The gravely irrational fees
Getting pickpocketed by your classmates
By Justin Azadivar
From the April 2007 Print Edition
Fresh from Cal Lobby Day, when the ASUC urged students to send a message to Sacramento by speaking up in opposition to fee increases, the ASUC followed with the next logical step: proposing three fee-increase referendums of its own.
It is difficult to comprehend how one can effectively argue that the Regents don’t need to raise the registration and education fees by 7 percent in order to provide education services when raising campus fees on ourselves by 13 percent apparently cannot be avoided.
The ability of the Regents to raise fees to pay for non-academic uses is very limited, and the UC system uses the referendum process in order to raise such fees. Recent fee increases passed by the student body include the Class Pass ($117 per year), Campus Health Care ($89 per year), and Recreational Sports ($80 per year), increasing the cost of education by $286 per year, or $1,144 for a four-year university stint. More so, this does not take into account the fact that these fees will increase over time. Students who are already struggling may have to take out additional loans to cover these fees.
While Cal Lobby Day organizers point out that student fees increased by 79 percent over the past decade, with the enthusiastic support of the ASUC the campus fee increased by 75 percent over a period of only two years. How much credibility can ASUC officials retain in their argument to stop fee increases, when those same officials increase fees at nearly five times the rate the state does in order to achieve its goals? Perhaps next year we should inaugurate an ASUC Lobby Day, when we would demand a halt to fee increases from Eshleman Hall, not Sacramento.
In February, I pointed out that the ASUC passes fees that gradually increase in order to make them more palatable to the students who vote on them (and pay the lowest fees). According to the minutes of the February 28 ASUC Senate meeting, Executive Vice President Vishal Gupta suggested that the senate go one better: “There were a lot of options on ways to go about potentially passing fee referendums and formalizing the language so that it didn’t necessarily raise fees entirely, or at all, in the first year.”
Passing a fee when almost half of the voters are never going to pay it is contrary to the fees’ alleged purpose of improving student life for them. Without the money there will not be any benefit, so it’s obviously not to improve the campus for students. Proponents of one of the current fees explain that the point is to “leave a legacy.” What does it mean to do this for the purpose of leaving “a legacy”?
It means the goal is to boost the supporters’ resumes and ease the weight of their consciences on the backs of future Cal students. The political calculation is simple and obvious. In a sense, I suppose we should be proud of the cutting-edge politics going on here on campus. They’re already acting like real politicians, and they’re only in college!
A closer look at the fee increases:
TGIF: "The Green Initiative Fund"
One fee increase, called “The Green Initiative Fund,” or “TGIF,” forces all students to pay an additional $5 per semester to attend Cal. This money will go to a fund, which will likely be controlled by the same people proposing this fee. Supposedly, this money will be used to fund “green” grants.
As an American, born and raised on concepts of freedom, forcing every student to fork over $40 to give a small group of students the warm fuzzies that come with knowing they’re doing something about the environment strikes me as a bit odd. The rhetoric used is even odder.
The proponents argue that this would be a great time to send a message that we, the students, support environmentalist initiatives. The obvious question is that if we care so much about it, then why aren’t we donating this money on our own? The answer is painfully simple: These folks are dedicated enough to spend other people’s money, but not quite dedicated enough to fork over more of their own.
The acronym TGIF is quite interesting, too. Much like the restaurant, “The Green Initiative Fund” is actually a franchise, a well-funded network of students at various campuses who try to get these fee increases passed in order to fund their grand visions of environmental peace, similar to CalPIRG.
But CalPIRG, at least, has to secure its own funds. CalPIRG members, annoying as they may be, go and actually get the money from students who agree to give it. They have the grounds to claim their budget comes from actual, concrete support from students. TGIF folks, though, only postulate a vague support by students who “support” them, but don’t actually take any real action to accomplish anything. If students really believed that they should fund these initiatives, they would provide the money themselves. Instead, the TGIF folks are too lazy to actually earn support for their cause, and instead want to subject future students to a mandatory fee they won’t have to justify.
All this, of course, assumes that TGIF will actually accomplish something. The ballot initiative will have one guaranteed, concrete result: a fee increase of $5 per semester on every student trying to gain an education. That’s all. There is no guarantee, proof, or even hint that it will accomplish anything resembling an environmental benefit. The proponents admit they have no plan for the money, touting it as the feature of being “open-ended.”
This fits extremely well with the “leave a legacy” view, and very poorly with the “sincerely help the environment” view. The approach of throwing money at a problem is rarely so directly advocated.
Student Life Fee
The Student Life Fee puts a $12-per-semester fee on all students in order to fund specific programs. This fee will establish funds for SUPERB, Cal Band, UC Choral Ensembles, and UC Jazz Ensembles, and remove them from the challenge of securing funds from the ASUC or the campus. It will also provide funds for unnamed “graduate student groups,” to be determined at a later date by the unelected Graduate Assembly.
The issue of whether only these groups deserve special funding arrangements is a minor one compared to the precedent being set: A group that has friends in high places and doesn’t want to struggle with the lesser groups in terms of securing funding can simply get these friends to put a fee referendum on the ballot to fund it. Smaller, less well-connected groups, however, will remain in a position where they have to beg for scraps at 25-hour ASUC budget meetings.
Student Union Complex Fee
The Student Union Complex Fee is related to the Lower Sproul redevelopment program. This fee will help fund the “planning and design” phase of the redevelopment program. “Planning and design” is a euphemism for inaction. The real goal here is to get an easier-to-pass small fee in place to set the stage for an enormous fee increase later.
This fee is the most sharply increasing one, at $9 per semester, but increasing $1.80 per year. Even summer students, most of whom will have no interest in the long-term Lower Sproul redevelopment plans, will have to pay a fee. After it increases to $14.40 in its fourth year, it will suddenly be easier to pass a “reauthorization” with the real fee increase, which was estimated to be in the hundreds of dollars per semester. At this point, we will have already sunk costs into the project, and most students who were around for the initial fee increase will have graduated, so voters won’t realize how the plan was used to manipulate them, and will likely pass it.
The sad part is that this fee increase was not proposed by students. It was requested by the university administration, which didn’t want the negative publicity that would be associated with assessing a Life Safety Fee. Instead, the university asked the ASUC to pass the fee for them, as they did for the RSF fee. And, just as you would expect from proud student representatives who want to bus students to Sacramento to fight fee increases, they said, “Sure thing, right away, sir!”
The ASUC election is April 11 to 13, and students can vote online at http://election.asuc.org if they want to stand up for affordable education by voting no on these fee increases.
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