The University of Central Oklahoma Student Association is currently going through the process of electing a new student body president and student body vice president for the 2026-2027 school year. The nominees include junior Jake Eads for president and sophomore Luke Underwood as his vice president, running against senior Johnny Butler for president and freshman Mark Harmon for vice president.
Presidential nominee Butler previously attended Rose State College, where he was elected student body president, and is the co-owner of a restaurant in Bricktown, Oklahoma City, called Whiskey Chicks. His vice presidential nominee Harmon stated that while he doesn’t have much applicable leadership experience, he will be doing what he believes is best. Opposing presidential nominee Eads majors in organizational leadership with a minor in pre-law and currently works as the chair of Congress for UCOSA. While his longtime co-worker and now vice presidential nominee Underwood has been a part of the fraternity Sigma Nu, PLC, UCOSA and UCentral Media.
The Eads/Underwood ticket’s first priority is making the campus more welcoming and inclusive for all students by focusing on physical safety as well as easy access to online resources. They later emphasize that feeling safe is just as important as being safe and plan to work with campus police to add more blue light emergency boxes as well as improve safety in parking lots and other highly trafficked areas. “I believe that for students to be safe, you have to feel safe,” Eads said. For their final policy, they want to strengthen student engagement across campus, planning to promote incentives such as Central Pantry and Bronco Bites.
While the policies described by the Butler/Harmon ticket outline improving how UCOSA meetings are run, “I believe that it should be mandatory for the student body president and vice president to attend every UCOSA meeting,” Butler said. Nominee Butler also described a policy he installed at Whiskey Chicks called the Dream Program, in which Butler gives each student who signs up for the program a “dream survey” where they write down their three top dreams they want to accomplish in their life as of right now. Butler said he would personally meet with each student once a month to figure out a plan for how they would achieve these dreams. “And that’s a beautiful thing to see unfold,” Butler said.
These lists of policies mostly differ in scope and approach. While Eads and Underwood focus more on campus-wide changes in their 4-minute speeches, Butler and Harmon mostly focus on specific people and areas like student government or mentoring students one-on-one.
Election Day has been declared to be Monday, March 30, and Tuesday, March 31 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Nigh University Center with tabling from the election commission from 9am to 5pm on the same days. “We will be doing the election through UCORE and specifically the UCOSA UCORE. We will be doing further election posts on Instagram, and people will be able to vote for both senators and the president and vice president,” said UCOSA Secretary Eric Eckard.
