Ahh, another beautiful quarter. Which means another long line at A.S. Soft Reserves for the poor saps forced to buy their class readers there.
Of course, as they stand in line, some canny students might start to wonder: Should they really vote to raise their own activity fees by 70 percent in next week’s campuswide election, as the student government recommends? Hopefully, they’ll arrive at the right answer, which is “No.”
As the A.S. Council likes to point out in justification of the hike, UCSD’s student government controls a much smaller budget than its counterparts at the other major UC campuses. But the comparison is flawed: The other campuses raise far more money from sources other than their students, while UCSD hasn’t even begun to catch up.
Consider, ironically enough, Soft Reserves. Like the other “enterprises,” which supposedly exist to make money for the A.S. Council to spend, the reader service has struggled to make any profit at all. For the most part, in fact, the A.S.-run enterprises’ main function seems to be to provide a job for the managers who run them, not sustain a viable business model.
Many years ago, Soft Reserves began to face competition from private companies, which could often produce the same class readers more cheaply, and actually deliver them to your class, to save you the long line. A benefit for students, right? Not in the eyes of Soft Reserves and your student government, which convinced the university last quarter to ban outside vendors from selling readers on campus, supposedly out of safety concerns. So now you must stand in line, yet again.
Instead of adapting to the competition by cutting prices and giving students better service, Soft Reserves chose to kick others off campus, in the name of assuring a “level playing field.”
The same story can generally be applied to the entire A.S. enterprises office, which was created half a decade ago to give the A.S. Council an alternative source of income to activity fees. Since then, the office has suffered from a massive failure of imagination, unable to create new services that students actually want to use.
At UCLA, the student government runs seven campus restaurants, and operates a trademark and licensing office that rakes in cash for letting outside vendors use the school’s name and logos. At Stanford University, the government operates a $6 million bank for undergraduates, and designs corporate Web sites.
Is there any surprise that the student councils at these campuses have bigger budgets?
UCSD’s A.S. Council hasn’t created a new enterprise for years, not since it jointly opened a ropes course with the recreation department. This year, Commissioner of Enterprise Angela Chen considered bringing in those chairs that provide a tantalizing back massage when you feed them your spare change. A far cry from Stanford’s bank.
The problem is that the student government has spent too much time trying to resuscitate its current failing businesses to think of new ones. It’s not that students don’t want to stand in line for hours to buy a class reader, our leaders’ thinking goes, it’s that they simply don’t know the service exists.
So this year, A.S. senators tapped into the council’s near-holy reserves account — something they refused to do even to pay a lawyer to protect Student-Run Television during the porn fiasco — to … hire a sign twirler to promote the A.S.-run businesses.
The failure to innovate hurts students in places other than just their pocket books, where they get hit with higher activity fees. It also means lost opportunities: The second purpose of the enterprises is to provide students with marketable work experience. While UCLA graduates can tell future employers that they experienced the intricacies of intellectual property law, UCSD grads can be proud that they served coffee at the Grove, another A.S. co-run business.
In future years, even the few profitable A.S. businesses, like A.S. Lecture Notes, are likely to go into decline, as more and more professors begin to post PowerPoint slides online and students turn to things like Wiki Web sites to share class notes. And the A.S. Council can’t keep raising activity fees forever.
The recent lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America provided the A.S. Council with a perfect opportunity: What could be more popular with students than a low-priced, legal music downloading service? The council could have built its own, or simply negotiated a massive group discount on behalf of the entire student body from a corporate vendor, and then kept a commission, as other schools have done. Sadly, it did neither.
Though framed as a referendum on the A.S. programming office, next week’s fee vote is instead an opportunity for students to choose the future funding model for their student government. They can accept higher fees, or force the A.S. Council to innovate.
