The results come from the systemwide 2012 UC Undergraduate Experience Survey, with questions on academic engagement, community involvement and financial background.

According to the survey results, 82 percent of UC students responding said they were content with their overall education. Despite more than $900 million in state funding cuts to the university over the last five years, this percentage has remained relatively constant since 2006.

“I think that shows that despite the economic recession and the decreased funding to UC in recent years, we’ve been able to continue serving our students really well,” said Shelly Meron, spokesperson for the UC Office of the President, in an email.

But while academic approval has remained relatively constant, students are increasingly unhappy with the cost of getting a degree. The survey found that student satisfaction with the value of a UC education is now at 60 percent, down from 71 percent in 2006. The percent of students worried about the cost of tuition has increased from 64 to 71 percent over the last two years alone.

“Obviously we’re concerned about tuition increases, and we’re continuing to work with state legislators and the governor to resolve UC’s funding issues,” Meron said in the email.

Sereeta Alexander, research analyst at the UC Berkeley Office of Planning and Analysis, said that the campus’s own survey of new students has found similar results — that students are concerned about financing their education in the next few years.

“(The results) show that we should be thinking about how we should support students more with financial aid and scholarships — even if tuition and fees are rising,” Alexander said.

CalSERVE Senator and Executive Vice President-elect Nolan Pack said that higher student costs may reduce campus involvement, another issue studied in the survey.

“The more a college education costs, the more students have to work while they’re in school and the less time they have to do other things like public service or civic engagement,” Pack said. “The more we increase tuition, the more we’re chipping away at the holistic college experience.”

Pack also criticized possible plans to make tuition more affordable through online education, pointing out that the high academic satisfaction rates show that students value a classroom education.

“It’s clear that the quality of a UC education remains very high, but the state’s continued divestment from higher education puts that at risk,” Pack said. “The fact that students are overwhelmingly satisfied with faculty and instruction should say something. Online education … contradicts the experience of being in the classroom.”

Contact Alison Fu at afu@dailycal.org.

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The council heard the case, Ickowitz-Freeman v. ASUC Senate & SB 160, at Anna Head Alumnae Hall Wednesday morning. Petitioners Noah Ickowitz, SQUELCH! party chair and a former Daily Cal columnist, and Joey Freeman, former external affairs vice president, allege that the bill’s passage was unconstitutional because it legislated investments, did not pass through the ASUC’s investment committee and did not obtain the two-thirds majority required to approve investment legislation.

CalSERVE Senator Nolan Pack argued for the defense, saying that SB 160 makes no changes to the budget and therefore does not fall under the investment committee’s purview. He also said that SB 160 leaves the ASUC’s revenue sources  unaltered. If this is true, the bill’s passage would be constitutional.

On Friday, the Judicial Council approved a settlement agreement to the case that would remove language from the bill, making the passage constitutional. On Saturday, however, the Judicial Council backtracked on that decision, deciding instead that the settlement was invalid.

ASUC Attorney General Hinh Tran agrees with the petitioners that the bill’s passage was unconstitutional and decided not to represent the ASUC Senate in this particular case despite the attorney general’s traditional role of doing so.

“The settlement would have produced a constitutional SB 160,” Tran said. “I determined personally that there are parts of SB 160, as is, that are unconstitutional because the ASUC intended that anything finance-related would require a two-thirds vote in order for the ASUC to divest.”

SB 160 was originally passed on April 18 by a vote of 11 in favor and nine against after 10 hours of debate that continued through the night and into the following day.

Pack — in place of Tran — argued for the constitutionality of the bill’s passage.

However, despite the procedural nature of the case, both sides felt their personal beliefs on divestment were being brought into the debate, raising questions about whether individual values will influence the justices.

“A significant part of the defense’s arguments were personal attacks on the plaintiffs rather than arguments against legal claims that the plaintiffs were making,” Ickowitz said. “Personally, I felt that they harped on one of the violations I was asserting but briefly addressed the others.”

Pack said, however, that this is not about Israel or Palestine but about upholding the integrity of decisions made by the ASUC.

“I hope that the Judicial Council upholds the legislative decision of the senate to support SB 160 rather than affirming arguments that aim to use judicial council to achieve a legislative goal,” he said.

The Judicial Council declined to comment on this story.

Click here for a video of Ickowitz’s statement.

Contact Matt Trejo at mtrejo@dailycal.org.

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SB 158, originally introduced as an alternative to divestment bill SB 160, was authored by SQUELCH! Senator Jason Bellet and Student Action Senator Rafi Lurie. The authors themselves requested that the bill be tabled indefinitely saying that to that the bill’s language had been too watered down in the ASUC’s Committee on University & External Affairs.

“The authors of this bill submitted the bill with certain language and the bill was edited down and edited down,” Lurie said during the meeting. “The language we (originally) put in there is what our community wanted to see. Table this instead of passing some half bill.”

The bill would encourage the ASUC to take financial and political action to help end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, recognizing harm inflicted on both side and affirming the right for a Jewish State. The bill would also indicate that the ASUC supports a two state solution.

Lurie maintained that the discussion surrounding the bill would not be laid to rest but instead addressed in a different bill.

Other senators, including CalSERVE Senator Nolan Pack and Student Action Senator George Kadifa, also addressed issues with the bill’s wording.

“I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to passing the bill as it came out of committee, but I am definitely opposed to many of the changes the authors are proposing,” Pack said in an email. “Specifically, the authors are packing the bill with loaded language that implicitly endorses disagreeable policies that may not be obvious at face value.”

Independent Senator Sadia Saifuddin said that that she felt portions of the bill were exclusionary to non-Jewish people living in Israel.

“I was not in support of some of the proposed amendments by the senators because the language was exclusionary by its nature and extraordinarily vague,” Saifuddin said in an email.

Bellet addressed concerns about the language of the bill saying that the bill is grounded in international law and correct in referring to Israel as a Jewish state.

“Jewish people and Palestinian people have a right to self determination,” Bellet said during discussion. “This bill supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”

CalSERVE senator and ASUC President-elect DeeJay Pepito said she voted against tabling the bill because she felt the discussion while worthwhile, was too short.

“To be clear, Senators who voted yes on SB 160 were more than willing to vote yes on SB 158 also,” Pepito said in an email. “We just wanted a conversation on amendments and language use within its text. I am troubled tonight knowing that the conversation on 158 was so short. This bill deserved time on the Senate floor — the community supporting SB 158 deserved time on the Senate floor.”

Ally Rondoni is the lead student government reporter. Contact her at arondoni@dailycal.org.

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DeeJay Pepito, president-elect from CalSERVE, said her first move will be to continue working to improve campus safety, especially with regard to sexual assault, considering that the ASUC Senate recently passed a bill expressing no confidence in the university’s sexual assault policies.

Pepito said she has already met with with her co-authors on the bill, SB 130, to talk about creating more resources for victims of sexual assault and clarify the reporting process, among other policy changes.

Another big issue Pepito must grapple with as president is that of the campus climate in light of the recent senate vote to divest from companies affiliated with the Israeli military. Grant Fineman, a recently elected senator from SQUELCH!, said the vote “disheartened” many within the Jewish community.

“There’s definitely some rebuilding to be done, especially because some people are not confident about the ASUC,” Fineman said.

As part of this rebuilding process, Pepito said she intends to establish a campus climate department within the ASUC to address these issues and create opportunities for disparate communities to collaborate with one another.

“Regardless of what ‘side’ students might identify with, there were people hurt, and there were people impacted on both sides of the issue,” Pepito said. “We want to stay away from framing this as a one-sided issue. This bill (SB 160) really highlights that there are still problems on our campus. We all need to take responsibility and accountability by taking responsibility for our actions and acknowledging that our words hurt others.”

Pepito will start shadowing current ASUC President Connor Landgraf in the coming weeks.

Executive Vice President-elect Nolan Pack of CalSERVE emphasized that he aims to work closely with the new senatorial class and will meet with senators individually before the end of the semester to build constructive relationships.

“For the past few years, the power dynamic has been such that executives believe they do not have to act at the direction of the senate, and the senate has been reluctant to exercise its power as the final legislative and administrative authority of the ASUC,” Pack said in an email. “Instead, the senate has assigned itself an unreasonable amount of administrative tasks. This has made the senate a structurally inefficient body.”

Pack said he hopes the senate will feel more comfortable in assigning more tasks to the executive slate, which will allow senators more time to work on platforms and community projects.

Valerie Jameson of CalSERVE and Safeena Mecklai of Student Action, academic affairs and external affairs vice presidential-elects respectively, echoed Pack’s sentiments. Both said they look forward to reaching out to the new senators. In the past, Jameson said she has seen a “strong disconnect” between the executive officers and senators.

“It’s twofold,” Jameson said. ”The senators have to keep the executives accountable, and the executives have to be out there and to help them in their ideas.” Along with reaching out to senators, Jameson said she will continue working on her textbook scholarship program.

Although Mecklai was the only Student Action candidate elected to executive office, neither she nor any of the other newly elected executive officials expressed concern over partisanship.

“The four of us want to do what’s best for the student body and are going to work well together,” Mecklai said. “I am not looking to the future as concern but as a challenge. There are a lot of external issues and so much to be done.”

Contact Sophie Ho at sho@dailycal.org.

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The California Modernization and Economic Development Act, drafted by UC Berkeley students in January, would implement a 9.5 percent severance tax on oil and natural gas extracted in California and could create anywhere from $2 billion to $2.5 billion in revenue.

The revenue from the oil severance tax would be dedicated to increasing funding for education, the environment, small businesses and county governments, according to UC Berkeley junior and campaign manager for the initiative Harrison Tibbetts.

The initiative expects to provide about $1.2 billion a year for education, with funds being apportioned evenly among the state’s public education systems.

“We have the right to an education,” said ASUC External Affairs Vice President Shahryar Abbasi at the rally. “By passing CMED, we can ensure we have that right.”

ASUC Executive Vice President-elect and current senator Nolan Pack spoke about the initiative at the Earth Day rally and criticized the state’s treatment of vulnerable communities and trends of deregulation.

“Help us repent Reagan’s launch into national politics and reinvigorate California’s economy,” he said.

Pack was among seven senators who helped pass an ASUC bill in support of the CMED initiative in February.

Tibbetts said the oil initiative’s campaign has gained momentum since he initially created the policy proposal earlier this semester.

He said that in the last three months, the campaign has doubled the size of its central team and recruited around 60 volunteers.

“The more people hear about the bill, the more positive feedback we get,” said campaign communications coordinator Kevin Singer.

Additionally, the campaign has received endorsements from high-profile figures, such as 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Distinguished Chair in Energy at UC Berkeley Daniel M. Kammen; former U.S. Secretary of Labor and UC Berkeley public policy professor Robert Reich; and state Sen. Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, who proposed a similar bill in February.

Evans’ office endorsed the CMED Act on Friday, shortly after the campaign attended the California Democratic Convention in Sacramento last week.

“If we don’t have revenue, we have cuts,” said Evans’ communications director, Teala Schaff. “We are cutting to the bone and cutting off limbs now. If we don’t identify new revenues, we will see more programs cut.”

ASUC External Affairs Vice President-elect Safeena Mecklai said her office will aid the campaign’s outreach efforts and more directly work toward encouraging students to vote this November, despite the fact that it is not a typically large election year.

“We hope to get students engaged in the issues and use Prop. 30 as a jumping-off point for doing so,” Mecklai said.

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

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The crowd that gathered in 155 Dwinelle Hall to watch the results erupted in deafening cheers as CalSERVE not only picked up three executive seats but also obtained seven seats in the ASUC Senate Thursday night. Student Action retained nine seats, and SQUELCH! candidates took two senate seats, with one independent  one additional third-party candidate also being elected.

This year’s election drew a record number of voters, with 15,430 people participating — significantly larger than last year’s turnout of 12,600.

“As soon as the tabulation hit, everyone was telling me ‘you got it, you got it, you got it’, and I was like just ‘wait’ … As soon as that bar went up, all I could think about was the last three years of me being here at Cal and how everything has been so instrumentally placed,” said DeeJay Pepito, who won the presidency, in the aftermath of the results.

CalSERVE candidates Pepito, Nolan Pack and Valerie Jameson took the positions of president, executive vice president and academic affairs vice president, respectively. Student Action candidate Safeena Mecklai won the external affairs vice president position, and Timofey Semenov — an independent endorsed by both Student Action and CalSERVE — took the position of Student Advocate.

“You know you run with a group of people who I’ve literally spent every single day for months and months with, so it’s really heartbreaking to see them not with me because they worked equally as hard as I did, and they deserve it more than anything,” Mecklai said. “I’m excited, nervous, I can’t believe it’s real. I’m stoked — in a really sad way.”

Four propositions — the Class Pass Renewal, the Fossil Fuel Divestment Referendum, the People’s Rights Referendum and the Constitutional Amendment to Improve the ASUC Advocacy Lobby — passed. Results of the health and wellness referendum are pending Judicial Council review.

This is the first time since the 2008-09 academic year that CalSERVE — a progressive coalition party founded in 1984 — has held a majority of executive positions.

“I hope that that drive for positive change will overcome partisanship and no matter the party make-up of the Senate or Executives, lead to a productive, cooperative, and successful year,” Mecklai said in an email before tabulations. “I’m so thankful for the support, words of encouragement, and excited smiles of my peers and friends.”

Nanxi Liu, executive vice president from the Student Action party during the last divided executive slate in 2010-11, said she found that working across party lines made executives more effective and accountable to one other.

“We questioned each others’ work, which encouraged us to think very carefully and diligently about the programs we worked on in our individual offices,” Liu said in an email. “There was also a competitive spirit between the exec offices to do more or do better than the other party’s offices.”

In the senate, CalSERVE secured seven seats, the largest number of seats the party has held since the 2009-10 academic year and one more than its current number.

The CalSERVE senate seats went to Destiny Iwuoma, Justin Kong, Briana Mullen, Wendy Pacheco, Caitlin Quinn, Sevly Snguon and Sean Tan.

“We ran a clean, positive campaign rooted in shared values,” Pack said in an email. “We promoted ambitious and attainable ideas that will improve the student experience at (UC Berkeley), and we presented a bold new vision for the ASUC and the campus.”

Still, Student Action will continue to hold significant sway in the senate, as it has in recent years, with its nine seats to be occupied by candidates Courtney Chow, Katherine Chung, Karen Lee, Sahil Pandya, Liza Raffi, Quinn Z. Shen, Pavan Upadhyayula, Lauren Week and Eric Wu.

Whimsical third-party SQUELCH!, which switched campaign tactics this election season and ran an all-serious senate slate for the first time, secured two seats on the senate with Grant Fineman and Emily Truax. They will be joined by one independent senator, Naweed Mohabbat, and Solomon Nwoche of the newly created Independent Campaign for Common Sense party.

“I think (Pepito is) extremely qualified to be president,” said Jason Bellet, the SQUELCH! presidential candidate. “I have so much love for this school and so much love for everyone involved in the ASUC and all the individuals who put countless hours into this race. No matter what, I think everyone in this room has the same goal in mind: to create the most effective and productive ASUC as possible.”

CalSERVE elections coordinator Anais LaVoie attributed the party’s success this election season to ethical, strategic and values-based campaigns.

“Our strategy was simple: run more candidates to grow the coalition, spend more time training them to be competent campaigners but even more effective elected officials and make the campus believe that CalSERVE is relevant and capable of fulfilling a more influential role in the ASUC,” LaVoie said in an email.

Staff writer Libby Rainey contributed to this report.

Ally Rondoni covers student government. Contact her at arondoni@dailycal.org.

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UC SHIP, which is run through the UC Office of the President, is projected to have a cumulative $46.5 million deficit by the end of the 2012-13 plan year, prompting the possibility of student premium increases, according to Graduate Assembly President Bahar Navab, who spearheaded the straw poll, in an email.

“Given that SHIP info has been changing so rapidly (new info comes out or UCOP scenarios change) we don’t have time to run a new survey for every new change,” Navab said. “So instead, we gauged what the senators wanted as representatives of the student body given the latest options.”

The poll will be included in a memo to be sent to the chancellor along with recommendations for what the campus should do next year, according to Navab.

“I think that they have shown that (the UC Office of the President is) unable to properly manage UC-wide SHIP, and we need to reclaim agency of our own decision-making with regards to student health plans,” said CalSERVE Senator Daley Vertiz.

The vote indicates interest in recommending to the chancellor that UC Berkeley pull out of UC SHIP and enter its own fully funded plan. Furthermore, it recommends that chancellors across the system hire a third-party firm to formally investigate UCOP’s alleged mismanagement UC SHIP.

“I believe that (investigating mismanagement) is a necessary step to hold UCOP accountable, identify the deficiencies in oversight that led to this mess and develop concrete changes that will prevent future mismanagement,” said CalSERVE Senator Nolan Pack.

Ally Rondoni is the lead student government reporter. Contact her at arondoni@dailycal.org.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that UC SHIP is projected to have a cumulative $57 million deficit by the end of 2012-13. In fact, an updated projection reports a total deficit of $46.5 million.

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Julia Joung, academic affairs vice president in 2011-12, noted that it is unusual for senators to complete their platforms the way they first imagined when running for office.

“At most, senators have internship experience in the ASUC and don’t know enough of the institutional history and context to roll out a platform that is feasible from start to end,” Joung said in an email. “The spirit or intent of the platform can definitely survive and come to fruition but it probably took steps and collaborations that senators didn’t anticipate.”

For some, success is seen in tangible reforms, while others are never able to overcome early obstacles. This year’s executive candidates have somewhat different rates of success when it comes to whether they were able to achieve campaign promises when running for senate in prior years.

Some of the executive candidates, notably CalSERVE Senator Nolan Pack and former Student Action senator Safeena Mecklai, were undeniably successful in achieving campaign promises. Others struggled to fully meet campaign goals.

Pack, who is CalSERVE’s candidate for executive vice president, had his biggest success with the creation of the Student Environmental Resource Center — a space in which students interested in environmental activism can receive advising with event planning and activities as well as other resources for campus life. Pack authored over 35 bills during his time as senator.

“I would say that my success in advancing my 2012 senate platforms has to be driven by a true passion for environmental and social justice and guided by many years of experience in a community organizing and student government,” Pack said.

Mecklai, who is currently running for external affairs vice president with Student Action, was also largely successful in addressing her platforms when she was a senator in the 2011-12 academic year.

She addressed her second platform, increasing student involvement in the city of Berkeley, by establishing the Local Affairs Working Group (LAWG) with past EAVP Joey Freeman.

”By establishing the LAWG, I was able to create a space for students to get involved with the city through action and discussion,” Mecklai said in an email.

Mecklai’s Student Action colleague Chen-Chen Huo, current senator and candidate for executive vice president, found it more difficult to realize the full capacity of his platforms. While Huo succeeded in implementing most of his stated senatorial platforms, he was unable to increase the impact of university career-guidance programs, one of the goals he presented when campaigning for senate.

Last year, Huo ran on platforms to increase the impact of university career-guidance programs, uniting professional fraternities on campus and promoting campus spirit and unity through music.

Huo united fraternities on campus through his creation of the Professional Fraternity Council, a coalition of professional fraternities on campus.

Huo’s platform to increase the impact of university career-guidance programs said that Huo planned to “formalize an ASUC liaison to the Career Center.” However, this platform shifted after he was elected due to the Career Center undergoing changes during the summer such as its move to a new and more visible Bancroft Way location.

“My work this year was mostly around visibility and promoting the new Career Center, as opposed to actually changing the programs that they offer,” Huo said in an email. “The platform didn’t really fall through as much as it was already realized by campus, and I was less of an initiator and more of a supporter.”

CalSERVE’s presidential candidate Deejay Pepito successfully addressed all of her senatorial platforms — especially campus safety.

Pepito helped to organize the 6000 In Solidarity anti-sexual assault campaign and co-authored SB 130 — a vote of no confidence in the campus’ sexual assault policies that also provides set of recommendations on how to make sexual-assault policies more navigable.

As a visible member of the Jewish and Greek communities, current Senator and SQUELCH! presidential candidate Jason Bellet, has similar senatorial platforms as Student Action senator and presidential candidate Rafi Lurie, who is also Jewish and is a member of Delta Chi.

Bellet cited his role in organizing “Voice for Change: My Favorite Enemy” — a concert aimed at promoting peace between campus communities related to conflict in the Middle East — as one way he reached out to his community, and Lurie cited his contribution to starting traditional religious services for Shabbat every Friday night.

CalSERVE Senator Daley Vertiz has worked with both Senators Lurie and Bellet and has mixed feelings on their productivity in office.

In an email, Vertiz said that he feels Rafi has not accomplished enough with his term as a senator to merit being elected president, while he feels that Bellet sometimes trivializes the ways to address bridging perspectives of opposing communities

“In the fall, (Lurie) abstained from a significant amount of bills simply because he felt not all students would agree with a certain stance,” Vertiz said in an email. “If Lurie as President plans to take action only when all students agree with a particular stance, than his administration will have zero to little impact on students.”

Student Action Senator Rosemary Hua, however, disagreed.

“He has some big ideas and when he gets passionate about something, he truly gets fired up,” Hua said in an email.

As for Bellet, Vertiz said he felt that the SQUELCH! candidate sometimes lacked understanding of certain communities.

“However, he has always been open to discussing the issues of communities with which he doesn’t identify and does a good job in attempting to foster a productive conversation even when there are polarizing ideas on both sides of an issue,” Vertiz said in an email.

Ultimately, though, it is clear that even with big plans and good intentions, it is more difficult to put these ideas into action, no matter how honorable they may be.

“There’s a lot of work required from you as a senator that isn’t directly related to your platform,” Huo said. “Before I ran for senate, I had long conversations, and I prepared myself to take on platforms that I could take on tangibly. I think I really did that with one and two, and I didn’t really do that as much with the third.”

Contact Ally Rondoni and Sara Grossman and newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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