It’s difficult to determine how seriously one should take
Jake Strom.
As he posed in the archway in front of Royce Hall, clad in
street clothes and wearing the head of a chicken costume,
occasionally making obscene gestures for the camera, the passing
campus tour groups weren’t sure what to make of him
either.
Strom, the presidential candidate for the Bruin Liberation
Movement, is embarking on the campaign route less followed.
“The goal of my party is to target precisely the people who
no one else is going to, which is the apathetic vote,” he
said.
His platforms include some of the same ideas candidates tout
every election season, such as fighting increases in textbooks
prices and reforming student group funding allocations ““ and
more humorous schemes such as tearing down Murphy Hall and
replacing it with the world’s largest bounce house. He wants
to bring fun to the campus, and has no qualms about wearing a
chicken suit to do it.
And then there’s the ski lift.
Strom believes that UCLA is becoming less of a student-friendly
environment. He says that not only students would love something as
“whimsical and goofy” as erecting an amusement park
style ski lift on campus, but the gimmick would also attract
prospective students.
“Yes, you’re putting out money which could go
towards other things, but what a selling point,” Strom
said.
Strom says the cost of the endeavor isn’t out of reach,
provided the university allocates its building funds to what he
believes really matters to students.
“If you look at all the construction which is going on on
campus, there’s so much waste, like refurbishing a lobby in
the dorms. No one is going to come to this school because the lobby
in Sproul is nice. It doesn’t matter. A lobby is a lobby. The
rooms are still really small. So if you take all that money and
allocate to something that students might really enjoy, I mean,
just think of the benefits,” Strom said.
Strom has no student government experience at UCLA, and says he
has never attended a council meeting.
USAC President Allende/Palma Saracho said not taking the
presidency seriously is a disservice to students. The reason USAC
takes itself so seriously is because it deals with issues that
affect students’ educational experiences and quality of life
at UCLA, Palma/Saracho said.
Even Strom’s mother questioned his qualifications for the
position.
“I think he’s vastly unqualified ““ he’s
disorganized, inattentive,” said Debbie Strom.
Strom grew up as the youngest of three children in San
Francisco. Now as a fourth-year political science student at UCLA,
he has served as the philanthropy chair for his fraternity, Pi
Kappa Phi, as a counselor and fishing specialist at UniCamp, and
volunteers with Best Buddies.
He counts reading, thrift store shopping and creative writing
among his hobbies. Strom once worked for a now-defunct offbeat
section of the Daily Bruin where he planned to focus on humorous
writing, such as explaining that frozen yogurt machines are powered
by little gnomes inside of them. He quit before any of his work was
published.
Strom also founded the UCLA chapter of the Flat Earth Society
and the Lorenzo Mata Super Fan Club.
“He’s very different ““ he does his own unique,
esoteric things,” said Debbie.
“He’s amazing,” she said.
An entrepreneurial foray into textbook reselling caused Strom to
focus on textbook prices in his campaign. He has made several
thousand dollars in a small business venture picking up discarded
books that were denied for buyback and selling them on
Amazon.com.
He said his success is based on the fact that UCLA unnecessarily
updates to new editions of textbooks at far faster rates than most
schools when older editions are still in use at a number of other
colleges.
“Couldn’t we say that for all subjects that
aren’t on the cutting edge of technology, that we’re
not going to support this system? We’re going to say, as a
department or as a school, we’re going to use the next to
most recent editions of books,” Strom said.
He is also a passionate critic of student group funding
allocations, saying that money that all students pay should go
toward programs that all students can participate in and benefit
from. He even criticized how his own fraternity received funds from
student government to carry out fall recruitment.
Strom said that programming funds should not go to cultural
groups who only serve a minority of students.
If student fees continue to fund programming which is not
available to all students, Strom said, he’ll call for radical
reforms, such as requiring members of campus groups to pay
dues.
While typical student government campaigns at UCLA involve
bitter fights over student group endorsements and gaining the
support of enclaves in the student population, Strom said he has
other plans.
The goal of his campaign is to reach and mobilize the apathetic
vote, the three-quarters of undergraduates who don’t know
what’s going on with elections, and don’t appear to
care.
“Twenty-five percent are going to vote for these two other
parties ““ forget those people,” Strom said. “Why
not think in the broader scheme: there’s 75 percent of the
school which is completely apathetic, and no one’s even
attempting to create a dialogue in a meaningful sense.”
Strom blames this apathy on the fact that student government
gets too entrenched in fighting the administration on issues they
ultimately have no control over, such as implementing the diversity
requirement or reforming the expected cumulative progress
requirement.
“I feel like what wasted energy it is to go through
this,” Strom said. “There’s nothing novel to this
idea, to the fact that they want us out quickly. We can have as
many protests and meetings as we want, it’s not going to
change.”
Strom says learning to work with the administration would be
more fruitful than opposing the system.
The campaign’s novelty may be what students need to become
interested in student government, said Strom’s roommate Arbi
Pedrossian, a third-year political science student.
“I think if he’s able to elicit enough amusement to
his antics, that he can maybe win,” Pedrossian said.
Strom said that while some candidates run because it looks
impressive on graduate school applications, or for the love of
power, he is running because it will be a lot of fun, and that
students will respond well to creativity and imagination for a
change.
“I feel like students want an entertainer. That’s
what a leader should be,” Strom said.