If it hadn't been for Vogel's older brother, Ryan, neither would be in office today. The elder Vogel implored Bassi, his former LDS mission companion, to be his running mate when he ran for student body president two years ago.

When Bassi decided to run for the top seat last year, he asked Joe Vogel to be his right-hand man.

"I kind of wanted to put my energies into different things like my writing," Vogel said. "But I knew it would be a once in a lifetime opportunity. Little did I know what I was in for."

Bassi's gregarious nature quickly explains why he is the head Wolverine.

While Vogel quietly contemplates his answers, Bassi tells a story, cracks a joke and frankly discounts the attempts by some students to remove them from office.

Their facts, he claims, aren't correct. And their approach toward running him out of office — litigation is being pursued by two students who consider Moore's total costs to be in violation of the UVSC student constitution — is inappropriate, he said.

As Bassi and Vogel tell it, the student senate weighed all the possible pros and cons of bringing Moore to campus before determining the political discourse, as well as tickets sales, generated from the controversy would be worth any bad publicity.

They didn't worry about donors pulling their funding — though most threats have since been rescinded, Bassi said.

And they didn't expect state legislators would turn their backs on UVSC, which receives the least state funding per student of any Utah institution. UVSC only receives 47 percent of its funding from the state. Tuition and donations make up the rest.

"We didn't go into this blind, for sure," Vogel said. "We knew it was going to be controversial. We knew it was going to be a big deal. We knew it was going to sell out."

Despite their resoluteness, however, there are quiet moments when each questions the decision.

Vogel worries about his mother, a UVSC English professor. She doesn't like Moore, so it's been hard for her to defend her son's decision to her students.

And Bassi recently asked his wife, a former Miss UVSC, if she would have encouraged him to run for student body president if she'd known the chaos Moore's appearance would bring.

"I told him I would do it again in a heartbeat," Alexis Bassi said. "It's built his character."

Protecting their family and learning to deal with a hounding media is real-world political experience, their adviser Phil Clegg said.

While others in student government are worrying about the details of an upcoming dance, UVSC student officers are busy coordinating large-scale security for Moore's appearance, which Bassi expects to get "crazy."

"It's definitely been a learning experience for them," Clegg said. "I think they've gotten a real taste of politics, and I think they've handled the scrutiny very well."

But the life lessons being learned are almost an afterthought for the pair.

Bassi makes a mental note to write in his journal so that he can examine this experience down the road — once he's accomplished a long list of goals he still has for the remainder of the school year.

"I don't want this to be the only thing we're remembered for," he says. "We've got a lot of time left."

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E-mail: lwarner@desnews.com