SQUELCH! has become the ASUC’s alarm clock that doesn’t have a snooze button and can’t be turned off. It has become the electric shock that will resuscitate a student government that was once rivaled by no other. It has taken the road less traveled, but it needs your help as voters to reach a destination that benefits us all.
Cal students have an obligation to a storied history of change, progress and innovation. To sit idly by a broken system forgets our roots. To repeat the same formula and accept mediocrity denies our astonishing capabilities. To pretend that our ASUC is the best it could be punishes future generations of Cal students.
When attending a senate meeting, anyone watching can quickly understand why the ASUC is broken. Financial decisions are made based on which party “represents” each student group. Senators argue for increased fiscal responsibility when an opposing senator presents a bill for a student group, and those same senators magically change their principles by arguing that a money tree exists by the Campanile if someone from their own party requests funding for a group. This type of behavior not only pits parties against parties, but it irresponsibly drags student groups into a political game that uses their plays, their conferences and their workshops as pawns. SQUELCH! senators have always whistle-blown from their one senate seat while calling for fair and consistent treatment of student groups, but they could help the campus much more if they had an increased presence in the senate and a presidential seat.
Even with just one senator in office, SQUELCH! championed campaign finance reform, and ASUC parties now have a spending limit of about $2,600. This prevents candidates from feeling pressured to contribute large sums to party spending and removes a degree of the disadvantages independent candidates face by having no party infrastructure to utilize.
Even with just one senator in office, hundreds of thousands of dollars in student fees will be saved by preventing an AC Transit contract void of negotiation from prematurely being implemented. This allowed negotiations to occur this year, which brought down the fee significantly.
Even with just one senator in office, we have chaired each of the three senate committees in the last three years, respectively.
This year, you are faced with a decision. Let the current system stay the same and believe this truly is the best we can do, or shake it up by waking up our beloved ASUC. To my knowledge, no CalSERVE or Student Action candidate favors budget cuts to education or tuition hikes, and yet the competition to hoard credit has resulted in a fragmented student voice at the expense of unity. If neither CalSERVE nor Student Action holds the majority in the senate, and if neither party holds the presidential seat, the two parties will be forced to work through their differences in a framework of unity and compromise at least for the causes that they do agree on. More importantly, with the pressure to compromise, the student groups represented by each party would learn to work with one another and create a better Cal.
Some may say that this is politics and that the system simply can’t change. To those critics, I would ask you to look at the students who started CalSERVE in 1984 and the students who started Student Action in 1995. Those students were innovators and realized that this system had to be transformed. Students responded by craving a refreshing change and voted in droves for these new parties. However, the parties slowly became what they critiqued. While SQUELCH! will face the same crucial problem of maintaining our mission as we expand our senate slate, we will do all we can to uphold our ideals and be pioneers from the beginning to the end.
SQUELCH! promotes independence for its candidates in campaigning and in governing. We provide guidance and mentorship for our candidates’ campaigns, but we never force a candidate to conform to one ideal. We have candidates who flier, and we have some who would rather die than flier. We have candidates who ride whales in Sproul fountain, and we have candidates who choose to stay on land. This independence and creativity bleeds into the senate, where we provide education and institutional knowledge to our candidates but let them form their own opinions without pressure, because they did get into Cal, after all. We reach out to any student or student group with open arms, and our candidates carry with them a deep commitment to Cal. We select our candidates based on quality above all else. We know that you don’t have to be boring in order to be serious.
Diversify your ideal executive slate, educate yourself on the issues and choose whatever mix of candidates from what whatever mix of parties you find suits you.
Editor’s note: Noah Ickowitz is a former Daily Cal columnist.
Noah Ickowitz and Eric Raby are SQUELCH! party chairs.
Contact the opinion desk at [email protected].