Transparency and accessibility have been favored buzzwords of the current Undergraduate Students Association Council members since their campaigns for office last year, when candidates promised to reach out and engage with students.
Despite expressing concern about these issues, council was met with student backlash this summer for not seeking enough student input on major decisions.
Students have a responsibility to inform themselves about student government – but ultimately, USAC also has a responsibility to actively seek out their opinions and give them a reason to care.
In the coming year, USAC must make it a priority to properly inform students about its actions and better engage them in the decision-making process. There is no one way to do this effectively – it’s a matter of numerous, varied approaches to getting the word out about council initiatives before they come to a vote.
More importantly, it requires a commitment by all council members to go out to students to seek opinions, rather than passively wait for students to come to them.
Currently, council is taking some steps to improve accessibility, including Internal Vice President Avi Oved’s new resolution reform feature on the USAC website, which allows students to comment on council resolutions electronically.
The feature is a step in the right direction, making it easier for students to get information on council happenings and provide feedback. However, without council-wide efforts to publicize both the feature and the resolutions under consideration, it will do very little to truly give USAC a grasp of the student body’s opinion.
The feature is a passive way to garner student opinion, and is only useful when it is coupled with active outreach to students.
Oved said he will be enforcing a hard deadline of 5 p.m. on Thursdays for students to submit items to be discussed at USAC’s Tuesday meetings. This is a good way to give students more time to hear about council initiatives, but in those interim five days between the deadline and the meeting, USAC must work to better publicize the issues under consideration.
To accomplish this, USAC staff members should march out on Bruin Walk and spread information by speaking with students and passing out informational material. After all, if council members can garner all that manpower for campaigning, and if their slates’ followers are as passionate as they seem during election season, there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to spread the word about important items of business during their term.
Reaching out in this way ensures that council is doing everything it can to get a sense of student opinion, as opposed to waiting for responses through websites, emails or asking that students physically come to council meetings.
Some of the council’s decisions over the summer demonstrate exactly why passively gauging student opinion is a problematic strategy. Last month, council voted to increase their stipends by nearly 90 percent, and there was public outcry that student opinion was not taken into proper consideration.
Resolution reform, while a good start with worthy intentions, could not have provided students with an avenue to voice their opinions in this case, because the measure under consideration was not a resolution.
The largest factor that could have led to a different outcome is council commitment to seeking out student opinion more thoroughly.
If social media outreach, personal conversations and reactions to stories in the Daily Bruin did not feel like enough student input, council should have waited until fall to pass the measure, even if it meant that the measure couldn’t go into effect this year. At least the delay would have better enabled council to inform the student body about the measure and properly gauge its reaction to it.
Ultimately, the only thing that will truly ensure proper outreach is full council member commitment to it, regardless of how busy things are in their individual offices.
The council’s job, first and foremost, is to be a representative body for us – and council members can only fulfill that responsibility if they are taking every possible measure to seek out student opinion each step of the way.