Last Tuesday, members of the Undergraduate Students Association Council attempted to take on the responsibility of holding themselves and the school responsible for their financial investments.
Through a single proposed resolution, three council members called on USAC, UCLA and the University of California to disinvest from any company that violates human, worker or environmental rights.
The notions of workers’ rights, environmental sustainability and human rights are still heavily contested today and it’s a long uphill battle for any institution, especially a student-run organization, to accurately define all three in a way that won’t draw ire from some group or another.
Instead of bringing the resolution to the table as one overarching, broad document, as the original did, splitting the document into three separate texts would foster more in-depth exploration of each issue.
With its role as a representative body for thousands of students, USAC is well-positioned to set the agenda, or conversation, within the university. As highly visible campus leaders, the actions of USAC council members can serve as a barometer for the administration to identify issues important to the school’s students.
The intent of the resolution is sound, and the issues it raises are ones that deserve the attention of students.
No one expects a resolution from our undergraduate student government to change the world, but opening up conversations about these tough issues can lay the groundwork for a more educated and socially active student populace.
Lumping all three issues together threatens to slow or even bring to a halt any kind of constructive criticism or conversation. There’s a difference between meaningful conversation toward a goal, and circular debate that rehashes familiar talking points.
With a single document, even if a group agrees on the ideas of labor and human rights, it may disagree on a small aspect of the environmental portion of the resolution and protest it, slowing the progress of all three points.
This isn’t productive conversation, nor is it the kind USAC should promote. Splitting the resolution into three parts would allow those student groups who have greater interest in one aspect of the document to engage in more depth and substantial conversation on an individual topic. This also means that people who are more well-versed in a subject will have a greater say in what goes into the resolutions.
The length of the resolution also creates complexities. To clearly define all three causes and their place at the UC, it would take a massive document – a text that would draw away from the immediacy of any one topic and that could dilute the message entirely.
If supporters of the resolution attempted to take the opposite course and shorten the document, they would run the risk of not thoroughly addressing the topics individually and would revert back to the original problem: vagueness.
A three-part document would prevent one resolution from drawing away attention of the others. If USAC were to vote on one of the resolutions a week, then focused debate could be had between students more invested or better versed in one issue over another.
Instead, with one document, there’s a possibility that students who have detailed concerns over, say, labor rights, could be overshadowed by students stuck on the mention of a single issue in an unrelated portion of the document.
For example, on Tuesday, a long debate emerged from a short reference to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. While discussion of the conflict is no doubt important, much was missed in discussion of other, more central, points of the resolution.
On Thursday, members of the council plan to hold a forum to continue discussion on the resolution. While it might help steer the conversation, once again, addressing this massive topic with one night of debate comes down to a game of numbers – that valid points can be drowned out by whichever party is the loudest.
Three documents would help narrow the debate and would remove much of the back-and-forth that can emerge from heated discussion over a single text.
If last Tuesday‘s meeting is any indication, there is a strong group of socially active students on this campus that want to have their opinions heard.
In order to ensure that everyone gets the chance to voice their concerns, it becomes necessary to split the resolution into three separate documents. As students who pay tuition to the university and fees to our student government, it’s in our interests to care about what the school does with its money and which business our student union interacts with.
Email Nelson at rnelson@media.ucla.edu.
Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion.
Thank you for your thoughtful words ryan!
Your proposal is a sensible and obvious one. Interestingly, this idea of splitting the resolution and making it more explicit was proposed at the council table last Tuesday by Cynthia and other council members. Unfortunately, our beloved EVP Lana El Farrah made it very clear last Tuesday at Council that she would NEVER bring a resolution that didn’t put ALL THREE things together. This is because Lana does not actually care about passing resolutions on these issues (many of which do have represent a consensus on campus), she only cares about scoring political points that will rally her base and so she can say she’s “been silenced.”
You haven’t been silenced. You brought a resolution to the table that was clearly offensive, extremely vague, open ended and could be easily misconstrued to further divisive political agenda. Stop being a politician and start acting like an advocate Lana and then maybe we can get things done.
I think that Ryan actually makes a very strong and clear argument as to why the resolution should be cut into three more succinct documents. However, your comment to the article seems to be based not on factuality, but rather purely anecdotal. You cite that the article is “clearly offensive” yet do not state what offense it has made? If it is offensive to be in support of human rights, then you may need to reconsider your place in the world as you too are human. If it is offensive to support environmental responsibility, then you may need to prepare for a total ecological failure in the near future. If it is offensive to support the rights of workers, especially considering that some of the most basic functions that run this University (and our nation) are contingent on the labors of hardworking laborers, then you might want to think about the injustice you, as patrons to this institution, are endorsing.
The fact of the matter is, if you, or any person, believe that any part of the resolution is worth supporting ethically, then you cannot say you do not accept the other two. If you believe in workers rights, how can you not believe in human rights? They are undeniably intertwined as all workers are people and deserve to be treated like humans. If you believe in environmental responsibility, how can you not support human rights? Unless you are completely disassociated from the human race, the primary reason that we as humans care about sustaining the environment is due to our need, as humans, to live on this planet. So, what you end up telling society when you approve of ethicality in some situations and unethicality in others, is that you are morally hypocritical For example, with relation to the document put forth at council, say that you advocate that human rights is an issue worth supporting as an “ethical investment” because you believe homosexuals in Uganda deserve to be treated as humans with the same rights as heterosexuals but, because of concerns of human rights violations concerning the Armenian Genocide is offensive to another community you refuse to support human rights at all. When you do that, you, as a council member, effectively approve human rights violations as long as someone is offended by supporting the human rights of marginalized people. That’s like supporting the holocaust because you don’t want to offend Germans.
So, please do not attempt to claim that the only responsible resolution to move the university away from a history of endorsing companies and practices that have (unethically) exploited people and resources as divisive. The only people being divisive are those who refuse to move forward on this issues. We do not need regressives advocating at USAC, we need progressives.
I think the issue that was trying to be addressed by the former commenter was the vagueness of the resolution. The resolution calls for a divestment from companies committing human rights violations. Before we advocate for divestment we need to define what exactly we are divesting from. In the resolution, it was proposed that we should divest from anything committing human rights violations such as the “aforementioned violations” which included the “2008-09 Israeli offensive on Gaza”. This specific event is a divisive issue. In fact, the pure diction divides the campus and marginalizes a large community by characterizing the 2008 war against Hamas controlled Gaza as an “offensive”. It’s not that opponents of this resolution are against human rights violations, workers rights, and environmental responsibility, but it is important to define exactly what human rights violations we should divest from. This is where the separation of the resolution into three separate documents would reduce the overall vagueness and offensiveness of the original resolution.
“No one expects a resolution from our undergraduate student government to change the world” @Ryan Nelson Are you being serious? Do not put words in my mouth, especially when I actually do have that expectation! As a result of the lack of initiative and engagement in external affairs from the vast majority of current council members, people have forgotten about the historical impact our student government has had not just at UCLA but also around the world. Are you kidding me? We are UCLA! UCLA that has historically fought for institutionalized changes that don’t just impact students locally but also have an impact on communities around the globe. It saddens me to see that students think we can’t and shouldn’t strive to make change outside of the UCLA campus. As Bruins, our community goes far beyond the university! Our community extends to the outer Los Angeles area and the rest of the world because, after all, our university, which takes pride on being one of the top public institutions in the world, owes it to the rest of the world to be educated and engaged on local and/or external injustices happening across the globe, regardless of whether the university is engaged in those affairs directly or indirectly. We are privileged to attend a university such as UCLA and thus it is our responsibility to hold the university accountable on making ethical investments.