Regime change starts at home. Well, most unfortunately for the students of UCSD, the happy event that is regime change happens every year, and with each successive A.S. Council election, regime change looks less and less like democracy and more and more like a three-ring circus.
Even without multiple Kevin Hsu’s running, reading the election news stories of a certain non-A.S. funded publication sounds like farce more apt for a certain Muir-based quarterly.
All right, take away all of the candidates espousing free parking, and the election looks more serious — except for the fact that nine positions are uncontested, and more are effectively so after the circus-like elements of the ballot are removed. It is patently absurd to call a system a democracy when all the students have is one choice.
After sitting in on interviews with nearly every candidate for campus-wide positions last year, it was a disappointment to this writer that by and large, the more incompetent candidates were chosen due to their association with the Students First! slate. Regardless of the mechanics of how candidates ended up on a slate, why certain slates sweep elections or the validity of slates as free speech and association, the effects are clear and chilling: competent students with good ideas are not running because they know they stand no chance of winning, and thus even their contributions of healthy discourse are lost.
If banning slates is illegal under the protection of free association, then there must be some means to reorganize the system such that minority voices stand a decent chance of being represented in a suitable number of offices on the A.S. Council. Perhaps subjecting slate members to proportional representation across all their offices is one solution.
And in spite of the sham that the election process has become, the A.S. Council still dares to ruminate about financial autonomy. Furthermore, the performance of the student government in the past four years is atrocious in nearly every other arena. Several failed fee referendums show that the “”governing elite”” has lost sight of what the student body wants and needs (i.e. a no-frills expansion without $80 a quarter worth of pork barreling).
The external office has spent all the last three years leading other campuses in state and nationwide movements for various idealistic issues about access to education, but has done little for UCSD relations with the San Diego community. The academic affairs office, under the utter incompetence of slate-elected Halle Beitollahi, has managed to leave students voiceless on the issues that matter the most to them (passing periods, curriculum, admissions, etc.) by not filling student appointments on faculty committees, the one place where student voices might actually be taken into serious consideration.
Lastly, the A.S. Council itself has wasted away the past year with needless resolutions on national issues with little bearing for student life or academic issues. As the Campus Coalition for Peace shows, if there are pressing external issues that students want to campaign for, ad hoc groups formed out of existing organizations are much more effective and legitimate sources of student activism.
Ironically, the only campus issue student government seems to have addressed in detail this past year is how they elect themselves. The sum total of this activity — the end of spending limits, the confirmation of the inability to deny the creation of slates, and the proposal to bring commissioner appointments away from direct election — is the further reinforcement of the slate system.
It is as if some opponent of democracy (or Kafka) has written the perfect farce of the system gone completely wrong: a democracy constructed such that the average student with good ideas has absolutely no chance of election, and those in power spend endless hours debating how to reform the system only to make it worse.
As a UCSD student, this writer would much rather his student activity fees go toward somewhat more competent bodies. After all, given that the external office failed to stem the tide of student fee increases by the state, and that the only visible return on A.S. this writer has seen this year is in the form of a schedule handed out on Library Walk, it is quite clear that this is money not well invested. Why even bother with elections? One wonders if the administration could not do a better job just appointing students by themselves and appropriating money to various offices. No doubt the student body would stand a better chance of getting competent choices in the commissioner positions.
Democracy is necessary in a society where pressing issues like universal health care, war and the macroeconomics are the questions at hand. But this writer sincerely doubts that the issues facing student government — namely, ten minute passing periods and who is performing at the next Sun God — can justify this circus we call a democracy.
However, whether the administration would be entirely competent in doling out student activity dollars and commissioner positions is also in doubt. Just take a look at the last issue of a certain student newspaper.
This writer would like to think he knows a thing or two about the cost of printing, and the advertising insert printed by the staff of the University Center’s last issue is an extravagant waste of funds.
Thick white stock paper and full-color printing on inserts (substantially more than humble newsprint) are a stupidly expensive luxury on an eight-page insert most students are more than likely to toss anyway.
Maybe students would be more likely to vote for an expansion if it were not so glaringly obvious that there is so much wasting of funds going on already.