I say, you say, IUSA

The IU Student Association has received increased scrutiny following the election commission’s announcement in March that only one ticket will be on the ballot for the organization’s elections today.

Much of the scrutiny has come from the Opinion pages of the Indiana Daily Student, where the editorial staff has asked fundamental questions about the nature of the 100-year-old organization and the power it has on campus to effect change.

In her March 22 column “IUSA, unopposed?” Kelly Fritz wrote regarding the IUSA, “One could argue that who, exactly, is in power doesn’t matter much or that we can’t get that much accomplished anyway.”

And on March 28, IDS illustrator Will Royal ran a stand-alone cartoon that built upon Fritz’s argument that when it comes to important issues, the IU Board of Trustees wields ultimate authority, relegating the student government to arguably less important roles, such as putting touch-screen monitors in the Herman B Wells Library and electricity-generating bikes in the Student Recreational Sports Center.

These questions posed by the IDS Opinion staff seemingly upset the current IUSA Executive Branch, which felt underappreciated and came together March 28 to write a letter to the editor outlining the “meaningful projects” the organization has worked on throughout the years.

While it is important not to trivialize the work done by current and past IUSA administrations that have indeed worked on many meaningful projects, such as the Indiana Lifeline Law and IU student readership program, there is something to be said for how much power the organization really has to work on behalf of students when it comes to the issues most important to us.

It seems that this is through no fault of any IUSA administration but rather a University administrative apparatus overseen by the IU Board of Trustees, Bloomington Faculty Council and University Faculty Council that likes to pay lip service to student concerns but doesn’t want to give us any decision-making power.

Three issues of student concern

During the past year, there have been three main issues of student concern to which we, through our elected officials, have been granted little input.

In April 2011, the IU Board of Trustees essentially fired University Chancellor Ken Gros Louis when it closed and removed funding for his office.

Historically, the chancellor’s office has been one of importance within the University. Once a position filled by the legendary Herman B Wells, the chancellor’s primary function of late has been as a University fund-raiser and resource for students to navigate the University system, often acting as a liaison between students and top-level administrators. During his tenure, Gros Louis fought on behalf of students in founding the Committee for Fee Review, which protects students from unjust fees.

That’s why students and faculty were shocked when the IU Board of Trustees fired Gros Louis. According to his original contract in 2006, there was supposed to be a formal review of his position conducted by administrators and the University president after five years.

No such review was conducted, nor was anyone outside the IU Board of Trustees — including students, to whom the chancellor’s office was an important service — consulted.

A little less than two months later, another important decision affecting students was made without student input or significant decision-making power, this time regarding tuition increases.

The IU Board of Trustees approved a stunning 5.5-percent increase in tuition and fees, which was 2 percent higher than the increase recommended by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education.

IUSA President Justin Kingsolver expressed his concern following the hearing, which he attended, regarding how much input students had in the process.

“Why are we not making the decision?” Kingsolver said. “We are footing one-seventh of the bill. Why are we not asked?”

Had students been consulted or included in the decision-making process, we might have offered some insight into services on campus that could be cut to offset or minimize an increase, he argued.

For example, between 1993 and 2007, IU has increased the number of administrators per 100 students by 55.7 percent and increased its spending on administrators per student by 57.6 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars.

During the same period, IU decreased the number of instructors, researchers and other service personnel per 100 students by 6.7 percent.

Had they asked, we might have told the IU Board of Trustees to look to their own ranks for positions or services that could be cut to offset tuition increases.

But to expect them to give us such power would be unprecedented and endanger the jobs of their administrative colleagues, unnecessary as they might be.

And for a more recent example of an important University issue for which students have yet to be consulted, look no further than the provost search.

Former Provost Karen Hansen announced her resignation in September 2011 and officially stepped down in January 2012. Since then, IU has been searching for a permanent replacement while Lauren Robel fills the position in the interim.

It has been almost four months since Hansen stepped down, and students have yet to be consulted.

The provost’s office is arguably the most important office to students, as it “oversees academic and budgetary policy and priorities and ensures the quality of the faculty and student body by providing leadership in matters related to academic programs and policies, promotion and tenure, faculty recognition, research, university outreach, and student recruitment and retention,” according to the Provost’s office’s website.

For such an important academic position, you’d think students would be among the first to be consulted, but according to statements made by Associate Vice President of University Communications Mark Land, it seems students will only be included at some arbitrary time once candidates have already been chosen.

And once that time comes, students will have only a limited voice, as any selection committee will consist mostly of faculty and administrators.

Land also told the IDS, “One of the challenges is sometimes these searches can take quite a while, and students are more transitory than faculty and staff.”

That type of argument for limited student inclusion in important administrative searches should anger students, as it suggests that we cannot speak with a unified voice for an extended period of time about the primary reason for our being here — our education.

It might also be important to remind Land that the University serves the students, not the other way around, and that there is no good excuse for marginalizing our input on important University issues.

In all three of these cases — the chancellor’s firing, tuition increases and the provost search — IUSA has tried to make its voice heard but had limited success. The University apparatus doesn’t allow student government sufficient power to have any sort of impact.

After Gros Louis was fired, IUSA passed a resolution condemning the IU Board of Trustees for making its decision without formal review and asked for it to be overturned.

Nothing has come of it.

As was already mentioned, Kingsolver complained about the tuition increases that occurred without any student input.

Nothing ever came of it.

And in regard to the provost search, student leaders, including Kingsolver, wrote a letter March 19 to IU President Michael McRobbie and other administrators “on behalf of the 43,000 graduate and undergraduate students at Indiana University in Bloomington” complaining about their lack of involvement so far in the process.

In response, the president’s office essentially told Kingsolver, who told the IDS, that the time for student involvement has not come yet and will only come at a time the office deems fitting.

Where does University decision-making power lie?

In the grand scheme of things, students have only three positions within the University decision-making apparatus in which they have any real power to help make a meaningful impact.

One is on the IU Board of Trustees, where School of Public and Environmental Affairs student Cora Griffin has the sole student-trustee position.

The other two are on the Bloomington Faculty Council, which wields legislative and consultative authority on a wide range of issues.

In all three positions, the student representatives are vastly outnumbered by their non-student colleagues.

If students want any sort of power, either their numbers need to increase within the administrative councils and committees that have legislative and decision-making authority or IUSA needs to be able to create binding resolutions, which could then make their way through the proper channels on the path to becoming IU code.

But for IUSA to have that capability, McRobbie would have to give it to them.

In September 1987, the IU Board of Trustees gave the IU president authority to make policy and procedural decisions related to the daily governance of the University. It is through this authority that McRobbie could give IUSA more power. For him to do so, however, would be unprecedented.

I had my own run-in with this unique University decision-making structure last year when I was co-executive director of legal affairs for IUSA. My team’s main task that year was to reform University policies regulating expression on campus that run afoul of the First Amendment.

Since this was strictly a student issue, the student government assumed the reforms fell under its purview.

Alas, we were wrong.

For any policy changes to occur, we first needed to go through the Student Affairs Committee of the Bloomington Faculty Council, then to the Bloomington Faculty Council itself and finally to the IU Board of Trustees for approval.

Unfortunately, the process stopped when the Student Affairs Committee  — of which, ironically, no student is a member — told us to go to an unrealistic number of student and administrative groups to get their approval, as if our rights from the U.S. and state constitutions depended on such consensus.

When it’s all said and done, IU student government only has the authority to collect $100,000 from students and spend it however they wish. It can’t even change basic student codes, such as those regulating campus expression.

This money has gone to programs as wide-ranging as bus-tracking systems, electricity-generating bikes in the SRSC, bike-sharing initiatives and seminars about GLBT issues.

These are all great additions and add value to our college experiences, but my tuition goes up each year, my chancellor’s job as a student advocate has been compromised, I have no say in who will be developing my educational programs in the future and my constitutional rights are being infringed upon.

These are the issues that really concern students. These are the issues for which our voices should be heard.

So instead of everyone going back and forth about how important or unimportant IUSA is, we should instead be organizing for basic structural reform of how the University makes its decisions.

It would be great to have an IUSA ticket campaign on that basic premise.

­— nperrino@indiana.edu