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Editorial: U.S.E.S. Committee’s Good Intentions Fall Short

At least the administration gets credit for trying. On the one-year anniversary of the Undergraduate Student Experience and Satisfaction report’s release, funding has recently been approved for the North Campus transfer student housing, passed by the regents last year (to the tune of $120 million, topping off UCSD’s debt allowance) and students are set to vote on an (administration-backed) athletics referendum this fall. A Sept. 26 e-mail from the steering committee announced actions taken since May, including a convocation for freshmen, extended Geisel hours (undertaken independently by the library), a nicely vague “number of actions” to “improve student understanding and relations” with residential security officers and a “unique program that merges the complexity of space and communities into urban dance.”

It’s a start, if only a weak one.

The original U.S.E.S. committee took care to showcase student voices in the report — but whose voices are reflected? While the committee used extensive numerical data for many of its general conclusions, the strong focus on individual student perspectives means that the choice of students interviewed had a large influence on the outcome of the report.

The committee used “informed judgment” to specifically target groups of students who they felt “would be the most honest” instead of randomly sampling students on campus to reach the most statistically valuable group possible. The report’s contributing groups included the Transfer Student Advisory Board (which has incentive to continue the push for on-campus transfer student housing) and the Triton Athletic Council (“We need more athletics money!”). Not surprisingly, the committee’s recommendations are eerily reflective of the biases of groups selected for the survey.

Is this a “comprehensive evaluation of undergraduate life at UCSD” — the charge the committee faced? Where are the interviews with randomly sampled students, which would give a more accurate view of the undergraduate experience?

Original committee members argue that the results of the report are not biased, and that the report is not designed as an exhaustive list of all possible maladies student satisfaction faces. The report’s overall goal of creating a more vibrant campus community is ambitious but admirable, and the statistical information collected by the committee does represent the overarching attitudes the report cites.

This board does not doubt the committee’s desire to improve student life at UCSD, so the visible conflict of interest between the groups interviewed, the report’s recommendations and the steering committee’s actions is disappointing.

The administration failed to even include students on the work group that recently released a report in response to vitriolic student complaints about RSOs, a critical part of the U.S.E.S. report, instead selecting representatives only from the UCSD Police Department, Housing and Dining Services and Residential Life, all of which have an inherent interest in continuing the RSO program as it is currently run. This fact has not gone unnoticed by students, demonstrated by a letter sent to Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Joseph W. Watson and Vice Chancellor of Business Affairs Steven W. Relyea by a group of students, including A.S. President Harry Khanna, criticizing the lack of students on the work group and the results of the report.

This oversight was a crucial mistake for the administration. The U.S.E.S. report identified that students feel cut off from the university, and without the perception that student input is valued, there is little hope this will change.

Although the report’s intention is laudable, the lack of statistical merit caused by the narrow focus on the student interviews serves the report a devastating blow. The steering committee’s implementations are beneficial for the groups of students the original committee sought out to improve, but not necessarily the student body as a whole. More individual student voices — chosen at random — would give the report’s recommendations (and the resulting administrative action) valuable credibility in all students’ eyes.

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