To me, walking across the UCR stage in less than two weeks is going to be a mere formality.
My graduation really happened about a month ago when individuals stole our newspapers and were caught on film. We had reports that people knew who was responsible but would not come forward, and no one in the administration would loudly denounce it for what it was: an appallingly cheap form of censorship. And oddly, it's been the most inspirational experience I could ask for in a college tenure.
Being at UCR, where students have an unfortunate lack of pride in their school, I've learned to draw inspiration from unusual sources. Most recently, that ability to find inspiration saved me during a grueling all-nighter. Recalling something I read in a book, I Youtubed a musical performance that I had seen parodied on Family Guy but never mustered the nerve to view in its original form. William Shatner's creative abortion of Elton John's "Rocket Man" in 1978 features Captain Kirk, a decade older, tuxed-up and smoking his way through a free-verse rendition. I began typing with abandon, positive that if Shatner could wing it, so could I (and I got an A).
That book that clued me in to what I was missing was the Encyclopedia Shatnerica, a $1.99 clearance gem that indexed in detail the highs and lows of the man's storied career. After nearly laughing myself into a hemorrhage reading some of the entries, it was sobering to realize that William Shatner had built a fairly lucrative career on camp. If Shatner could become a cultural icon seducing alien bimbos, maybe laughing at him is the wrong approach; he must be doing something right.
Comparing UCR to William Shatner may seem peculiar, but I can think of no better analogy in terms of things that are maligned at length and creatively, yet continue to thrive. UCR has weathered a bad reputation for smog, lazy students, and academic underdevelopment. Despite its reputation, for 50 years, the school has grown and continued to add programs, majors and schools. It has capitalized on its diversity, gaining national recognition for the school's demographic make-up. Yet there are people who accuse UCR of being a dumpster school.
As Randall Graves told Dante Hicks in in the movie Clerks., "We look down on them as if we're so advanced. If we're so fucking advanced, what are we doing working here?"
UCR affords great chances for opportunists who recognize the truth in the expression "big fish, small pond." It's much easier to stand out here, and people who don't take advantage of that have only themselves to blame. It's easier to offer criticism than help. But it is important, especially now as the budget force parties to compete for a shrinking pool of money, that students recognize the power of the student-run institution.
We've been yapping a lot about transparency, and recent headlines seem to have proven this concern valid. Not long after we wrote an editorial criticizing closed-session meetings for the student government, we broke the first of a series of articles detailing how an allegedly unauthorized $4,748 airfare charge made by ASUCR president Roxanna Sanchez had been undisclosed for four weeks. The concern, seemingly, would be the failure to report the charge.
Recently, after witnessing a senate meeting where the senate as a body appeared to have forgotten that they voted to spend tens of thousands of dollars moving the Exchange, I requested the voting records to find out who had voted yay or nay. The senate chair Jessica Maldonado (now president), gave the counts but refused to release the names, saying it was a closed-ballot vote. How do you do a closed ballot vote via email, where automatically, the votes are identified by the email address?
Putting the Transparency Act in the ASUCR Constitution was a nice idea, but the way it has been used, they might as well have included a roll of Charmin.
We've gotten a sample of the treatment that the public and the state government feels it has gotten from the UC Regents. The legislature even proposed a bill to make UC subject to legislative oversight, because as one senator put it, the UC feels it's above the law and beyond public oversight or accountability. UC needs to make more of an effort to appear responsive to public concerns, or risk losing public confidence altogether.
ASUCR would do well to learn from this: it risks becoming obsolete when problems like Sanchez's ill-conceived travel and contradictory explanations happen. To be clear, the need for a strong student government is never obsolete.
What students need is not a couple of resume-padders taking 300 votes as a mandate from the student body. Nobody expects perfection. But nobody expected to see the student government president explain away her mistakes in a letter that included the qualification that she was a "student, female and minority." Sanchez has done more to undermine the idea of a student-run institution than any person in recent memory. Her failure to recognize the problems with not telling ASUCR about the airfare is an unfortunately poor ending to service here.
But this fiasco also gives the incoming ASUCR a good opportunity. There is nowhere to go but up. So go up and remind the students why ASUCR exists: to defend student interests. The current system, which consists of UCSA fighting the Regents, who fight the legislature, who all fight public opinion, is not working.
Now, as the need for budget cuts prompts Chancellor White to dissolve the Vice Chancellor of Administration office and distribute its responsibilities among existing offices, the school is about to see a further concentration of responsibilities and power.
Students should be equally interested in the quality of the Highlander Newspaper. A newspaper should inform, expose, showcase, analyze, and be a forum for different voices on campus. But what differs us from a newsletter is that we have the luxury of criticism. There are PR departments who are paid to provide positive spin on events. If we devote ourselves to spinning everything positively, that makes us obsolete.
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