Student government involvement in broader university issues has
kicked into high gear now that the largest state and national
student coalitions have begun work for the coming year.
The University of California Student Association recently held
its annual congress at UC Irvine and approved the three issues to
lend its primary focus: tuition control, student voter registration
and opposing the Racial Privacy Initiative.
Keeping student fees from rising has traditionally been an
important issue for the association, with the goal of maintaining
access to the university.
Undergraduate student fees have not risen in eight years ““
they even experienced a 10 percent decrease in the past few years
““ but this trend is not likely to continue in the face of a
multi-billion dollar state budget deficit.
“We’re going to have to step it up,” said UCSA
Chair Stephen Klass. “We can be positive of some sort of
increase in the future, and we’re getting people ready to
work against it.”
A related movement for the UCSA ““ a coalition of all the
UC’s undergraduate and graduate governments ““ is to
stop graduate student research and teaching assistant stipends from
being taxed before they are distributed.
But in order to bolster movements like maintaining student fees,
the student voice has to hold weight with legislators. Thus the
association is working to increase student voter turnout in the
backdrop of an upcoming gubernatorial race.
“This is the power students have as a lobbying
group,” said Chris Neal, external vice president of the
Undergraduate Students Association Council and UCSA vice-chair.
Arguably the most ambitious point on the association’s
campaign is its movement against the Racial Privacy Initiative, a
policy that if passed would ban the collection of racial and ethnic
data by the state.
Spearheaded by UC Regent Ward Connerly, the policy is on the
March 2004 ballot, and UCSA is working now to properly frame what
it calls the “Information Ban.”
“(Racial) data is often used for keeping officials and
administrators accountable to social inequality,” said Klass,
a fourth-year ethnic studies student at UC San Diego.
“It would completely shift our ability to see how social
inequality plays out,” he added. “We wouldn’t be
able to gather data on who’s admitted and who’s left
out.”
Supporters of the policy say racial and ethnic classification is
no longer relevant or even accurate, and that anyone who wants this
data should collect it themselves instead of relying on the
state.
On the national front, Neal represents UCLA in the United States
Student Association, a coalition of student governments across the
nation. This past weekend he traveled to Washington, D.C. to become
certified in teaching students how to organize grassroots
movements.
He is also learning to organize electoral work, including how to
study demographics and redistricting, which should come in handy
with the UCSA’s voter registration movement.
“This way we bring (organizing) to the level of students,
who don’t usually have this tool,” Neal said.