Status of GA Autonomy Bill

by Rebecca Rosen

Over the past four years,the Graduate Assembly (GA) has waged a campaign to gain autonomy from the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) so that graduate students can have an independent governing body. Currently, it falls under the constitutional jurisdiction of the ASUC Senate, an organization primarily composed of undergraduates.

This is an important issue to the GA for several reasons. First, no other graduate governing body in the UC system is subordinate to an undergraduate governing body. The GA represents a diverse population of graduate students consisting of GSIs, parents, and many international students. As such, the graduate students generally have different interests than those
of the undergraduates.

Additionally, while the GA receives all graduate student fees, it is otherwise under the legislative and fiscal control of the ASUC.In this past,this relationship has fostered tension and debate between the GA and the ASUC Senate and has fueled the GA’s campaign for autonomy. For example, the GA was required to contribute $30,000 to the ASUC 2003 student government elections. GA members contend that the GA should not have to pay the full amount because it did not have a role in appointing the committee that coordinates the elections and because the Senate has repeatedly mismanaged its financial affairs in the past. For example,the Senate originally estimated the GA’s share of the election costs to be $9,000,but cost overruns led to the new, larger figure.

This past spring,ASUC Senator Eugene Chung proposed a bill that requested GA independence from the ASUC. The bill initially appeared to have the favor of the Senate. In the past, members of the ASUC Senate have opposed this action on the grounds that the GA has misused funds for large executive stipends and food. These issues have been at least partially resolved, and the GA was confident that the issue of the GA autonomy would be up for a campus-wide vote in the April 2004 elections.

However, the Attorney General of the ASUC, Ryan Powell, took over a month to approve the bill, stating that the language of “autonomy” was too vague and that it was unclear from the bill exactly how much of the commercial revenue from the ASUC store would go to the GA.This delay left little time for the GA to collect the required 1,000 signatures for the bill to appear on the ballot. The GA’s Autonomy Committee will spearhead the continued push this coming year to put the autonomy bill on the ASUC’s 2005 ballot by working with the Attorney General to clarify the language of the bill.