Editorial: Neal’s request for stipend uncalled for

Everyone is facing a budget crunch in the United States. The
state. The university. The University of California Students
Association. And Chris Neal, apparently.

Neal, the Undergraduate Students Association Council external
vice president, believes he needs to be paid for “the extreme
amount of time” he puts into his position on the UCSA board.
So now, the board to which he serves as vice chair has approved
giving Neal $3,000 in compensation for his work this year, along
with $4,200 for the board’s chairman, Steve Klass. Previous
to this allocation, board positions were not stipended.

The problem with Neal and Klass asking for stipends now is
UCSA’s current difficulty balancing their budget. UCSA
already has about a $10,000 deficit for which it needs to somehow
account through their savings or otherwise. By paying Neal and
Klass, the hole gets bigger: UCSA now faces a $17,000 deficit
because Neal and Klass believe the work they chose to do is too
time consuming.

And that’s the key word: choice.

Neal chose to run for EVP knowing that he would sit on the UCSA
board and that it would be a time consuming job. And, Neal chose to
run for vice chair of the UCSA board, knowing it would be an even
more time consuming job.

There is no mystery here. Neal might argue a stipend is
necessary to avoid the need to take on additional time at an
irrelevant job to subsidize his personal expenses, therefore
allowing him to dedicate more time to representing student
interests. But it seems sparing UCSA of almost doubling its deficit
is a pretty important student interest in itself. And if he
doesn’t have personal expenses he needs financial
compensation for, why ask for a stipend? The more noble thing to do
is leave the money with the entity that currently needs it more:
UCSA itself.

There’s no logical drawback to leaving the positions
without stipends. Perhaps Neal might say not having stipends lowers
access to those positions for lower income students who might need
to work a second job to supplement their USAC stipend, thus making
a commitment to serving as chair or vice chair impossible. But
it’s much more important for students to have access to
education than access to UCSA board positions. The $17,000 debt
Neal is helping impose on UCSA could have been used by the
organization to help subsidize more lobbying of this nature. It
will be sitting in Neal’s bank account instead.

USAC members might not receive luxuries, but they
shouldn’t be running for office expecting financial gain in
the first place. Being a student representative means making
sacrifices for the overall student body ““ Neal failed to do
his job in this respect. It may be true the EVP office is more time
demanding than other USAC offices, but it comes with the territory.
Other USAC members don’t get additional stipends for sitting
on committees and boards on campus in addition to sitting on USAC,
because it is their job to do so.

If Neal is so pressed for time, maybe he should reconsider such
things as taking week-long detours to Ghana for purposes completely
useless to UC students.

It’s a leader’s job to sacrifice his own comfort or
time for those he represents in tough times. Taking money directly
away from students’ pockets for his own benefit, and doing it
as a UCLA representative, makes Neal an embarrassment to our
school.