I have had much experience with personal and legal contests of the meanings of the term. In Wisconsin, as Angus noted, we have been given the guaranteed right to “equal say” with the other shared governance entities that handle our institutions (chancellors, faculty, boards of regents, etc.). This occurred through the passage of Chapter 36, the creation of the UW System, in our state law. One tiny paragraph gives a new meaning to student power, which I think is of course more than semantics, it is legal authority. Thus, as a student leader, you can’t help but have many stories of your use of shared governance to get from the smallest of campaigns done to the largest legal restructuring of student rights in the state’s history. I myself ran for student body president on a “take your power back” campaign and worked my ass off, got beaten up and then got up over and over again, and after one year of struggle I forced the hand of our corrupt chancellor and his corrupt bosses in the UW System administration, and got students 100 percent of their segregated fees (whereas we only had about 25 percent before), which totaled over $10 million at the time.

If you are doing research on the topic, I have many forms of explaining it, as I’m sure you can imagine, as well as hundreds of documents about our fight. Get in touch with me at miswilso@ucsc.edu. Of course, hundreds of leaders, generations of us, worked on this issue and continue to do it. For me, it started with me sending a letter to the chancellor saying we as the legal representatives of the students (I was elected by the student body, so I wielded legal authority under state statue) no longer recognized the process and would work to restructure it. After one year, my team and I had presented both the institution (and various local and state media looking for a juicy story) with a credible enough threat. I was literally telling Wisconsin Public Radio that my university leadership was violating several federal and state laws and UW and UWSP policies. I never blamed him, but I pointed to the man with the ability to fix all this as my chancellor, Bernie Patterson, who unnerved would tell me at meetings to stop doing that if I wanted to get our rights, as we deserved. I smiled politely and continued using the same rhetoric, asking the faculty for their support and calling on them to join us, so that the students would not have to sue their university and so that we could focus on the greater threat of privatization together. After we won our fight, our friends at other campuses decided to push their chancellors too. Dylan Jambrek , Geoff Murray among others recodified their rights, mainly by using our campus as a threat of what would come if their so-called bosses refused to comply with the will of the students…