Gabe Rose, president of USAC, is a fervent supporter of Sen. Barack Obama. Ironically, this month he’s adopted a political strategy of Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Last week, at one of the Undergraduate Student Association Council’s marathon meetings, Rose and Finance Committee Chair Parsa Sobhani proposed a sweeping reform of our undergraduate student government. If passed, it would transfer legislative power from the current council of officers to a 20-person senate, creating a legislative branch separate from the executive. Despite Rose’s enthusiasm, councilmembers have balked at the idea. Just as the Clintons did with their health care plan in 1993, Rose and Sobhani developed a massive government overhaul without using the ideas of all stakeholders. The council’s ambivalence about the plan means it’s likely to fail. Thank goodness for that, because a senate is a terrible idea.
Rose, and the many who have unsuccessfully proposed a senate before him, is understandably frustrated with the current system. USAC officers have dual roles, which combined demand more time than is available. They must legislate, which amounts to funding UCLA’s hundreds of student groups and changing USAC’s bylaws, which govern politically contentious USAC functions such as Kerckhoff office space allocation. Offices coordinate everything from silly spirit programs, such as the Bruin Bear Security Force, to more important activities, such as lobbying for increased UC funding in Sacramento.
Rose’s plan attempts to lessen the stress of wearing these two hats. He hopes a senate will free councilmembers to focus on programming, which, he said Tuesday, is “his first passion.”
This assessment is short-sighted. While incorporating a senate would free up USAC’s time to focus on programming, it would also mean that councilmembers would have to justify their programming to a heavily politicized legislative body, giving them less freedom to operate programs as they, and their constituents, see fit. Rose’s job would get harder, not easier.
All other UC campuses have senate systems that by their nature are notoriously conservative in authorizing programs. For instance, if the senate is dominated by one party, and a USAC office, such as the external vice president’s is occupied by another, the senate could simply veto all of the office’s programming. Rose is Pollyanna-ish here. He hopes that since it will be easier to get elected to the senate than to council, the new government will encourage independents to run. Experience at other UCs shows that undergraduate senates quickly become dominated by two parties.
The second major problem is that a senate would make it difficult to change the government when it needs changing. Rose’s plan gives the president a veto power much like that of the American president and establishes many more checks and balances than currently exist.
James Madison advocated for separation of powers in our republic’s government because such a system would prevent laws from changing radically at the whim of a short-lived majority. That same argument isn’t valid for student government. Students cycle through here every four years, and our government must have the freedom to change as quickly as we do.
Perhaps the only benefit of the senate plan is that it would depoliticize the roles of the five elected commissioners, who oversee offices such as Campus Events and Student Welfare. These commissions are largely nonpartisan, and their programs are unlikely to change regardless of who’s in power.
Since these commissioners have a vote on council, though, slates are tempted to run inexperienced candidates in order to gain more power at the table. If these candidates win, program quality suffers. Depoliticizing these offices may be a benefit, but it is far outweighed by the costs.
The system ain’t broke, and we don’t need to fix it. Rose talks about the need for better representation, but students are represented fine in the general representatives and executive officers that they elect. USAC functions pretty well; those who care to attend its programs enjoy them, money and office space are allocated to student groups fairly and transparently, and UCLA has one of the most lively group of activists in the UC. What more could we want?
E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.