Happy First Week all. Here’s what happened while you were out.
The Student Board of Governors representatives turned over. Tim Blair bids farewell, as Michael Duncan takes his place. Bijan Ahmadian and Alexandra Caldwell (UBC-O) were re-elected for their respective second terms.
The University approved a plan to in-fill Totem residence. This was met with surprise and glee from at least one editor of this blog. (Board item front page, 60-megabyte board presentation .pdf)
A historical polemic by UBC alum Mike Thike
Do you know who the man in this picture is? If not, you probably lack a lot of knowledge that would be helpful in understanding the current activist climate at UBC. With Trek Park, the “Lougheed Affair”, and the recent Knoll Aid 2.0 RCMP confrontation, tension within the AMS has risen beyond reason. I think much of this tension is due to radically different perceptions of politics, history, and the role of student activists in society. While I can’t expect to convince SDS-UBC and The Knoll’s most strident critics of their value, I do hope that history can help us to find some common understanding and lead to more constructive dialogue. The man in the above picture is Mario Savio, the most prominent student leader at UC Berkeley (and in America) during the 1960s. He is standing on a police car. Inside the police car is Jack Weinberg, an activist and former Berkeley graduate student. In September 1964 the Berkeley administration had decreed that students on campus would not be allowed to promote political or civil rights causes through fundraising, passing out pamphlets, tabling, or other means. At the beginning of October, Weinberg was tabling for a civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equity. The police asked him for I.D., he refused, and they arrested him. A host of sympathetic students then surrounded the police car with Weinberg inside it, and did not move for over a day, at one point repelling an attempt by police to reach the vehicle. By the following evening, the students had negotiated with the university administration an accommodation for political activity on a portion of the campus, and the waiving of charges against Weinberg.
How about this picture? This is a community garden being planted in Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1969. People’s Park was built on land owned by the university originally intended for student housing but left to deteriorate after development plans changed. In April 1969 a number of community members began constructing a park on the land, without the university’s blessing. The park lasted for a month before police moved in to dismantle it under the direction of newly elected governor Ronald Reagan. The ensuing conflict resulted in the death of James Rector, shot by police while sitting on the roof of a nearby cinema. Today People’s Park is a Berkeley landmark.
If student movements for change are rarities still on the campus scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious “inner emigration.” It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted as “inevitable”, bureaucracy as “just circumstances”, irrelevance as “scholarship”, selflessness as “martyrdom”, politics as “just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too.”….
Tragically, the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes. But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel — say, a television set — passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college somewhat more “tolerant” than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations. With administrators ordering the institutions, and faculty the curriculum, the student learns by his isolation to accept elite rule within the university, which prepares him to accept later forms of minority control. The real function of the educational system — as opposed to its more rhetorical function of “searching for truth” — is to impart the key information and styles that will help the student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond.
These are paragraphs that I feel are even more apt today (maybe substituting “Guitar Hero” for “the Twist”) than they were fifty years ago.
As Students for a Democratic Society, we want to remake a movement – a young left where our struggles can build and sustain a society of justice-making, solidarity, equality, peace and freedom. This demands a broad-based, deep-rooted, and revolutionary transformation of our society. It demands that we build on movements that have come before, and alongside other people’s struggles and movements for liberation.
Together, we affirm that another world is possible: A world beyond oppression, beyond domination, beyond war and empire. A world where people have power over their own lives. We believe we stand on the cusp of something new in our generation. We have the potential to take action, organize, and relate to other movements in ways that many of us have never seen before. Something new is also happening in our society: the organized Left, after decades of decline and crisis, is reinventing itself. People in many places and communities are building movements committed to long-haul, revolutionary change.
SDS-UBC was formed out of discussions last year about how to recover from the bitter decline of the Social Justice Centre. We felt that a new direction under a new banner was necessary, and the resurgent SDS offered both an inspiring legacy and strong allies. Members of SDS-UBC traveled this spring to an SDS conference in Washington State.
Sometimes in times of crisis it’s important to look at the big picture. So that’s what I’m going to attempt here. Make no mistake – the AMS has as fundamental a crisis as it can realistically expect to face. Since it has mandatory membership its very existence is not at stake, but its ability to make a positive change for students, either by lobbying or by campus presence, is very much at risk.
The AMS’ credibility is shot. The Lougheed and Bonfire Affairs have pretty much turned the AMS into as much of a joke as possible. Students generally used to be fairly ambivalent; it’s safe to say that the tide has turned. Students on all sides of the political spectrum have some serious grievance or other against the Society, and students in the middle are completely and entirely alienated by the insane and fractious factionalism that makes the U.S. House of Representatives look downright civil by comparison. Indeed, the only unifying belief is that the AMS isn’t worth students’ time. Not only has the AMS lost respect of students, it’s also lost the respect of those with whom it needs to have a productive relationship – the media, the University, various authorities, and the community at large. And so much time will have been spent on damage control, diverting energies from worthwhile reforms.
The root cause is the unnecessarily bitter factionalism that’s driven a wedge within the society. What began as an ideological cleavage has rapidly descended into the poisonous, petty politics of personal vendettas. While tempting, there’s no need to blame anything else.
There’s an upside – the AMS is still a relatively healthy society, and students have many reasons to appreciate it. It’s still in good financial shape, just passed a transformative referendum, and was on its way to becoming the centre of campus discourse once again. Moreover, the AMS has an opportunity this week, with a Council meeting and the Block Party, to take the first steps to make it right.
There are some relatively easy steps to take. My rules:
But first, it’ll require one side to “blink.” In every intractable dispute, some party needs to be the first to stand down. Or at least take a step towards it. Please – do it. I’m not calling for a homogeneity of ideas, just a cooling-off period, and a focusing of the ideological cleavage in a productive way. Diversity of ideas breeds good policy and debate, but that can only happen if you find common ground to channel it. Mark my words – nothing constructive will happen this (exec) year without some consensus. The next few years of the AMS, and the student movement at UBC for the near future, depend on you.
You’ve probably noticed them: ads on the 99 B-line with smiling, ethnically diverse young people with “I am CFS” drawn on their outstreached hands in marker. The Canadian Federation of Students (CFS), which is one of the two main federal student lobbies, is gearing up for a huge publicity campaign in the next month to try and prevent SFU students from withdrawing as a member student association of CFS. Numerous other member student societies, including the Kwantlen Students Association, and UVic Graduate Students’ Society, which have also submitted notices of referenda for defederation from CFS. Our student society, the AMS, is a founding member of CFS’s rival federal lobby student lobby, CASA, which formed in 1995 as a breakaway group from CFS of five Candian student unions. The two networks have distinctly different approaches to lobbying, and have differently leaning politics on higher education issues. Also, CFS has much higher membership fees than does CASA by about an order of magnitude (compare 430 000 in dues that SFSS pays to CFS to 47 000 that AMS pays to CASA).
But this story is about the CFS. The Simon Fraser Students Society (SFSS) has been a member student society of CFS since its founding in 1981. In return for about half a million dollars a year of membership fees paid to CFS, they get some student services (like a discount card, rental listings, student phones, and some other stuff) and more importantly, a federal lobbying office and participation in national campaigns, including the national “day of action” which you may have heard of.
Last March, the SFSS included a question about leaving the CFS in their yearly referendum. While only about 5% of students voted in the referendum, 78% of those who did vote wanted out. Proponents of SFSS leaving the CFS cite the high membership fees, redundant services and ineffectual lobbying of the CFS, as well as corruption associated with CFS-friendly student association executives. (SFU, Douglas College, and Kwantlen College all have had tragically good examples of this in hte last fe years). Anyway, despite the clear majority in favour of leaving, last March’s referendum was “non-binding”, since CFS has its own detailed rules about how a member organization may leave the Federation. last March’s vote was intended to get a feel for how students felt about the CFS. This March, the next step is being taken with the official referendum (in accordance with CFS rules) which will determine whether the SFSS stays leaves.
This month I got a couple media releases from the KSA detailing how the CFS’s “secret war-plans” for the “no” campaign had been revealed. These plans included more than a hundred thousand dollars to fund the campaign, plans to fly in pro-CFS campaigners from all over the country (both students from CFS schools, and CFS staffers), and even plans to try and hire CFS-loyal individuals into the staff of member’s student unions. CFS national chair Amanda Aziz rebutted that the “war plan” document was authored by Summer McFadyen of the CFS-BC office alone, with no collaboration from the national office. CFS lawyers have demanded an apology from the KSA, which deliberately leaked the document. More details and opinion in the Maclean’s on Campus blogosphere HERE, HERE, and HERE. While from the CFS’s perspective, it makes sense to invest a lot of resources to prevent the loss of member schools (and with them, member school’s yearly dues), these campaign plans would probably overwhelm any effort the “yes” side could possibly hope to match. While the “yes” side is subject to campaign spending limits according to SFSS referendum rules, expenses paid by the CFS wouldn’t be included in these regulations. Moreover, from the leaked documents, it’s obvious that many prospective campaigners aren’t even students, and are employees of NDP and Union affiliated groups.
In any case, this is just a prelude to the actual campaign. Is the CFS a self-aggrandizing parasite, or real advocate for students on a national level? How effective are they? Of what value are services they offer? Is support for the CFS based in its value as student-issues lobby, or because it’s a leftist organization? All questions that will come up. The war of words has already started in SFU’s student newspaper, The Peak. Have a taste of the debate: “Why we should leave”, and “Why we should stay”. More opinion here, here.
This business with CFS actually does bring up more general questions about high-level student advocacy, lobbying, government relations, and the role of the student movement generally. Should they be larger, and deal with issues outside of higher education, have partisan affiliations, and campaign through protests? (like CFS), or be more narrowly focused, not spend money on publicity, and engage on policy with government in closed-door meetings? (like CASA). Or are these national groups necessary at all? The VP external position in the AMS is purportedly the least busy of the portfolios. There’s no saying what a motivated VPX could do individually if they spent enough time in Ottawa and Victoria.
You can tell it’s exam time (and, in my case, hockey playoffs – Go Sens!) by the vastly decreased post count. And readership too, no doubt. Meh. I should be sleeping. But since I found the (remarkably poorly) hidden jelly bean stash in my living room I’m a little hopped up on sugar. So decided to write something on this sorely neglected blog. Something interesting? Naaah. But a rambling treatise on lobbying? I can do that.
See I haven’t spent that long at the lobbying game. Really, I only spent 2 years of my life trying to get University officials to listen to me. (I’ll note, however, that I spent a year trying to get things from University officials in non-political capacities. That experience helped.) I also get the feeling that, relative to some, I’ve had a fair amount of success. But at a minimum, I’ve learned a few tricks about successfully bending the ear of University administrators.
Apologies for the “us-them” dichotomy. And for the perspective. But this is just my approach to lobbying. It is possible to get things done in the University’s bureaucratic maze, it just takes patience and a willingness to play the game.
I don’t want to draw attention away from the post below. Read it, too. But that’s why I’ve hidden this one behind a jump. But don’t let that stop you from reading this one, either. Read it all! Just remember there’s two new posts tonight. We’re busy.
Don’t worry, this isn’t a post about the Ubyssey. But in a way it is. See some people, including Gina, have taken the Ubyssey to task for what they see as shoddy reporting on campus affairs. My opinion is slightly different. Would I prefer them to be a more campus-centered paper? Of course – if they don’t, who else will? (I draw a distinction, though, between covering AMS minutiae and campus affairs; the latter are important, the former far less so.)
But my issue with the Ubyssey isn’t really an issue about the Ubyssey, it’s about the campus political machinery as a whole. However, I’ll use the paper as an example. See it’s my sense that those who write the paper don’t have enough of a knowledge base to adequately cover what’s important – heck, they don’t have enough knowledge to know what’s important in the first place. It’s really hard to cover, say, the development of a new campus plan or the OCP, MCP, MOU, or amendments thereto without already knowing what all those are, what they mean, and how they inter-relate.
Now be honest – who here actually knows what they all mean? My guess is there’s maybe ten students who do.
Let’s be clear – I don’t fault them. It’s a very rational ignorance. The required information is very high-cost – it takes significant energy to educate yourself to even the baseline degree necessary to understand these things. And to someone who’s a student, has a zillion other things, it’s just not worth it. It really isn’t.
I also don’t think it’s just the Ubyssey. I think the vast majority of the student political world is the same way. The vast majority don’t have the baseline understanding of how development politics work – they just don’t like big buildings. Most don’t understand the budgetary process or Policy 72, but don’t like when tuition goes up. Again, I don’t fault this (much).
Why? Because nobody’s taken the time to educate them. This information is very high-cost, relatively inaccessible. To get all the background info is difficult enough – to synthesize it into accessible forms without dumbing it down is a challenge unto itself. We’re all students with lots on our plates.
So what’s the solution? It’s for those who know the stuff to get out there, spread the word. Produce the one-sheets, the backgrounders, make sure there’s a baseline level of knowledge that’s far more broad than the AMS executive offices. (Don’t think all student politicians have this. Far from it.) There’s so much knowledge and information tucked away in our brains, and it’s just going to waste up there. Also, don’t assume our constituents (and readers) don’t care. They do – nobody’s just ever told them why these things are important. (“They spend your fees” doesn’t make the AMS important, by the way… get a better answer.)
My humble suggestion: if you’re rich in knowledge, spread it far and wide, and don’t chide those whose knowledge level isn’t up to yours. And if your knowledge level ain’t so great, listen and learn from those who’ve done the legwork. Ask! There’s a good chance they’re willing to talk.
Athletics has decided not to close the Aquatic Centre gym! They apologized for the process, and agreed to find other ways to deal with the (minor) issues raised like liability, class space, and old machines.
This is a victory that happened because the AMS and students at large worked together. The AMS reps couldn’t have done it without a mobilized popular support, and the students wouldn’t have had a voice without the focusing impact of the AMS reps.
It’s the kind of symbiotic lobbying efforts that need to be common practice.
And, if this has proven anything, it’s really not that hard to do. Plus it’s fun when you win.
First, I should note an addendum to my previous post. Rec has released their proposed fee reductions. They’re very good. They’re 25-30% in the Elite (refereed) divisions, and 45-50% in the Co-rec. This is a very welcome development.
Something interesting happened with the Aquatic Centre Gym closure. Note Tuesday’s Ubyssey – there were two stories, one dealing with the closure, and one covering student reaction. And really, that’s fair. Student reaction and outcry has been nothing short of remarkable. Those of us who’ve been around a while can’t remember anything like it.
How has it worked? Quite simple. The first people were tipped off by people in HKin – a Facebook group was established that became a central online gathering point for people to a) find out, b) get information, and c) invite more friends. But most importantly, it became a hub to tell people where to apply pressure, whom to e-mail. I have no idea how many e-mails were sent, but people sent them to the right people. Moreover, the AMS swung into action with a rapid response and applied pressure. In short, the student lobbying arm worked like it’s supposed to.
What’s been the outcome? As of now, the University has agreed that this needs to go through the committee, and that the original decision bypassed that. They’ve called a meeting for some time next week, though haven’t indicated when it will be yet. They haven’t provided any more information, are unprepared to present a case for action. In short, they got caught with their pants down and are desperately trying to pull them back up.
What are the lessons for the student movement?
Admittedly, it’s still not done. But things look good. We’ve seen a relatively successful grassroots student uprising… the question is how we, as students, can replicate it in the future.
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