University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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ASUC Senate Returns To Power The ASUC underwent a major reorganization this year and in so doing regained much of the power it lost two years ago. It came in the form of an agreement signed by the Administration and the ASUC Senate, which returned to the Senate the power to make final budgetary decisions regarding ASUC activities. Control of student fees allocated to the ASUC was taken out of the hands of the Senate by Chancellor Roger Heyns in the fall of 1967, and put under the direction of a newly created board, the Union Program and Facilities Board (UPFB). Among the reasons for the Chancellor ' s action was the Senate ' s move to sharply cut back funds for some traditional activities, namely the Cal Band, and the decision to allow graduate stu- dents to vote in student elections. The latter was con- sidered by the Administration to be a violation of the ASUC constitution and Regental policies. Subsequently, the constitution was revised to enable all students to vote. The new budgetary policies outlined in the agree- ment provide that a group ' s budget may not be reduced by more than one-third the first year, one-third the next year, and one-third the third year. This means that a group would not be cut out completely in one year, but rather would be phased out over a three year period. Under the agreement, two new boards, an Activities Commission, and an Operations Commission, were created to oversee the budgets of various groups and make recommendations to the Senate. The Activities Commission consists of representatives from ASUC activities, three Senators, an ASUC Vice- President, and the ASUC Executive Director. They will review the budget of all ASUC activities, and recom- mend to the Senate a final budget. The Operations Commision is responsible for ASUC facilities, operations, and personnel. It is composed of faculty, students, employees, and an administrator. The agreement did, however, carefully avoid defin- ing the exact relationship between the ASUC and the Administration. While containing a statement that acknowledges that the power of the ASUC is delegated to the Senate by the Chancellor and the Regents, it also states that the ASUC Senate maintains that it is sub- stantially an autonomous organization with the right to manage its own affairs, free from external interfer- ence. What all this will mean to the ordinary student is hopefully a more responsive and responsible approach to the funding of student groups and activities. All of these plans, however, depend upon an increase in stu- dent participation, which in turn depends on the ASUC proving to the student body that the days of sandbox politics are over. 21

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McKenzie and Stampp on Academic Participation John McKenzie Vice President for Academic Affairs By their greater numbers and by their worsening conditions, students have come more than ever before in this country ' s his- tory to constitute a class. The university has become in many ways analogous to a factory and the students the raw material to keep it running smoothly. Worse than these oppressive conditions is the role students are required to play within the university, that is as trained workers for both a dehumanized and dehu- manizing technology admidst the meaning- less life of suburbia. Instead of the univer- sity being used to fight the root causes of the alienation and anomoly that are Amer- ica, the university is used to sustain them. Those of us in the ASUC concerned with the academic fate of the university in a sense with the battle for its soul, have worked to devise forms and create oppor- tunities for student participation as well as to move to reorient the university to a cur- ricular policy that enables learning to re- place training and motivation to replace submission. Numerous obstacles remain: the guild psychology that sees students as passive agents, a view that more often than not dominates faculty policy councils. Another perhaps more obstructive U.C. Board of Regents, more appropriate to General Mo- tors than a university. None the less we have gotten somewhere: in 1969-70 during the first year of the ex- istence of the post of a Vice-President for Academic Affairs, eleven Academic Senate Committees agreed to student participation; two, the B.E.D. and the Committee on Teaching, on an official basis. The ASUC developed a campus-wide Search and Se- lection Committee (SSC) to advise the AAVP on his appointments. We informa- tionally assisted student departmental or- ganizing at Berkeley and the AAVP ' s office was fortunate in having the advice and as- sistance of John Sugiyama, Coordinator for the SSC, Mark St. Angelo, Floyd Huen, Keith Takata, Don Schag, Alan Fong, and Steve Bloek. There still is effectively no academic com- munity within the University and the Uni- versity itself has lost its coherency. Whether or not it successfully deals with these cen- tral weaknesses is a question that bears directly on its ultimate survival. Kenneth Stampp Professor of History This year, as students moved more closely towards achieving the nebulous goal of student participation in campus decision- making, debate on the topic shifted ground. Once the question was whether students should have a role in the tradi- tionally faculty and administrative areas. Now the question is how student opinion can most effectively be used. Taking time off from his studies of the evolution of Southern thought and identity in American history, Professor Kenneth Stampp joined in the debate saying he strongly believes that the only practical way for students to actively participate in such areas as the development of academic policy, the protection of academic freedom and the fixing of admissions policy is through the ASUC. He admitted that while he shares serious reservations about the ASUC with many of his faculty colleagues, he still believes the AS UC should be the organizing force. Stampp suggested that students could best participate in such traditionally faculty matters as academic freedom, educational policy and experimental education through ASUC-established student committees par- alleling existing Academic Senate commit- tees—not, as has been widely recom- mended, through a single joint faculty-stu- dent committee or some small student rep- resentation on an existing faculty group. He explained that on any committee with both student and faculty membership, the faculty members would want, and would go ahead, to meet alone when they felt it necessary. So, Stampp said, Why have a committee system which would breed sus- picion? If students were to set up parallel committees, then the corresponding faculty group could meet with it to get student ideas. This way we would have a regu- larized system to feed student ideas into the operations of the faculty Academic Senate here. Kenneth Stampp John McKenzie Pim JicKelizie 23