Aram Ghoogasian: Students must put pressure on UC Regents to have voices heard

The University of California Regents aren’t our friends.

Trying to achieve goals such as keeping tuition rates stable, ensuring accessibility to higher education and proper representation rarely comes easy when students are faced with the votes of 25 individuals against their single, relatively inconsequential vote.

In an attempt to increase student representation, Avi Oved, UC student regent and former Undergraduate Students Association Council internal vice president, is proposing the addition of a nonvoting student member to the board. As it stands, students are represented by a voting student regent, a nonvoting student regent-designate and three nonvoting student observers to standing committees.

A nonvoting student member will likely mean nothing for student power. The regents are notorious for being distant and inaccessible – UC President Janet Napolitano proved as much with her now-infamous “crap” comment, and adding a student with no real power won’t change that. Even worse, the regents could make it seem as though they care about student representation without relinquishing any power to UC students.

Only a unified front of students and its collective rage can force the regents to obey its demands. To combat a lack of real representation, students need to get angry to have their voices heard. The regents have proven time and time again that they won’t listen to us unless there is mass outrage against them.

The tuition freeze is the most recent example of what this sort of pressure can accomplish.

This achievement came in the wake of systemwide student action and lobbying from student governments, not with actual votes at the table. If it taught us anything, it’s that the quickest avenue to achieve students’ goals is through a combination of anger and advocacy.

Fighting for another powerless representative position devoid of voting rights that gets filled undemocratically will ultimately prove fruitless. The best way for students to increase their influence is through pressure, whether that comes in the form of popular protests or relentless demands from student leaders.

As we saw with the reversal in raising tuition for the upcoming academic year, the vote of the student regent wasn’t nearly enough. It was only after the tumult students themselves created that the decision was reached.

Few issues get students going like fee hikes, but if the same anger can be used to combat other UC policy decisions, students will have a tool much more useful than an additional nonvoting representative.

Despite the appearance of progress, adding a person whose words will only fall on deaf ears because of his or her inability to vote is an exercise in futility. Even worse, it could allow the regents to say that they are making progress when in reality they aren’t making any meaningful concessions.

To make matters worse, significant bureaucratic hurdles prevent the creation of a student position with actual voting power on the board.

Adding a voting student member would require a multimillion-dollar campaign to urge California voters to pass a constitutional amendment allowing for such a change to take place. It’s safe to say that won’t happen any time soon.

One must also keep in mind that even the student regent, the only direct representative we have, is not democratically elected, but rather is selected by the regents without comprehensive student input or approval.

The process is a far cry from democracy. When students have little to no say in who represents them, the regents seem less like a body meant to ensure student needs are met and more like a board of oligarchs.

So we’re caught in a bind, since Oved’s proposal, although well-intentioned, does little for representation. It’s too difficult to create a new voting regent, and that regent wouldn’t even be chosen by students themselves. Students need to exercise their power through other means like popular unrest to get the regents to meet their demands. There are few other options.

It remains a mystery why more than 200,000 students only have a single vote at the table while a group that includes lawyers and CEOs, whose interests don’t often overlap with our own, run the show.

When it comes to the Board of Regents, student anger is one of the few ways we can exercise our power, and it shouldn’t abate until students get the representation – either directly or through the regents themselves – they severely lack.