I’m Ashish Vaidya, a scholar, educator and a first generation American.
MEET ASHISH
I’m proud to hail from a lineage deeply rooted in justice, equality, and the pursuit of the American Dream. My grandfather, a political leader in his home country of India, was kicked out of his political party for challenging corruption. Arriving in the U.S. with only eight dollars, my parents worked tirelessly to ensure their children could embody the American Dream.
Philadelphia is my hometown, and I earned my undergraduate degree cum laude from Villanova University. I traveled to war-ravaged Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I helped build houses for people who had lost their homes during the Troubles.
In 2015, I earned a Ph.D. in political science from Temple University. My dissertation work helped me to develop a knack for researching and interpreting data. That same year, my wife Heather and I moved to beautiful Centennial, Colorado, where we’ve lived ever since.
As a social science educator at both the high school and college levels for the last fifteen years, I’ve seen the challenges that young people face. I started teaching at Temple University, a public institution of higher learning, when I was still in graduate school. When our governor cut the budget for public universities, I lost my graduate stipend for a semester and struggled to make ends meet. I then worked for several years at the Temple University Writing Center, where I helped students with papers on a wide variety of subjects and enabled struggling working-class kids from many different backgrounds to gain confidence in their writing abilities.
Teaching political science in Colorado Springs, I developed a language that appeals to people of all backgrounds. In this time of heightened political rancor, I see myself as a bridge-builder, drawing inspiration from my grandfather and invoking the "better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln once said.
Navigating the challenges of COVID-19 in 2020, I, along with fellow educators, adjusted on the fly. We learned to use new technological tools while providing crucial emotional support to our students from afar.
Every semester in my state and local government class, I give my students a research paper assignment in which they have to take a policy that has been adopted in one jurisdiction–state or local, analyze the results of that policy in terms of the data, and assess whether another specific jurisdiction should adopt that policy. They have to take into account the relevant differences between the two jurisdictions, and they have to look out for lurking variables that might cause misleading statistics.
The point of the assignment is to demonstrate that local governments are the laboratories of democracy. It is this kind of analytical, data-driven thinking that I want to bring to our city council. I want to be a leader in finding common sense solutions to the gaps we face in housing affordability, sustainable waste management, entrepreneurial success and more. We have the opportunity to be trailblazers right here in Centennial, and to adopt policies that have worked in other municipalities.
I am an avid reader, podcast listener, and vinyl record aficionado. I also enjoy running, hiking, and generally exploring our extraordinary state of Colorado.
