With one summer, six weeks of the quarter and a successful
referendum under their belts, officers of the undergraduate student
government say they are buckling down to fulfill the campaign
promises they made last spring.
Many members of this year’s Undergraduate Students
Association Council sit at the council table having won some of the
most competitive political races at UCLA in the last few years. Now
that they’re in office, the promises they made during their
campaigns to edge out their opponents are slow in coming to
realization.
General Representative Jenny Lam campaigned with two primary
intentions: to promote hate crime awareness among Bruins and to
increase child care access for student parents who attend UCLA.
Lam said most of the work she’s done so far toward her
vision of a hate crimes resource fair has been “behind the
scenes.” She has contacted various centers on campus who
counsel and deal with victims of hate crimes, such as the Center
for Women and Men.
She intends to spend most of the fall planning the resource
fair, and has tentatively set the date for early winter
quarter.
In terms of improving child care access, Lam said there are a
“substantial” number of student parents in the UCLA
community. She has not done much beyond collecting information
toward determining how existing child care services can be improved
or expanded.
“Many (student parents) don’t know there are
services out there for them,” Lam said.
Within the same office, Adam Harmetz, top general representative
vote-getter, said earlier this year that he would produce a report
on university growth and its impact on student life. Like Lam, he
said his priority is in the research-gathering stage, and has set
up interactions with the Academic Senate on the issue.
He admits that the work has chugged along more slowly than he
had intended.
“We have not moved as far along as we hoped,”
Harmetz said.
He contends that the report is the top issue of his office, and
expects “something tangible” to come from the office
sometime during winter quarter.
Michelle Styczynski, the third general representative, has been
busy keeping up with her election-time goals. She said she would
bring entertainment back to Westwood in the midst of a community
crackdown to keep the surrounding college area more tranquil than
it has been in years past.
The process of working with community leaders has been more
bureaucratic than she expected, and she said initially “it
was difficult to get meetings with them.”
Part of the difficulty for Styczynski, she said, is that some of
the people she is trying to work with see change in the area
happening over a long period of time rather than during the
one-year term of a USAC officer.
“There’s only so much you can do in a year,”
she said.
But Styczynski remains ambitious about her plans, and is working
to revive a concert series in Westwood Village ““ particularly
on Broxton Avenue ““ that occurred on a regular basis during
the 1990s — as often as four times a week.
She also mentioned her efforts with the rally committee to
publicize lower-profile athletics on campus, so that students
support sports other than football and men’s basketball.
“I want to see students interested in sports other than
those that typically do well,” Styczynski said.
President David Dahle’s major campaigning project is a
randomized survey designed to gather student input on a
“variety” of issues affecting students. He is not
taking on the task alone, however, and he has enlisted the help of
Harmetz’s and Styczynski’s offices in conducting the
effort.
Students shouldn’t expect the survey to hit their e-mail
boxes any time soon, though ““Â Dahle said he is
coordinating with administrators to ensure that the questions in
the survey are “objective enough.”
“We really want to see what people think,” Dahle
said. “We don’t really know right now.”
Some of the issues that will be addressed by the survey include
a possible switch to a semester system, United States military
action against Iraq and the BruinGo! free busing program.
The promises have been made, and the work has begun ““ and
students will have to keep their eyes and ears open to make sure
they get what they voted for.