A.S. presidential candidate Erin Brodwin is running on the Student Voice! slate ‘mdash; and she won’t let you forget it.
An ERC junior with a year of experience as Associate Vice President of Local Affairs, Brodwin touts the pillars of the Student Voice! ‘mdash; student empowerment,’ access and affordability and campus community ‘mdash; with the sureness of an experienced politician.
Emphasizing her ability to build relationships with administrators, legislators and diverse student organizations, Brodwin hopes to stay true to these pillars through relentless meetings with student organizations and college councils and by encouraging student input through, for example, campaigns on Library Walk.
As AVP of Local Affairs, one of Brodwin’s most successful campaigns has been helping to organize the joint external and local affairs lobby core, whose efforts lobbying in Sacramento earlier this year paid off for students big-time.
‘At the student conference in Sacramento, we sent students and met representatives and discussed the need for decreasing student fees,’ Brodwin said. ‘We successfully made sure the proposed fee increase of 10 percent was significantly reduced [to 7.3 percent] and we hope to do something like that again.’
Brodwin hopes to institutionalize the student lobby core and put continued pressure on lawmakers and the UC Regents to keep student fees as low as possible. She plans to organize a large student presence at the May regents meeting, which will take place at UCSD, to protest further student fee increases.
‘When student fees go up, it puts the burden of taxes on the backs of students, targeting underrepresented communities,’ Brodwin said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, education is a right.’
Brodwin says that a satisfactory free speech policy is one of her top concerns, and has worked as an undergraduate student representative to the campus committee to revise the free speech policy.
Although Brodwin says that it would be ideal to have no policy at all, she is willing to work with administrators rather than against them.
‘I consistently was honest and told them [the council] how I was feeling and that the students were being marginalized and the administration was being overrepresented,’ Brodwin said.
Nonetheless, Brodwin said that a rather significant achievement for the committee was getting a record of the meeting’s minutes e-mailed out to them, and also admits that the committee is an advisory one that can only make suggestions.
‘If we don’t feel satisfied we’ll take action,’ Brodwin said. ‘We’ll publish extensively, hold demonstrations, bring it up at different meetings, do a letter writing campaign, etc.’
To increase student input at council meetings, Brodwin promises to reorganize the council floor in a manner which would allow the rest of council to see the person who’s speaking and make the environment less intimidating.
She also suggests moving the council meetings, which are currently held on the fourth floor of Price Center East, to a more rec
ognizable location.
According to current A.S. President Donna Bean, however, the current organization of the council floor is the only way that logistically makes sense.
‘We’ve had student input continuously throughout the year regardless of the way the room is set up,’ Bean said.
‘I don’t think changing the location away from the A.S. offices makes any sense,’ Bean said. ‘We used to have it in Price Center Ballroom, which was even more intimidating. We could maybe have it in a different location once a quarter, but I don’t think moving the meeting is going to do anything. Move yourself downstairs and educate people and let them know where the meeting is.’
Though Brodwin doesn’t think that candidate Ustav Gupta’s plan to ‘uncage SunGod’ is realistic, she would like to see SunGod brought back to it’s original purpose.
Brodwin hopes to improve future SunGods and programming events by increasing student input in booking decisions, making sure the headlining artists are committed early and diversifying campus programs by, for example, making the nooner concert series more frequent.
‘The admin said when someone dies, SunGod dies,’ she said. ‘I want to make sure SunGod is brought back to its real identity, which is such as community building, but to keep it safe.’
Brodwin hopes that her experiences on A.S. will help her jump through administrative hurdles, and that her efforts to reach out to students will create a student body that is more involved and engaged.
‘Coming down to students instead of having the students come to us is one of my main goals,’ Brodwin said.