You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Student Government’ category.
I was recently asked a really interesting request from a Canadian student activist, and I’ve received permission to share it, and my answer, with you all.
His question:
I’ve been looking into starting graduate school in 2013. I found myself naturally drawn to [a private college in New England] but after some basic research I get the feeling that despite their claims of championing social justice & democracy, there does not seem to be a legitimate accredited representative student body on campus. I find myself doubting that I will ever be able to truly enjoy my educational experience at a school that doesn’t have progressive/radical student representation.
So my question to you is: do you have a basic list of some schools in the states that have such representation? I know the Student Union model varies quite intensively between Canada and the USA, but I’m still hoping there may be a few schools out there that have the sort of Union I’m looking for.
My response:
It’s a good question, and not one that has a really straightforward answer. Instead, some general thoughts.
The basic unit of campus representation of students in the US is generally the student government, sometimes called the student association or something similar. (Graduate students and undergrads are typically organized separately.) Student governments range from very weak to fairly strong, with a few general trends visible.
First, and probably most importantly, student governments at public colleges are usually more robust than those at private institutions. Public universities are responsive to political pressure in ways that privates aren’t, and they tend to be more likely to have policies in place ensuring a measure of student autonomy and representation in campus governance. When student activists fought for university reform in the late sixties and after, it was in the public universities that they had the most success, and those successes are still visible on some campuses today.
A second indicator of the strength of student government is the existence of a statewide student association, or SSA. SSAs are most often constituted as federations of student governments within a public university system, and they tend to be established outside the control of the university itself. (In contrast, campus student governments generally exist within the university governance system, and are subject to administrative interference.)
The presence of an SSA in a university system is an indication that the student governments within that system have a history of students’ rights organizing. Many SSAs also foster a culture of student engagement with university governance issues while representing a check on administrative meddling in student affairs. Similarly, campuses that are members of the United States Student Association are generally at least a bit more likely to have activist student governments.
Looking beyond the student government world, some sites of institutionally significant student organizing to keep an eye out for are graduate student employees’ unions, Occupy-affiliated mobilizations, and chapters of groups like Students for a Democratic Society. These groups aren’t directly embedded in university governance like the ones discussed above, but they often represent a pro-student force in campus struggles.
So. That’s what I came up with. I’m eager to hear from y’all on this — I suspect that some of you may have different and better advice than I do.
UC Berkeley’s chapter of the College Republicans plan to host a bake sale on campus this morning as a commentary on affirmative action policies under consideration in the state legislature. (The idea is to critique affirmative action by offering food for sale to some groups for less than others.)
The “affirmative action bake sale” is a bit of a relic in conservative organizing — it had its heyday in the early 2000s. But it always provokes, and Berkeley is no exception. Some of the institutional reactions, however, have been fascinating.
Sunday, a group calling itself the Multicultural Coalition for Affirmative Action released a list of demands in response to the planned sale, calling on the Berkeley administration to — among other things — add clear anti-discrimination statements to the university’s Principles of Community, and to add those principles to the Berkeley code of student conduct.
On Sunday night ASUC — Berkeley’s student government — unanimously passed a resolution that, after a page of careful laying out of the various jurisdictional issues and imperatives involved, “condemn[ed] the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or seriousness by any student group.”
And yesterday Berkeley’s chancellor sent out an open letter on the sale. The event, he said, was “hurtful or offensive to many” at Berkeley, though he didn’t say why. It was not the politics of the sale, he implied, that were problematic, but the form of their expression: “Regardless what policies or practices one advocates, careful consideration is needed on how to express those opinions.”
Absent from each of these formal statements was any explicit statement of what exactly was wrong with the Republicans’ sale. (ASUC indicated that actually selling treats to certain students at reduced prices might violate anti-discrimination regulations, but of course actually selling stuff was never the point of the event.)
I wrote yesterday about the hundreds of non-violent protesters who have been arrested at UC campuses in the last three years, and I’ll be writing more about those events as this week rolls on. Seen in that light, the failure of ASUC and Chancellor Birgenau to do more than merely place themselves on the side of sensitivity and civility rings hollow.
As an act of political theater, the affirmative action bake sale is a pretty paltry one. It offers a weak and overplayed analogy to the admissions debate, rehashing claims that have been batted around for ages. What makes it provocative isn’t its form but its message: that affirmative action is an immoral act of discrimination.
That’s what the College Republicans of Berkeley believe, and that is the message they are attempting to convey with their sale. They believe that affirmative action is racist and sexist against against whites and men, and there’s no polite way to call someone a bigot.
Birgenau wants to make the debate about the bake sale a debate about how polite the Berkeley community should be. But that’s not what it’s about, on either side. It’s about who should be allowed to enroll in the university, and on what terms.
That’s what’s under discussion. That’s what’s at stake.
Update | Zunguzungu has provided a report from the scene in comments, and there’s a lot more info to be had at the Twitter hashtag #theaffirmation. All in all, it sounds like student supporters of affirmative action responded cogently and soberly to the bake sale. And it’s worth noting that a list of demands released today by “The Coalition,” an anti-bakesale group, pretty much ignores the bake sale, and the College Republicans, altogether.
The coalition demand the passage and implementation of California’s Senate Bill 185, which would allow race and ethnicity to be taken into consideration in UC admissions, and Assembly Bill 540, which addresses admissions and tuition issues for undocumented students. They demand new funding and staffing for support services for students of color at Berkeley. They demand a restructuring of the school’s American culture course requirement to center scholarship on race, ethnicity, and gender, and the inclusion of the university’s “Principles of Community” on course syllabi. They demand representation of underrepresented campus communities in admissions hiring.
Each of these demands is addressed to the functioning of the University of California as an institution. None of them have the College Republicans or those who share their views as their target. Crucially absent from the list are demands that appeared in a draft version that appeared on Friday, calling on the university to bolster its code of conduct with new restrictions on bigoted student behavior.
As I said above, Berkeley’s chancellor Birgenau is seeking to frame this conflict as a dispute between students over standards of civility. Berkeley’s campus activists have rejected that framing, and are properly centering the government and the university itself in their response.
When I left off my report on the 2011 National Student Congress of the United States Student Association, students were walking out of the plenary. I’ll pick back up there…
The Association had just passed an amendment to its constitution giving every member State Student Association a seat on the USSA board of directors. The idea behind the amendment was that it would encourage SSA’s to join (and stay), help strengthen the SSA movement throughout the country, and maybe even lead to the growth of new State Student Associations in states where they don’t exist. On the premise that strong SSAs mean strong student governments (and vice versa), it was expected that the change could even help USSA expand its campus membership.
Not everybody saw it that way.
Some folks from states without SSAs viewed the move as a way of consolidating organizational power in the hands of the states that are already well-represented in the Association. There were even a few SSA representatives who opposed it, on the grounds that their SSAs — lacking the funds to send students to board meetings — would themselves be closed out of the new structure.
A solid supermajority of delegates to the Congress supported the SSA amendment — it garnered the votes of about three quarters of the delegates on the floor — but passage rankled a significant minority, some of whom were already perturbed by other developments. And so, with the body in recess, a sizable handful of delegates walked out.
When the plenary came back from recess and the vote was formally announced, vice presidential candidate Tiffany Loftin moved to reconsider the amendment in order to allow for continued discussion. That motion passed easily, and the body then continued on with the agenda. The number of students who had walked out wasn’t large, nor was the number who had followed them to try to sort things out, so quorum wasn’t a problem.
Soon it was time for dinner, though, and so the students went into recess again. When they came back, the students who had walked out — some of whom were, uncomfortably, from the Congress’s host campus — were still discussing the situation among themselves. An informal decision was reached by USSA leadership to see if some accommodation could be reached.
Discussions continued, in various configurations. Some of those who walked out met with USSA officers. Others met with sponsors of the SSA proposal. Meetings were held, formal and informal. And the non-protesting majority of the plenary just hung out and waited.
It was really quite extraordinary. The walkout had been small, and the position of the Congress majority had been clear and decisive. There was very little information available about what was being discussed, or what was likely to result. And yet the students just hung out, trusting the process, more than willing to cool their heels in the hope that some sort of consensus would emerge that would allow everyone to go forward as friends and allies.
In the end, they waited for more than six hours.
They chatted. They read the upcoming resolutions. They worked on their presentations for their various already-submitted proposals, and drafted new ones. They taught each other games. They hooked up the arena’s sound system to YouTube and taught each other line dances. A LOT of line dances.
And then, shortly before midnight, the walkers-out returned. A few short speeches were made, and everyone got back to work. The SSA amendment was re-introduced, with a few proposed changes. Two were approved easily, but a third — which would have given every state with a member campus its own board seat — was rejected decisively.
At that, one of the campuses which had walked out before walked out again. A couple of people urged them to stay, but most of the delegates seemed willing to let them make their own decision. They weren’t happy to see them go, but they weren’t going to chase them, either. They’d made their case, the body had considered their proposals, and if the compromise that had been arrived at wasn’t a compromise they could live with, then so be it. After the walkout, the SSA amendment passed a second and final time.
The plenary kept going after that, until something like 3:30 in the morning. (They’d have likely kept at it for longer, but the university told USSA that they had to leave the building by four.) And then, as before, the most startling fact of the gathering was its lack of ill-feeling.
This was a group which had gathered at nine in the morning, ready to work. It had faced delay after delay — by the time the plenary shut down for the night, it had worked for a total of eight hours, and waited to work for a total of ten and a half. And yet there was almost no grumpiness during the waits, almost no snippiness during the debates. Folks were there to work, there to work together, and so that’s what they did.
Next up: Plenary, Day Two.
The 2011 National Student Congress of the United States Student Association is winding down today — as I type this, the group’s newly elected 2011-12 Board of Directors is meeting for the first time. It’s been a whirlwind of a conference, so I haven’t had the chance to update as much as I’d have liked, but I’ll be compiling a full report here over the next few days.
The conference began with a couple of days of speeches and workshops and meetings. The Congress site was Florida A&M University, the first historically black college or university (HBCU) ever to host a USSA annual meeting, and they were wonderful hosts — it’s a hell of a campus, and a hell of a student body. If you’re ever down here, be sure to stop by their archives — it’s one of the best-curated university galleries I’ve ever visited, as well as being a gem of a small museum of the history of race and racism in the United States.
Nothing huge broke in the first few days of the Congress. No huge drama, no dramatic developments. The association’s sitting vice president, Victor Sanchez, drew one competitor in his race for USSA President, while National People of Color Student Coalition chair Tiffany Dena Loftin was unopposed for the vice presidency.
The Congress was looking like a quiet one as Monday broke, but Monday — plenary day — turned out to be a doozy.
The plenary was scheduled to begin at nine in the morning in the FAMU basketball stadium. Students entered down a long stairway past row after row of deeply raked seats, taking their positions on the parquet of the stadium’s center court. Technical glitches delayed the start of the session for a couple of hours, but spirits remained good as the group started work, held a brief session, and then boarded buses for a barbeque lunch, step show, and rousing speech by a Wisconsin union leader on that state’s recent student-labor uprising.
The group reconvened early in the afternoon, making its way through the agenda to the first contentious issue — a constitutional amendment altering the makeup of the USSA Board of Directors.
USSA’s board is based on a hybrid structure combining regional representatives and identity-based caucuses representing various student constituencies. Monday’s amendment proposed adding a designated seat for each member State Student Association, giving those organizations — which, along with USSA’s campus chapters, make up the Association’s membership — a direct role in the group’s governance for the first time.
In the eyes of the proposal’s authors, the change was intended to strengthen USSA’s relationship with its member SSAs, to encourage non-member SSAs to join, to foster the development of SSAs in states where none exist. To some opponents, though, it represented a power grab by already powerful factions within the Association.
The proposal was brought up Monday afternoon, and passed by a comfortable margin. After the vote was completed, but before it was announced, the body went into recess for fifteen minutes. During that time some simmering frustrations bubbled over, and several delegations who had opposed the amendment walked out of the meeting.
…and my flight has just been called. More soon.
I’ve just hit Tallahassee for the 61st annual National Student Congress of the United States Student Association, and I’ll be blogging from the ground here for the next six days.
USSA is the oldest and largest student-led national student organization in the United States. Founded in 1947, it’s a confederation of student governments and State Student Associations that prioritizes grass-roots organizing and legislative lobbying from its headquarters in Washington DC.
Much more about USSA, and this year’s Congress, to come…
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments