Naesoj Ware, president of the 65th Howard University Student Association (HUSA) announced earlier this month that she was resigning from her position. The next day she said it was all just to prove a point, but according to her, the announcement was never supposed to leave the room.
On Tuesday, Nov. 4 HUSA held its monthly general body meeting and at the end, Ware informed the audience of department directors, sub department leads and HUSA staffers of her unexpected decision.
That night of the announcement, word spread quickly amongst the student body. Ware said she asked those in the room to keep the information amongst themselves, a request that she says was not respected.
“This was also something I was trying to internally communicate with HUSA. …I asked everybody that night ‘Can we keep this in-house?’ and before I even left the meeting I had four calls from outsiders,” Ware said.
She also said the announcement was just as spontaneous for her as it was for everyone else. The idea came to her in the moment and she intended for it to take it back after a few minutes but realized the impact she could have.
“My intention is never to lie to anybody or mislead anybody. I was never going to get on the internet and be like this was some premeditated big plan that I had concocted and knew what I was doing. I was honest, I came up with this on the spot,” said Ware.
Ware explained that this stunt was pulled to show how quickly adverse news will spread across the student body, while other news, such as the student resources offered by HUSA, do not receive the same attention or engagement.
The following day, she posted a series of videos on the story of her personal Instagram account reflecting on her leadership and the lack of political participation from students.
“Without knowledge of me and the things that my team and I are doing and who I am as a person without knowledge of or engaging in all of that, how could you say that you trust me or know what I’m doing?” she said in one of the videos.
As the news spread against Ware’s wishes and her intentions came out, there were mixed reactions.
A staffer of the administration, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, recalled Ware saying how it was with a heavy heart that she chose to step down as president of the Howard University Student Association. They described the night as one of confusion and high emotion.
“Her directors even looked confused — Payton [Garcia] kind of chuckled and tried to move the meeting along. Some first-year staffers were crying and some gave her hugs,” she recalled. “I think she had good intentions but what she did was dramatic and not logical.”
Garcia, the HUSA vice president, said he did not know Ware was going to make that announcement and feels that she broke his trust.
“Everyone whose feelings were betrayed or …felt lied to and can no longer completely take her word seriously or to the level of weight that they would once have before, I feel the same. A level of trust was broken in her eliciting that was the course of action she found the best solution for,” Garcia said.
Ware acknowledged the harm she caused but said she does not regret the way she went about it.
“There is always a different way we could go about things. I’m not going to say a better way but there was another way that I could have communicated that message but I can’t guarantee it would have garnered the same traction and so I apologize for the harm that it inflicted,” Ware said.
Some students like Nataiya Johnson, a senior sports medicine major from Seattle, Washington, support Ware’s decision.
“It was shocking for a lot of people and the point was to get everyone’s attention and to draw eyes to whatever she was raising attention to,” said Johnson. “That’s exactly what she did. She did a really good job at it.”
Although some students support Ware’s actions, other students do not. Euegene Holsey, a senior health sciences major from Jacksonville, Florida, called it a “theatrical production” that made him question student leadership.
“We want our student leaders to lead and not put on a show,” Holsey said.
Ware said she believes most students are passive about student politics and a portion of those who like her don’t truly know her or her work. She argues against blind idolization of student leaders and for active engagement in campus politics to shape opinions.
“I could be leading y’all astray. I could be embezzling money and you didn’t know anything before, you just know now that I’m quitting and now you have something to say. You’re just letting anybody lead you at that point,” Ware said.
Holsey did not vote for Ware nor did he vote at all in last semester’s election. He said he does not keep up with campus politics and this was not an ideal way to capture students’ attention.
“I hope that she learned from this. …I do think that she has the entire right to continue to lead, to continue to sit in that position but [also] to know that she will be held accountable for her actions,” Holsey said.
Garcia acknowledged that her plan worked — they had the most engagement on social media that they had seen in quite some time, at least in the past two weeks when they originally released their phase one progress report, he said.
“I was one of those people who also was hurt by how she did it, even though I agree with her ‘why’ and her rhetoric, but that doesn’t mean that what she did was okay,” said Garcia.
The former student advocacy director for the 60th HUSA administration, Imani Bryant, who earned a bachelors and masters degree in political science at Howard, said although Ware’s ploy was surprising, it also makes sense to them.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before but in terms of the administrations that I’ve seen since I started at Howard and since I’ve graduated, it almost makes sense. There is a transition of leadership that is very dramatic,” Bryant said.
Although Bryant said what happened was dramatic, as a former student leader, they said they understand where Ware might have been coming from.
“But also, Howard is an incredibly large university…so it’s expected that students are not going to be politically engaged with student government, especially when student government, for a lot of students, is something that doesn’t touch their lives at all, or at least they don’t think it does,” said Bryant.
Johnson was another student who did not vote in the election last semester but said after this, she plans to stay in the loop with the student government.
“Being able to experience exactly what [Ware] is talking about definitely opened my eyes to be more open to doing my research, looking into elections [and] looking into what exactly is going on behind the scenes,” said Johnson. “At least for me, it definitely is something that I’ll be paying more attention to.”
Bryant said although the work of student leaders is often behind the scenes, recognition of their work is appreciated.
“[Student leadership] is a lot of hard work that goes unsung and it would be nice to be recognized and it would be nice for students to be engaged in their student government,” said Bryant.
Garcia encouraged that even now, students should still take everything seriously and pay attention to what Ware wrote in her progress report letter that detailed the completion of the administration initiatives.
“People have busy lives but seeing the amount of people that did have the time and effort to see those rumors being spread and even participate in them does showcase to me that when we care about something, we choose to engage in it,” he said.
“No matter how it made you feel…turn this moment into something more so that we can all overcome that aspect that many people call out about Howard — the [performative nature],” he continued.
Ware said she intends to continue being intentional with her political strategy and “extreme” in her methods. She compared her actions to how President Donald Trump is extreme in his actions and his work is talked about daily.
“I do still always want to be extreme because one, the gravity of the work that we do is extreme. And two, clearly extremism is what people pay attention to,” she said. “So if that’s what you’re going to pay attention to, that’s what I’m going to give y’all.”
Copy edited by Damenica Ellis
