Submission: UCSA campaigns lacks transparency, impact

Every year, some of your student fees go to UCLA’s contribution of more than $74,000 to the University of California Student Association board. However, the UCSA board has recently shown no interest in being accountable to its constituents: you, the UC students. They have dropped campaigns that we democratically selected and instead accepted outside money to take up other campaigns, all without student awareness or consent.

This year, we have come out of congress, UCSA’s annual convention, with an incredibly ambitious set of campaigns: UC divestment from fossil fuels, an oil severance tax that would require two-thirds vote of both the state Senate and state Assembly, and “IGNITE,” a continuation of last year’s “FIRE” prison reform campaign with the added component of increasing racial diversity in the UC.

UC students have historically asserted great influence over social reform and policy development in this state, leading the protest of the apartheid in South Africa through divestment and placing limits on the ability of the UC Board of Regents to increase student fees and misuse funds. But these campaigns take widespread student support and focus.

In the past year or so, UCSA has taken to getting riled up about several grand-scale, idealistic plans at the same time. They split their resources and flit from campaign to campaign throughout the year, eventually accomplishing little or nothing.

Based on the results of last year’s campaigns, it looks like nothing will get done this year either. Out of the two campaigns chosen by students last year – changing the fund distribution between campuses and democratizing the Board of Regents – neither were accomplished.

The board never really made any effort to reform the the way funds are distributed among campuses. And although great progress was made on the California constitutional amendment to reform the makeup of the Board of Regents, the UCSA board dropped it at the last minute. There was interest in Sacramento in introducing the legislation, but the UCSA board decided that publicizing it and getting students excited at the end of the year would take too much work (even though they somehow expect to get students excited and involved in three campaigns this year). And this is to say nothing of “Fund the UC,” a supposedly multi-year campaign that has been little more than an afterthought among UCSA board members since its introduction in 2011.

Instead of following through with the two directives UC students had voted for at UCSA’s congress last year, the UCSA board decided that a different campaign was in all of our best interests. An organization called the Rosenberg Foundation offered UCSA $25,000 to advocate for legislation concerning prison reform and juvenile justice.

This is a noble cause, and one that I have worked on both with Bruin Lobby Corps and in the office of Rep. Tony Cardenas, but it was not one of the campaigns democratically selected by students at congress. If the UCSA board refused to carry out the two comparatively simple goals students gave them last year, how can we know that they will commit to the exponentially more expansive set of campaigns we decided on this year?

As it stands, we can’t. The problem is that there is no transparency mechanism or system of accountability within UCSA. At congress this year, the board made no attempt to defend or explain this past year’s failure.

Students went right along debating ideas and building campaigns without knowing that we still haven’t completed the campaigns from last year. Not only does this rob the UCSA board of legitimacy as the voice of the students, but it also deprives students of an opportunity to learn about things that make a campaign likely to fail or succeed. It is the responsibility of the board to be proactive in reaching out to students to increase awareness and involvement.

Even students who want to be engaged have trouble staying informed; the UCSA board never gives updates on the progress of campaigns, and their webpage is consistently devoid of meeting minutes and upcoming agendas. Posting these online would alleviate this problem, as well as help avoid several other missteps the board has made throughout the year (such as passing a resolution including ethical divestment without first reaching out for student input).

But even when these issues have been brought up, the UCSA board continues on with the exact same practices. So what can we do? The UCSA board is in place to represent us, the UC students. The UCLA representatives specifically (including the external vice president) need to be responsive to you. If you too think that the UCSA board has been misusing your student funds, you should email our external vice president, or attend office hours. Let our representatives know that we are watching, and we are ready to start holding them accountable to the student movement.

Fossier is a fourth-year political science and psychology student and the director of the Bruin Lobby Corps.