8
ITiTTOI news
ATTENTION ’74
P acer O wners :
B e
S tudent M ovement
Maryanne Cassera launches an agenda for change as vice president
of the Portland State University student body by Grace Pastine
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111
ItM
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Mete Dr.
aryanne Cassera’s cluttered
office on the fourth floor of
Portland State University’s
Smith Hall is a testament to
her hectic life.
“I’m just moving in,” she explains as she casts
an apologetic glance around her paper-covered
desk and at the institutional blue carpering lit
tered with papers and packing debris. A message
board is plopped on its side on the floor. Three
chairs, an indication that Cassera expects a lot
of visitors, take up much of the available space
in the room.
This year, Cassera, a 25-year-old undergradu
ate, steps in as vice president of Portland State
University’s student government. In that capac
ity, Cassera will preside over the student Senate,
a voting body modeled after the U.S. Senate.
Cassera props herself in a swiveling, slightly
battered chair, occasionally leaning forward to
emphasize a point as she discusses her agenda for
change.
Together with president Chocka Guiden,
Cassera will push a foil slate of projects for the
1998-99 school year, including a large-scale ren
ovation of PSU’s student union, and will step up
lobbying efforts to increase faculty compensa
tion and maintain student control of student
fees.
In a separate new job, Cassera will serve as
co-chair of the National Queer Student Caucus.
The NQSC is part of the United States Student
Association, a nationwide student lobbying
organization. Cassera just returned from
Boulder, Colo., where she attended the USSA’s
annual weeklong conference.
If these two new jobs aren’t enough to keep
her busy, Cassera is also the co-founder of the
Oregon Students of Color Coalition. She says it
is the first statewide organization for students of
color.
Last year, in an effort to draw attention to
the small percentage of non-Caucasian faculty,
the coalition presented Zero Awards to PSU
departments with no faculty of color. This year
group members are gearing up to combat anti
affirmative-action measures, like California’s
Proposition 209, which they fear may be pro
posed in Oregon.
She is also a member of numerous campus
organizations and even finds time to play on a
softball team.
Friends tease her about the fact that her day-
planner is divided into 15-minute increments
and is always foil.
Cassera is accustomed to hard work. During
high school, she held a foil-time job at Round
Table Pizza in order to help support her mother
and three sisters. She still found time to be on
the track and field team and work for the school
yearbook.
For many years, a college education was out
of reach for Cassera. In order to continue sup
porting her family, she attended a local commu
nity college in the Portland area instead of her
dream school, the University of Washington.
Yet even at community college, Cassera found it
too difficult to work foil time and go to classes.
She quit school, and it wasn’t until four years
later—when she discovered her job at Oregon
Health Sciences University made her eligible
for reduced tuition at a state school—that
attending college seemed feasible.
Cassera jumped back into school as a foil
time student at PSU in the fall of 1996 and has
n’t slowed down since. The small stipend she
receives for her vice-presidential work, as well as
the free housing she receives in exchange for her
work as a resident manager of an on-campus
dormitory, help her make ends meet, but she
admits it has been a struggle.
Perhaps it is that struggle that has made her
sympathetic to so many different groups. The
daughter of Filipino parents, Cassera is part of
the first generation of her family bom in the
United States and will be the first person in her
family to obtain a college diploma.
Yet she says it is her identity as a lesbian, not
her ethnicity, that initially informed her
activism. While working at OHSU, she became
concerned about the safety and job security of
gay and lesbian employees and became active in
the campaigns against measures 9 and 13.
According to Cassera, detractors of her cam
paign for vice president worried she was too nar
rowly focused on issues facing queer students
and students of color.
In response, Cassera cites some of the cam
paigns she has worked on in the last two years,
including the push for an on-campus child care
center that is slated to open in January 1999.
She is currently lobbying administrators and
legislators to approve an across-the-board
tuition freeze, which, if accomplished, would go
into effect for the 1999-2000 school year.
Cassera also says keeping down interest rates on
student loans is a major priority.
"How can they say that’s a queer agenda or a
woman of color agenda f’ she asks. “My job is to
represent all students.”