Before his 1953 conviction for tax evasion, lobbyist Artie Samish was the “Secret Boss of California,” running the state Legislature through well-placed cash, the mother’s milk of politics. At UCSD, cultural organizations under the Student Affirmative Action Committee umbrella run campus politics in much the same way, though the money flows the other way: SAAC does the suckling, and the A.S. Council hands over the milk.
Until the Students First! political machine fell apart last year, SAAC orgs played a crucial role in campus elections, essentially hand-picking the specific candidates that ran on the SF! slate. But their might continues; in last year’s election, not a single one of the three slates that competed for campuswide offices dared to oppose the $180,000-a-year SAAC-backed referendum to fund student-initiated outreach. (The referendum failed.)
To this day, SAAC retains a nonvoting seat on the A.S. Council and is the only student organization that gets representation on the University Centers Advisory Board, though it’s not quite clear why culture orgs — instead of, say, Greeks or the College Republicans — have a larger vested stake in how student-funded facilities function.
The suckling itself comes in with the outreach funding. Every year, the A.S. Council appropriates approximately $40,000 to programs like high school conferences, designed to increase the number of underrepresented students on campus; SAAC orgs run many of these programs.
The process is supposed to work in the following way: First, the special Student-Initiated Outreach and Recruitment Commission — composed of mostly of SAAC org representatives — is supposed to draft a budget, picking the programs that receive outreach funding; next, the A.S. Council is supposed to review the budget, to make sure student funds are being spent in the best way.
In practice, the second step doesn’t happen, as became clear last month when the council was scheduled to approve the SIORC budget. Something was definitely amiss when the actual budget that the A.S. Council was supposed to be ratifying was never even attached to the council agenda.
“I don’t feel like this is a complete request — there isn’t even an amount there,” a dumbfounded Revelle College Senior Senator Rachel Corell told other councilmembers at the time.
Fortunately, Vice President Finance Greg Murphy was on hand to explain the rules of the game to Corell.
“SIORC is something that we generally let them allocate on their own,” Murphy said. “Whatever we approve, we just generally rubber stamp it.”
While members of Congress generally vote on legislation without actually reading it, the A.S. Council lowers its standards a notch, voting on legislation without actually seeing it. In effect, not only does the fox guard the chicken coop, but it does so with the blessing and the “rubber stamp” of the farmer.
And there are reasons for treating outreach funding with more scrutiny then other A.S. programs, not less.
The problem with outreach is that there is absolutely no evidence to show that it works. Between 2002 and the end of this academic year, the A.S. Council will have spent $146,000 in student activity fees to fund outreach. Ironically, between fall 2002 and this September, the number of black students — the campus’ most underrepresented group — admitted to UCSD actually fell from 330 to 313, despite an overall rise in the number of admitted freshmen.
Groups that put on outreach programs generally defend them by showing data on the number of students that attend. But there is absolutely no way to tell if the attendees would have applied to UCSD anyway, whether they attended the high school conferences or not.
If effectiveness were to be judged simply by usage rates, those herbal Viagra alternatives we keep getting e-mails about would be considered the new miracle drug. And there is as much science to demonstrate the effectiveness of the supplements as there is showing the success of outreach.
Last year, Earl Warren College sophomore Matt Herrick, at the time the college’s freshman senator, dared to ask if students actually got any benefit out of the Asian and Pacific-Islander Student Alliance high school conference. Such benefit is a requirement that must be met to receive funding from the Warren College Council. (APSA is a SAAC member.)
In response, Herrick’s dorm doors were super-glued, his face was superimposed over porn hung in Warren College residence halls and he was burned in effigy. OK, that last one didn’t happen. He eventually lost his challenge and then wrote an emotional letter, printed in the Guardian, apologizing for his ways.
And so the SAAC stranglehold over campus politics continued, though there are signs that its iron grip is weakening.
For example, last year’s demand by then-SAAC Chair Emily Leach that the A.S. Council do something about a culture of “white male entitlement” on campus was largely ignored. Most, it seems, realized that it would be a neat trick for white males to run the show, with women outnumbering men and Asians outnumbering whites at UCSD.
It may be only a matter of time before the constituent SAAC orgs realize that they share few common interests. After all, while blacks suffered under the state’s affirmative action ban, Asian students largely benefited under Proposition 209, their ranks growing to fill a disproportionately large share of seats on UC campuses in the aftermath. Yet both APSA and the Black Student Union work together as members of SAAC, still laboring under the illusion that they somehow have a shared goal.
For now, SAAC will continue to run campus politics, but cultural orgs should be getting pretty nervous. Even Artie Samish eventually fell from grace.
