During a heated meeting last week, the Undergraduate Students Association Council discussed and meticulously tweaked a resolution that makes demands of the new University of California president, Janet Napolitano. The meeting lasted four hours and ended with an impressive compromise that passed the resolution with unanimous consent.
Tonight, the council has yet another potentially charged meeting ahead of it as it considers a new resolution, the third one to be brought forward since the councilmembers took office.
“A Resolution in Support of the IGNITE (Invest in Graduations, Not Incarceration. Transform Education) campaign and UC Diversity Pipeline” expresses UCLA’s support of the University of California Student Association’s IGNITE campaign. The campaign focuses on prison reform and increasing diversity at the UC.
USAC does a disservice to the goals of the IGNITE campaign by burying it in the multitude of far-reaching resolutions it has brought forward so far this year. It’s only the second week of the quarter and the council has already passed two resolutions.
Since taking office, it approved a resolution calling to end the use of the term “illegal” and a second making demands of the new UC president.
Engaging students with all these resolutions at once is virtually impossible. Adding another item to the list is going to compound that problem, particularly when so many students remain focused on the issues surrounding Napolitano and last week’s resolution.
“Students are still in the Napolitano zone,” said Internal Vice President Avi Oved. “We need to capitalize on the attention we have on Napolitano right now. Once that’s dealt with we can move onto IGNITE,” he added.
Certainly, all the attention placed on the resolution concerning Napolitano has prevented council from being able to properly publicize IGNITE.
At tonight’s meeting, the councilmembers should postpone taking action on the resolution until they feel they have had sufficient time to publicize it and students are made fully aware of the IGNITE campaign’s goals.
As of 1:30 p.m. the resolution was still not up on USAC’s Resolution Reform website, so students could not give input online even the day before the resolution was set to come to the council table.
There are several pieces of controversial legislation mentioned in the resolution, including Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 5, which would allow for the consideration of race, sex and ethnicity in university admissions.
Issues like this one deserve proper attention from council and from the student body, and rushing them to the table just a week after a major, controversial resolution was passed fails to give them that attention.
Council did reach out to certain student groups who expressed support for the IGNITE campaign, said External Vice President Maryssa Hall.
However, it is important to make resolutions available to the entire student body in their exact wording. That way, everyone has access to the resolution and has the ability to examine particular clauses, not just the student groups council chooses to involve.
On Sunday, Nicole Fossier, director of the Bruin Lobby Corps in the External Vice President’s Office, still had not seen any of the wording in the resolution – and she works within USAC as a student lobbyist.
It’s the council’s responsibility to make sure that its constituents understand what it is doing, and bringing a new resolution to the table before it has given people time to process the last one is a failure on its part to do that.