For a campaign with such a simple name, Fund the UC’s operations have become dizzyingly complex in recent years.
Fund the UC is an advocacy campaign under the umbrella of the University of California Student Association, an organization that lobbies on behalf of UC students. The initiative pursues both grassroots organizing and state-level lobbying strategies to comprehensively reform California’s system of higher education funding.
Recently, it was the focus of a Fund the UC outreach week organized by the Undergraduate Students Association Council Office of the External Vice President. The diversity of the week’s activities – which ran the gamut from a phone banking session to convince California lawmakers to provide the UC with additional funding to video testimonials from debt-saddled students – reflected the expansive set of political goals the campaign has adopted.
Fund the UC’s mission has dramatically expanded in recent years. USAC External Vice President Chloe Pan said the campaign now hopes to stave off tuition increases, address facets of college affordability such as high textbook prices and advocate for a long-term funding solution for the UC. These new goals will supplement the campaign’s original mission of reforming Proposition 13, a California ballot initiative that has limited the amount of tax revenue available for higher education.
But Fund the UC’s scattered approach to political advocacy has not yielded many concrete victories. Despite the campaign’s efforts, the most effective catalyst so far for Proposition 13 reform seems to be the changes to state and local tax deductions enacted by the Republican federal tax bill, not the campaign’s advocacy. Defying student advocates, the UC regents ended a six-year tuition freeze earlier last year by approving a tuition hike of 2.5 percent. And regents are set to vote on another tuition hike during their May meeting, with a letter from Gov. Jerry Brown mostly responsible for a delay in the vote.
Clearly, the campaign has not achieved many of its goals. If Fund the UC is to gain relevance as a student advocacy program, its leaders in UCSA and in external vice presidents’ offices must fundamentally rethink their approach. To promote the program more effectively to the student body and achieve concrete political victories, Fund the UC’s student leaders must focus exclusively on preventing tuition hikes. Narrowing Fund the UC’s objective will help it fulfill its important mission. In contrast to obscure issues like Proposition 13 reform, tuition increases perennially incite student anger. The furious protest that greeted a tuition hike in 2009 is just one indication of how easily students can be mobilized against such increases. But the funding inequities produced by Proposition 13 simply cannot mobilize students to the same degree tuition hikes do, and Pan agreed that mass student mobilization is important to achieving Fund the UC’s goals.
This is especially true in light of the fact that so few students understand Proposition 13’s significance.
Daniel Wang, a third-year mechanical engineering student, said he hadn’t heard of Proposition 13 at all. Neither had Tristan Jahn, a first-year political science student. Both Wang and Jahn said they didn’t see how Proposition 13 affected their educations at UCLA.
Given the low level of student interest in Proposition 13 reform, it seems obvious that Fund the UC should focus on staving off tuition hikes. In addition to tapping into a reservoir of student anger about the rising cost of a UC education, focusing exclusively on tuition hikes will help the campaign promote its name recognition among the student body. This is especially pertinent given that Fund the UC Week, which was touted as a week of important political action, was attended very sparsely. In light of the explosiveness of the tuition issue, Fund the UC’s lack of name recognition was likely to blame.
Tellingly, neither Jahn nor Wang had heard of Fund the UC nor had any idea what the campaign sought to accomplish.
Pan said when the campaign circulated a petition calling to delay the tuition increase vote, it received more than 1,200 signatures across the UC. If Fund the UC narrowed its political objectives to preventing tuition increases in this way, it could cement its connection to the tuition issue in the minds of students.
Of course, it might seem that Fund the UC should take an expansive view of college affordability and advocate against any policy that would raise the price of a UC education. However, divorcing tuition hikes from increases in textbook prices and other educational expenses makes sense because textbook prices are largely out of the hands of UC decision-makers. As the Huffington Post explained, textbook prices continually increase because of a lack of competition in the market and because many students often cannot refuse to buy up-to-date textbooks even if prices are too high. UC officials are similarly powerless to influence the price of student health insurance, which is largely affected by the broader health insurance market.
Fund the UC’s wide-ranging portfolio has clearly hindered its ability to mobilize student activists and produce measurable results. If the campaign is serious about enacting change, it needs to be laser-focused on what students really care about: preventing tuition hikes.