Later this month, the University of California Board of Regents will vote on whether to create a new student adviser position. The adviser would represent student interests in UC committees the current student regent and student regent-designate don’t participate in.
At face value, the regents’ consideration of admitting another student into their ranks seems like a move in the right direction. However, because the student adviser will have no voting power, approving the position would be little more than symbolic and represents the regents’ continued resistance to meaningful student representation.
If the regents really want to prove they care, they will come forth with a plan to actually engage students more proactively. Currently, only one student regent holds voting power alongside 18 other men and women with no explicit interests in representing students outside of their involvement on the board.
When the student regent does vote against the rest of the board, nothing actually changes. The student adviser, like the student regent-designate, will not have the voting power necessary to even marginally change this unbalanced power dynamic.
The student adviser’s purpose among the regents is being marketed as a megaphone for the student population, which the regents have little interaction with. Yet ironically, the adviser’s responsibilities do not involve any power and contribute only one student voice to the cacophony of other officials, experts and outside interests.
Simply involving another student is unlikely to make any difference. Even when soliciting students’ feedback, the regents have proven to be reluctant listeners.
Last October, the working group for the Statement of Principles Against Intolerance hosted an open forum and scheduled meetings with members of the UC community at UCLA to solicit feedback on the statement’s draft, which generated heated debate on how specific it should be. This gave regents an opportunity to have meaningful interaction with students – both in volume and variety.
However, not all those who had a scheduled audience with the regents during their limited visit got to voice their opinions. The working group ended the open forum before all students in attendance were able to speak, and before others with scheduled appointments arrived.
The working group has no plans to host an open forum again.
Since then, the UC has said little else about the statement publicly, but has continued consulting experts and others with vested interests, including UCLA’s Chancellor of Diversity, Equity and and Inclusion Jerry Kang.
At their November meeting, the regents only confirmed that the statement would be inclusive.
Who’s on their list of privileged interviewees and why their advisement matters more than students’ hasn’t been disclosed. As with most of the UC’s decisions, the statement is being drafted quietly.
A student adviser will not fix the University’s lack of transparency and accountability, and as a single person, will not suitably represent the vast student body the regents more or less ignore when making decisions on everything from its tuition to its health insurance.
If the UC wants to get a pat on the back, it’s going to have to try harder than that.
The editorial board has the right intention, and makes legitimate points. However, systemic change in a bureaucracy is a slow, slow process. Another student advisor is not a solution, but it is a step in the right direction. The way to build on this step in the right direction is to flood the regents with support for the idea, not to attack them for not doing enough. Opposing this plan sends the regents a clear message: do nothing, and the students will attack you. Do something and the students will attack you. Therefore, don’t waste your time listening to students, because they will attack you no matter what you do. Better plan: support this plan and work towards incremental change.
This post is not just directed at the Daily Bruin, but rather at this overarching trend in personal thought – this idea of “us” versus “them.”
Just a few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending UC Student Congress, a conference where I was exposed to a plethora of student issues and incredible activists across UC campuses working towards tangible change.
I had the opportunity to attend a small seminar given by UCLA’s very own UC Student Regent Avi Oved. I have always looked up to and admired Avi for all of his work here in USAC as well as the greater UC system, but until hearing him speak I didn’t truly comprehend the power of his position on the Board of Regents.
And this power does not come from his vote.
He explained how much of the strength of his position comes in the form of advocacy. How it comes from the informal power he derives from having the listening ears of 18 incredibly powerful, otherwise unreachable people, people with deep respect for him. This is nothing to be scoffed at. His job is to play on behalf of us in a huge game of chess. He’s had to power map and work to understand the regents as individuals, their personal opinions or motives, and use this knowledge to make the most strategic moves in order to influence the tides to roll in the favor of the UC student.
Bureaucratic change is long, dull, and arduous. By taking steps to appoint a Student Advisor, another voice and another mouthpiece directly connected to the ears of each regent, so much groundwork is being lain for the Student Regents that will follow and for the students of the UC system. It’s not “our vote” versus “their vote” as the DB would like you to believe; it’s so much more.
Lift up your student leaders and administrators instead of tearing them down. It is time to stop thinking in “us” versus “them” and start understanding that tangible change will only come when all parties involved set aside their disagreements and disillusions to compromise and create something that is greater than the sum of their parts. #onemorevoice
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The Regents taking steps that don’t enlarge student voting representation to a size that rivals non-student representation does not necessarily make it a bad move. There’s nothing that anyone can expect the Regents to do that lessens their ability to craft policy that student bodies might not necessarily like or understand.
This, however, indicates to me that rational thinking isn’t the likely outcome: “alongside 18 other men and women with no explicit interests in representing students outside of their involvement on the board.” The author imagines the board of regents like a senate of overlords puffing their cigars, drinking scotch, and talking about horse racing. Of course the author has no clue as to the real motives and interests of individual regents.
The power dynamic is unbalanced because the power dynamic needs to be unbalanced. Like prisoners cannot be wardens, students who largely lack real world experience — particularly in organizational management — are unfit to run one of the largest university systems in the universe. Present student representation is appropriate and ideal as it keeps on the board the pulse of the student body. Reformers put too much stock in representation on the board. They would be more successful in ground-level protest.