In USAC politics, the least sexy issues are often the most contentious.
In the past few weeks, councilmembers have spent hours in deadlocked debate, quarrelling over new guidelines allocating Kerckhoff Hall’s limited office space to student groups.
For the last three weeks, undergraduate student government has remained at a standstill on the issue of office space allocation. President Gabe Rose plans to review the current tenants’ claims to space sometime next quarter, but there is no concrete plan to assure that Rose will even have opportunity to do so.
In order to give each group on campus a fair shot at an office, USAC should indeed review all of Kerckhoff’s tenants and immediately open up applications for new ones.
What’s more important, however, is that USAC develop a clear set of criteria to determine office space allocations now and in the future. Without one, the process will continue to be diluted by political patronage and ultimately fail to allocate space to the groups that can use it best.
For those not scholars of USAC history, Kerckhoff’s offices have been occupied since time immemorial by the big identity groups on campus, such as MEChA, the Queer Alliance and the African Student Union (ASU). No one knows how these groups came to occupy their offices, or if any guidelines distributing the space have ever been written down. It just happened, as if by divine fiat.
Now, some could be expelled from the garden. With Rose’s review, if tenants don’t meet a yet-to-be-agreed-upon set of criteria, the size of their space could be reduced, or worse, they could be evicted.
Neilda Pacquing, a presidential appointee who chairs the non-partisan Office Space Allocation Committee (OSAC), has drafted a set of criteria that groups must meet in order to receive office space. In their current, unratified form, the criteria comprise a point system. Of the points, 40 percent quantify the group’s engagement with students; 15, the size of the group; 15, the group’s ability to sustain itself; and 30, the group’s ability to utilize the space. Pacquing’s committee would decide how many points each applicant deserves in the four categories.
Some student leaders, such as Cultural Affairs commissioner Bernice Shaw, one of two Students First! members on the 13-person council, oppose the criteria on principle.
“We can’t have an exact percentage breakdown,” she says, arguing OSAC must be free to weight the factors in each organization’s case as it chooses.
“We definitely need to look at the underlying social realities of different communities on campus,” she said, speaking of how she would allocate space were she in charge.
Reading between the lines, however, “communities” is just SF! newspeak for the identity groups that already occupy Kerckhoff and, by the by, happen to be her slate’s key constituency.
Her conservativism is self-defeating. While an absence of criteria would make it easy for a future SF! majority to allocate space to its constituents, it means today’s Bruins United majority could easily evict those same groups altogether.
BU, after all, has its own “communities” ““ namely Greek organizations and political groups such as the College Republicans ““ that could easily fill up Kerckhoff on their own.
Shaw and the current tenants should instead fight for strict criteria that make sure the groups that get office space are those that use it.
Many tenants already make great use of their office. The Queer Alliance uses theirs as a safe-space for students not yet out of the closet. Many groups, such as Chicanos/Latinos for Community Medicine (CCM), use their offices to run social service programs around Los Angeles County. The ASU’s office provides a place for black students to congregate and work on the organization’s important retention programs. These sorts of activities require a centralized location.
But not every group requires a one. We’ve all got laptops and can easily book a classroom for a meeting.
Some may only want the office for storage, a mailing address or prestige. Bruin Democrats, for instance, received their space last year, yet they rarely use the office for anything other than storage, say members who wished to remain anonymous for fear of jeopardizing the group’s space.
To avoid such inefficiency, the council should move 20 percent of the points in Pacquing’s criteria from the “student engagement” category to “utilization of space.” Engagement, in any case, is a poor criterion. CCM may not do a lot of campus programming, but it serves a large population outside the school.
For groups that just need storage space or a mailbox, USAC already has plenty of mailboxes for rent, and lockers, said Rose, will be available soon.
For the rest, they should apply for space along with everybody else.
E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.