The ASUC is political play-pretend, and many ASUC senators I’ve spoken to would agree. Since ASUC serves as the primary connection students have to the administration, it is often senators who experience this ineffectiveness most directly. A few have professed to me how their frustrations have grown with each moment they are reminded of their limitations.
As it exists today, the ASUC primarily allocates funding to registered student organizations, and this has a real impact on students’ day-to-day lives. But when it comes to the single most defining issue of our time — divestment from genocide — they’re largely toothless. Thankfully, the ASUC worked hard to activate one of its only tools to fight for it through this year’s divestment referendum, a poll to see whether students would be comfortable divesting from companies that manufacture weapons technology.
While canvassing for it, I almost felt silly. “We’re not actually voting on divestment,” I’d clarify to Sproul Plaza passersby. “We’re just voting to express that students want it.”
If that’s all the ASUC can do, then it’s true that they are structurally incapable of delivering a truly democratic student-centered campus. Without binding decision-making power, the ASUC remains a mere consultative body, simulating democracy and all of its surface features without the substance. That’s why the candidates who spoke of radicalizing the ASUC earned significant popularity. Yet it remains difficult to see how they would do that.
One of the most salient issues of this election cycle centered on a critique of the coalition model of the ASUC as fractured and misaligned with students’ universal interests. The main voice for this rejection of identity politics, Tai Cassel Engen, earned comments from opponents calling him racist.
These accusations do not engage with what he is saying at all. If we step back and think about what truly brings us all to UC Berkeley — what undergirds the body politic which the ASUC is supposed to represent — it’s our role as students, not our race or our ethnicity.
There is certainly potential to mobilize cultural and ethnic affinity organizations from within, but separating them into different caucuses and voting blocs for an annual election will never build true student power.
So what does a real students’ union look like? Well, we can look right across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to San Francisco State University, which won divestment through a unique model of organizing tailored to student conditions called the student union model.
The student union model is centered around the classroom and major departments. It is a refreshing departure from traditional models of organizing, which require students to join or start activist groups and then form coalitions between them. That method inherently limits the number of people reached, as typically those who join activist groups are already politically active or at least curious enough about politics to engage in organizing.
San Francisco State’s Student Union organizing model can teach us how to break out of this insularity and tap into the mass base that is our classmates and peers. All this takes is becoming familiar with our classmates, creating study groups and listening to the needs that are felt most widely and deeply among them.
This model is already taking shape on the UC Berkeley campus. Currently, an environmental justice minor is being proposed at UC Berkeley’s Rausser College of Natural Resources. How did this get off the ground? Well, students developed the minor for two years and proposed it to the college. In fact, this coalition grew so strong that Kate O’Neill, the associate dean for instruction and student affairs at CNR, noted the students’ strong coalition.
The student union model simply asks us to be social in our classes. It’s so simple that we jokingly call it “the friend method.”
A blueprint for winning divestment exists. Yet the conditions under which that blueprint saw success have changed.
Shortly after San Francisco State’s success, the UC system tightened a set of policies targeting its organizing model. As I see it, the greatest strain on classroom and departmental organizing is “Time, Place and Manner” restrictions, which designate a set of prerequisites for political action.
Aside from outright physical enforcement, it’s also death by a thousand spreadsheets. Organizing a single event for the Armenian Students Association revealed to me the sheer amount of pointless meetings, unclear requirements and unjustified fees that the administration imposes. They are experts at giving students the run-around.
Organizing is made purposefully difficult — not to mention, scary. Nobody wants to be named in the next list of 160 names. This has a chilling effect of self-censorship. Add Time, Place and Manner into the mix, and you have the recipe for a paralyzed student body.
While financial independence from the administration would go a long way for the ASUC, its organizational flaws will still exist. Its structure will remain fractured along lines that are merely ancillary to student representation. It’s not that identity does not matter. It’s just that the student government is the wrong venue for it. Administration responds to mass unified pressure, not to a coalition of groups with partially competing interests seeking consensus.
The student union model must be broadly adopted by both the ASUC and activists. We must begin to reclaim our classroom spaces — and remember what being on campus is about. Just as the financialization of our university has turned our tuition dollars into an investment fund, the identitarianism of the ASUC has turned democracy into a performance of politics.