Monday, 4/14/97
ASUCLA heads operate without a body
Student government breaches faith by issuing cost increases
before consulting all of its members
ASUCLA’s student and career leaders have gagged the student
body, but not before shoving a horse pill – in the form of a $43.50
annual fee increase – down its throat.
ASUCLA autocrats hiked the $7.50 fee to $51 without a standard
practice referendum and will add insult to injury later this spring
when they ask students, in a nonbinding survey, how they feel about
it.
The official justification for this outrageous decision is not
convincing. For several years, the financially troubled ASUCLA has
teetered on the edge of insolvency. This increase, its proponents
argue, will add about $1.6 million to the association’s coffers
annually and help to guarantee the association’s continued
existence – in many ways, an admirable and important goal.
But not if it means undermining every value the "students’"
association is supposed to hold dear.
"By and for the students" is a phrase historically used to
describe ASUCLA. But by avoiding a binding vote, the association
has made it clear that it is certainly no longer "by" the students,
and it is becoming increasingly murky just how ASUCLA is "for"
us.
In its more prosperous years, ASUCLA proved its allegiance to
members by sponsoring events such as textbook rebates (remember
those?). Student-led movements within the association resulted in
an organization with a conscience that refused to do business with
corporations tied to the apartheid government of South Africa.
But years of bad business decisions and poor management landed
the association in a financial quagmire that has the current batch
of leaders desperate to return to profitability.
As a result, the "student" part of the association has received
increasingly short shrift. In recent years, the ratio of student to
commercial space within the union has shrunk dramatically. Prices
are higher. The programming fund, historically one of the most
tangible benefits ASUCLA provided for students, is now paid for by
the university.
Through all these tough, but seemingly necessary sacrifices, a
nagging question was: "Will ASUCLA remember its purpose once it
regains financial stability?"
By silencing the voice of the very students who make ASUCLA what
it is, the association seems to have answered that question.
Somewhere in their desperate attempt to save ASUCLA, student
leaders and career employees have forgotten what they were
saving.
Where were our student governments when the association decided
accountability to students was too great a burden to bear?
Amazingly, both the undergraduate and graduate governments
approved, albeit reluctantly, the decision to go over the head of
the student body. By supporting this proposal, student government
has effectively relinquished student control of the association to
career employees.
University policy usually makes these sort of unexpected student
union fee hikes an impossibility. In most circumstances, a binding
student vote is required. There are loopholes however, and ASUCLA
has squirmed its way through one.
ASUCLA officials claim that time constraints and contractual
obligations made a vote impossible. But it is extraordinarily
difficult to believe that association bean counters had no inkling
of the need for a massive fee increase until it became too late to
put it to a vote.
It seems much more likely that ASUCLA officials realized that a
fee increase would be a tough sell to a student body skeptical of
the association’s worth, and looked for alternate means to get the
cash.
But at this point, the association should have to work hard to
prove its worth.
ASUCLA could have tried to reconnect with its membership and
taken the time to explain to students the genuine need for a fee
increase.
Instead, ASUCLA feared that students might not think the
association was worth an extra $43.50 a year. But if student
approbation of the association was low prior to the forced
implementation of this fee, we suspect it is even more dismal
now.
We have only one question for ASUCLA’s board of directors and
the student governments that supported its decision: What is the
point of keeping a struggling student union afloat when it ignores
the very students it purports to serve?