. As far as I know, those 30 minutes where they went over the Memorandums of Understanding was the single, largest multi-year allocation of ASUCD funds and other financial commitments to basic needs in a single meeting of the Senate in history, that wasn’t budget hearings. I am so incredibly proud of what happened and the fact that everyone who was in attendance agreed that providing these resources and programs to students was paramount. 

I’d say No. 2 is the dollar [wage] raise that we did in fall 2024. It’s the most effective thing we did for basic needs this year. There’s no better way to show your employees how much you care for them and to help them amidst this affordability crisis than by raising their wages. I’m really proud that we were able to make that happen and that the Senate partnered with us to approve that bill. 

Lastly, the creation of Vital Emergency Shelter and Transitional Assistance (VESTA) I’m really proud of. I think that there’s so much more we can do when it comes to housing, beyond just housing advising. We can provide resources directly to students and partner with student organizations that are willing to enter the transitional housing space. And that’s essentially what we’re trying to begin to invest in. Yesterday we committed $250,000 over five years at minimum to Aggie House to make sure that they’re able to afford a lot of their operations. 

Q: Is there anything that you wish you could go back and redo, or things you wish you could have worked on more?

Ilupeju: If I could go back, I wish I did more, just in general. I think some of the things that prevented me from doing even more was getting caught up in petty squabbles that came out of student government. That I should’ve just ignored completely. There’s a personal aspect of the job that’s hard to ignore. But sometimes you have a small minority of people who go against the grain and don’t really add anything productive overall to the conversations going on and detracting the progress that could be made. It’s better to just keep your head down and focus on the work you’re doing. 

I wish I said no to more things. I said yes to so many meetings and so many ideas that I did not have the capacity for. And I think if I said no to more stuff, I’d have been able to focus more on the high-impact projects that we started working on at the start of the academic year. 

Lastly, I also wish I’d met with more students. I try to do as much of that as I can, but I really think that I could have met with way more students than I did this year.

Q: One year ago, before you took office, you spoke with The Aggie about your goals for your term. You spoke about your unhappiness with the ASUCD, saying, “I ran for president because I was really unhappy with the current state of affairs. I’ve been there for the past three years, and we continue to face the same issues frequently. I just felt, with the experience I had, I really needed to assert myself and put myself in the position of higher leadership to direct ASUCD where I think it needs to be headed.” 

Do you feel with your leadership, you were able to direct ASUCD to where you hoped? 

Ilupeju: Without a doubt. As I said earlier, we made the single largest multi-year financial commitments in a meeting of the Senate for basic needs. That’s something that’s going to outlive me that future generations of leaders can build upon. But I think the tone this year has been basic needs first, everything else second. Under my leadership, I’ve been able to help people see that that should be our core principle. We’re headed in the right direction. 

Q: In that same interview you said that students “should know that fixing the issues on this campus and making sure that everyone’s voice is heard is a mission that we all have to commit ourselves to. That includes people within and outside ASUCD. Unless we build a sense of community and foster a culture of accountability, none of the things that we all want will happen at all.” 

Do you think you fostered a culture of accountability within ASUCD during your term?

Ilupeju: I think from the very beginning, I let the [Senate] table know that I invited criticism. And a few of them made sure to do that as much as they could this year. I did not shy away from criticism, and I addressed it head on. I took responsibility for the parts that I thought were fair, and when I thought criticism was unfair, I pushed back. I think that was one of the ways that I redirected the environment. My old thought process was, if people saw that the Chief Executive is willing to have personal and critical conversations behind closed doors, then they’ll be willing to take accountability themselves. 

At the start of the year, I wrote a bill restructuring the Executive Branch to make it more accountable to the Senate and the student body. One of the mechanisms was the creation of executive directors, which are supposed to reflect the will and the decisions of the president, but can also be counteracted by the Senate through a vote.

I think lastly, when it came down to hiring, I made sure to hire people who weren’t always going to agree with what I have to say. My chief-of-staff and I have had very spirited debates about some of my policy projects and ideas in this very office. I think it was good to surround myself with people who would be honest with me at all times. Especially the internal vice president (IVP), Aaminah Mohammad, who is the most honest person I’ve ever met. She says things as they come to her and places a higher value on truth, doesn’t coddle people. 

A lot of times it wasn’t, “Oh, I had a No. 2;” I was governing with a co-president. That’s basically how the relationship has been, and she’s helped me to be accountable. 

Q: In that same quote, you also talk about building a sense of community. During this interview, you’ve mentioned numerous times about how there’s been some internal conflict within ASUCD. Do you feel you were able to build community, or if it necessarily didn’t work out, where do you think you or other members of the Association went wrong?

Ilupeju: I think I did build a sense of community. When I was speaking to this a year ago, I wasn’t talking primarily about ASUCD. I was talking about ethnic groups and underserved communities on our campus, and I think through the Community Development Fund we’ve been able to achieve a lot of that. This year, the Executive Office partnered with clubs in the Black community, in the Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian, Pacific Islander communities. And right now, and this is not part of the Community Development Fund right now, but we’re working with Senator Solana Rodriguez to see how we can help students in the Chicano/Latinx community pay for commencement fees.

Hopefully that works out, but that’s the community that I envisioned a year ago — making sure that I made myself accessible to the student leaders in all of these different communities, so they could reach out whenever they had concerns. I gave many of them my personal contact. Over the summer, I met with a fair amount of club presidents to talk about what ASUCD could do for them. 

I think for the first time in a couple years, I even extended that to Greek life. When we started Tipsy Taxi, I met with the Interpaternity Council to communicate that they were part of this community that I was trying to build as well, because they represent and serve a lot of students, and we have a shared goal of making sure that students get home safely.

When it comes to student government and the workplace in general, it’s cynical, but I don’t envision a future where [conflict] is ever not a thing. You put people in the room who have different ambitions, different political ambitions at any level of governance, and there’s bound to be conflict that can’t be avoided.

Although the sense of community I was trying to develop here, internally, didn’t quite meet the standards I would have liked it to be, I wasn’t delusional to actually think that I would solve student government drama in one year. I’ve been here for four years, and there hasn’t been a year where there wasn’t some type of drama or interpersonal conflict. I think it’s further exacerbated by the fact that the student government is the most public-facing side in ASUCD. Other groups have interpersonal issues, but you never hear about them, because there’s not a reporter taking things down, or people putting out statements and whatnot. It was just bound to happen.

Q: Switching gears now. This year, many ASUCD units faced budget cuts, and you played a major role in them. What was your goal when tackling the ongoing deficit?

Ilupeju: It was to prioritize the units and services. The ones students utilize the most, and also weren’t duplicated by the campus. Cuts had to be made, and I proposed many of those cuts. I think we should have cut more than we ended up cutting, to be quite frank. 

But our units and commissions and offices and committees and all sorts of bodies, they proposed $1.1 million more [in spending] than what’s coming in as revenue. It was impossible for everyone to get what they wanted. I relied a lot on the controller’s expertise, but I also definitely brought in my values. The way I’ve always thought about ASUCD services is that they’re meant to supplement what the campus already offers. If there’s something that the campus isn’t doing that students really need, then it’s ASUCD’s job to ensure that they’re provided. But if there’s something that we offer that’s underutilized, and there are other campus alternatives, it doesn’t seem to be in the students’ best interest that we continue funding it at the same level, especially if students are missing a return on investment on the fees that they’re giving to ASUCD. 

Q: Again, to kind of switch gears, you were the manager of the Unite for Action slate, which ran your current IVP, Aaminah Mohammad, for your job. During the election, it was reported that the slate was disqualified due to actions on your behalf, with violations “including sharing Senate candidates on the ASUCD Executive account” and “promoting the slate to the University Honors Program students.”

I know you spoke with The Aggie about this, as other violations would ultimately lead to the dissolvement of the slate. How do you feel about the dissolvement and her disqualification? 

Ilupeju: I think what happened was unfortunate. But I’m a person of faith, and I believe that everything happens for a reason. The fact that there was a dissolvement of the slate and that the candidates were disqualified, it was meant to happen and the world is going to go on. I think what I would say is that the manner in which it happened and the way that things occurred are, in my opinion, very unethical. I think that there’s a lot of election reform that needs to happen here at ASUCD.

For example, the External Affairs Vice President (EAVP) candidate, Janani Sundaram, won that race, probably by 20%. And I have no apprehension that Senator Zack Dollins will do a great job, but I’m just speaking to the election itself. She won that race, but she was disqualified because she didn’t turn in a form. But from what I understand, she was facing an emergency that prevented her from submitting that form. And essentially, the voices of hundreds of students were just disenfranchised due to what I think was a truly incompetent Elections Committee. 

When it comes specifically to the slate in elections, a lot of the allegations that were levied against [United for Action] were factually false. If you actually went to the University Honors Program Director, Kate Andrup Stephensen, if I had reached out to her to ask her to share the Unite for Action flyer, she would tell you that I never reached out to her. 

I sent a flyer to a listserv. She was on the listserv, remembered my name, and was just like, “Oh, he probably seems like a great guy” and sent it out on my behalf. We need a system where the claims that people make and the violations that they report are fact checked or adjudicated after the elections, so people can’t engage in lawfare. I think what happened during this election was lawfare, and to me, it’s incredible that this is something that we never thought of fixing.

This has been the worst-run election, but I think that now we know that it’s possible people can misuse systems that are supposed to promote fairness and accountability. It should be the job of the student government to fix that in the future. Because, like I said, this is what happens in Third World countries, where you involve your opponent in endless and pointless litigation to take them away from the campaign trail. That’s essentially what happened. We weren’t able to make our case for a lot of these things that we were alleged to have done. When we were promised that the election period would be extended so that we were able to go in front of the Judicial Council to make our case, it’s my understanding that some candidate pressured the Elections Committee to release the results right away so we wouldn’t be able to make our case. That is not unlawful or illegal, but just morally wrong. 

However you want to look at my role as slate manager, I think I only filed out two violation points for other candidates. But what I found insane was that it’s been reported by different campaign agents that we had some candidates who filed dozens of violation points against United for Action. It just begs the question, are you campaigning to prove that your ideas and your vision are better for the students of UC Davis, or are you just campaigning to make sure that someone else doesn’t win? And what does that say when your strategy is just to prevent the other group from winning rather than actually trying to campaign and prove to everyone the popularity and interest in your ideas? There’s so much I can say, but I definitely do think that we need a lot of election reform. 

Q: How did the appeals process go?

Ilupeju: It was all over the place. We were told different things at different times. The evidence that was given for the allegations that were made were really poor. 

I said this to the Judicial Council, and I think it’s worth mentioning here as well. Some of the evidence for the things that we did was things that people put on an anonymous platform. How can you validate that it wasn’t the people who reported the thing that you’re said to have done, who posted those things anonymously online? There’s no way to make sure that those are actual people who experienced those things who aren’t campaign agents that might be influenced to say those things. That’s just a very low threshold for evidence quality. I think that we need to rise above that and do a lot better.

Q: On that same note, given that the slate was dissolved, how has it been working with the incoming executive team?

Ilupeju: It’s been great. I’ve had weekly meetings with President Elect Amrita Julka, and we’ve kind of gone over what you need to know, what this current role entails, pending actions and projects that we’re involved with and ways that I can be of support to them once they assume office.

Q:  If you could give a piece of advice to new ASUCD President Julka, what would you tell her that you haven’t already?

Ilupeju: To be honest, I don’t think she needs too much advice. Senator Julka is a very capable individual, but if I could give her advice that I haven’t said yet, it was just to find more opportunities to listen to students more. That’s something that I wish I did a lot more of this year. I had this idea to start the year to do coffee chats and taking random students to breakfast or something, hearing their problems and the ways they wanted to solve things. It didn’t really materialize, but we did try to find ways to talk to students this year that they could probably build upon. 

We orchestrated a couple of town halls. We went to a lot of club events, the vice president and I, to make sure that we were also embedded in the communities that we were trying to serve. I hope that that’s something that she continues. 

Q: What are your hopes for the future of ASUCD?

Ilupeju: I hope they continue with this basic needs model. [The Special Session] was like an ASUCD New Deal of sorts. I hope that the future generation of leaders after me build up on that and continue to realize that we’re at our best when the things that we’re doing materially improve the lives of students, but we’re at our worst when we spend hours in meetings engaging in pointless discussion, pointing fingers and focusing on vanity projects that don’t really serve the wider student body.

Q: Moving forward, what are your post-grad plans?

Ilupeju: I am attending a rival University of California to do a master’s program in Global Studies. It has been my goal to enter into the Foreign Service one day. I’m hoping that it’s a stepping stone in that direction.

Q: And when you mean rival? I don’t want to pry more, but would you care to share?

Ilupeju: For the article or for yourself?

Español-Rivas: For the article.

Ilupeju: It’s gonna be on LinkedIn soon, but UC Berkeley.

Q: Congratulations. My last question for you is, do you have any final comments that you’d like to make to the student body?

Ilupeju: These last four years being one of your elected representatives have been great and truly transformational. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve you. I hope I made a lot of you proud, and I hope that the investments that we made this year continue to benefit future generations of Aggies to come.

Written by: Aaliyah Español-Rivas — campus@theaggie.org