Candidates for UA chair discuss issues

To give students a better idea of who will be representing their interests, the The Daily Pennsylvanian invited all UA members who were planning to run for UA chairperson to an interview session last week. For about an hour, College junior and UA member Jeremy Katz, College junior and UA Vice Chairperson Samara Barend, a DP columnist, and College sophomore and UA Treasurer Bill Conway answered editors' and reporters' questions. Excepts from that discussion follow. Opening statements Katz: I was on the UA this year. I saw how things were done. I think there's a lot of cynicism about how the UA works, but there's a lot of potential there also. The UA could have been run better, the leadership could have been better, attendance policies were lax, goals could have been clearer, there wasn't much connection between UA and University Council. I think I would set the right tone for the UA this year. It's something I'm really excited about and I would put all my energies into it. Conway: I've been on the UA for two years since my freshman year, on University Council for two years and I'm currently a Student Activities Council executive board member and in the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, which breeds an interesting contrast. I've worked on a lot of projects, and being treasurer the past year I've become well-versed in the budgetary issues. I've worked hard and I have the qualifications to be chair. This is what I really want to do, and that's why I'm running. Barend: This is my fourth year on the UA. Through the years, I witnessed a number of different faces to the UA. There's a kind of different look to each one, but it's kind of the same: a UA strapped without the power to govern. It didn't have a basic tie to the administration. Communication was lacking, and that's what I think is the real route of the problems of the UA. How you can bring real issues to the UA and tie it to what the administration is doing so there can be a proper consultation process. That would be my real focus. Also, figuring out what powers the UA has that we can capitalize on, like the power to mobilize. DP: Could you critique the UA this past year? Conway: The previous UA, we really had some problems because no one besides [College senior and UC liaison] Meredith Hertz was a returning exec board member. I think we wasted a lot of time early on finding out our roles. I think a lot of the accomplishments of this UA will become apparent more in this coming term because we're in a middle phase with many of these things. We couldn't get as much done as we would like because we didn't have the necessary experience. Barend: First of all, I think that this year's UA lacked communication between the exec board and the body and within the executive board itself. A couple of people were meeting with top administrators, but they weren't relaying information back -- there wasn't that link. I think that crippled it. Another thing I think that we could have improved on: In passing resolutions, we kind of did it with the recreation resolution, having other student groups support us. Katz: I think there were some good things that happened on this year's UA and some things that stemmed from the UA leadership that could make next year's UA an incredible force. It all starts from the top. We talk about students not taking the UA seriously and a lack of power in the UA. That is the UA's fault. As the year went on, more and more people were missing meetings, and I asked what happened to the rule, and I was just brushed aside. It's the same with the UC. There was no tone, no sense of leadership, of positiveness, of goals. We weren't proactive -- we didn't have goals. As the leader you have to delegate authority to everyone on the UA to get everyone involved. DP: What do you see as the single most important issue for the upcoming year? Barend: I think the single most important issue is one of consultation. All these other issues are so important, but we won't have any say unless we fix this consultation process and we try to work with the administration and get other student groups going and get some kind of discourse. Katz: We need to clean up the UA. If the UA is fragmented, we're not going to do anything. In the beginning of the year, the first thing I would do is sit down with the UA and say, "Look, let's get these issues that you want to work on out now." Then let's communicate with the students what we want to do and let's do it. Another issue is the fact that this campus is very segregated and no one wants to deal with that. Conway: I think the UA needs to concentrate on things we can get involved in right now and point to and say, "These are things the UA is working on." First of all, Sansom Common. Right now it's in the process of being built, they're developing what they think should go in there. The other thing is recreation. We need to let the administration know it's a student priority. DP: How would you make the UA responsive to students? Conway: I think obviously that the premier thing is outreach. Because I've been on so many committees with SAC and the InterFraternity Council and just throughout the UA, I've become pretty much friendly with nearly every student leader. I think if we do activities where we collaborate with other student groups, more students will become involved with what we're doing and the UA will become viewed as more student-friendly. Barend: I think that the UA needs to have some type of institutionalized outreach. There needs to be a Public Relations Committee within the UA. Katz: If we do things, if we are organized, if we have goals, if we have a vision, if we get things done, it will be expressed to the students naturally. Let's just let our actions speak for themselves. Barend: I don't think the UA can just start out and go acting. They really don't have the pulse of the student body. They have to go out and seek out opinions of students. DP: What will you do to make the UA more proactive in expressing student concerns to administrators? Katz: Each UA member this year was appointed to have a liaison with the administration. UA members didn't really know what to do with that liaison. We would just respond to what was going on. We need a concrete list of things we are going to do, make that clear to the students and go out and do those things. Conway: The liaison, this system didn't get off the ground right. We really have to make sure that while we're working on something, we're in contact with the administrators involved. Barend: I don't think we had a concrete list of goals going in, and that hurt us with the administration. I think next year if we came up with some projects and we figured out which issues the administration would be willing to deal with the UA, and allow the UA to give it proper consultation on. DP: How would you specifically conduct outreach and improve the consultation system? Conway: When every member finds a liaison, someone from exec should go in there with that person and sit down and develop a plan for what issues will be possible to bring to them. The member on exec will really be an expert and guide the UA member through the first meeting. Barend: We need to find issues that the entire body could work on or could go to a committee. We have to have an arrangement with the administration that they trust us and come to us with issues. Katz: As things are set up right now, the administration has no reason to listen to us. The only way that the administration is going to come to us, as undergraduates, is if we're a force, if we can sway people to go one way or another. I don't plan on the UA being the administration's pawn, but at the same time, I feel like a lot of times this year, we've just said, "This is what the administration is doing, and we disagree with it because this is what the administration is doing." My example is vending. DP: Should the UA give money to the IFC every year? Barend: I think that depends on the type of proposal they put forth. I don't think the UA should pump off a syphon of money every year. I think it has to go the same way every other group has to come to the UA and itemize it down. Katz: Of course not. I don't think we should say for the next 100 years, we're going to give this amount of money to the UA. This year, I think the way the UA handled giving money to the IFC was a well-thought-out plan. I am in a fraternity. That doesn't mean I'm trying to take over. I'm not "a Greek." I'm Jeremy Katz, that's who I am. I think we did something reasonable. Conway: I consider this -- the $30,000 -- a stop-gap measure for a problem that we have. The simple problem is that the IFC has no way to produce revenue. It's for things that would defray costs for things the whole campus can take part in. DP: What do you intend to do to get people more involved? Katz: This is something we can easily do. If I was chair, I would be much more into getting everybody involved, into delegating power, into having everybody working on a project. If people don't come to meetings, I'm going to make it an issue. If you can't live up to the responsibility, you shouldn't be on the UC. Conway: Obviously we wanted to create a bylaw that would force people to come to meetings. We looked at this constitution backwards and forwards, and it requires a vote in which 20 percent of students vote to make a change in the constitution. As far as attendance goes, I wouldn't say it was good, but it was way better this year than it was in previous years. Barend: A number of people had individual projects that they were working on, but the problem was that people would come to UA meetings who weren't doing anything, and they wouldn't be able to take any kind of active role. If there's motivation there, if everyone is working on a project or sees that there's a better relationship with the administration and we're taking a proactive approach, we can have a better organization. DP: What would you do to improve relations between Penn and West Philadelphia? Conway: I don't think the administration does enough to reach out to this neighborhood. Although I think the initiatives as far as retail are good, they sort of said, "We want to enhance the west and expand east." It's like saying we're going to pack up our bags in West Philly and move as far east as we can, and that's obviously not the right solution. Barend: Definitely the UA has to have an active role. Some things are the community-service hub and the 40th Street Committee. With the Spruce Hill community, the West Philadelphia Committee of the UA needs to be going to their meetings, talking to them to figure out how Penn students can be more connected, finding out what their real issues are and how we can overcome the separation between Penn and the Spruce Hill community and other communities out there. Katz: We need more outreach. First of all, vending is an issue that the UA took the wrong stance on. It was an opportunity that we had to better this campus. The other thing about the shooting is that at the same time that we need to be reaching out to the community, we need to use our brains here and, at least for a few years, not invite trouble on us [by hosting the Philadelphia Public League boys basketball championships at the Palestra]. DP: What would you do if the University's athletic facilities plans are inadequate? Barend: What I would do, since we already have the people mobilized, is get all the different student groups who have an interest and do visible things. Before we did reactive stuff, talk to the administration to be sure they knew the avenue we were going to take. Katz: The fact that we do not have adequate recreational facilities is unacceptable. You can't do it by just talking to the administration. People are going to listen to us if we can help them or if we're going to get in their way. Conway: I believe if they do come out with a plan, it will be a plan that will basically be the plan that we want them to implement. Assuming that they decide to do some halfway thing, we'd have to do the outreach and the University Council measures. I'm a big believer in collaboration with student groups. DP: Should the referendum on allotting SAC funding for the IFC have been invalidated? Conway: I really believe it should have been. I knew the reserve fund was huge, and I think that was a very big misleading factor. I knew people who were like, "My SAC group is going to die." Barend: I have to agree to an extent. I think the e-mails were misleading. If they had said "We don't agree with the principle," then I wouldn't in principle have had a problem with it. I didn't support it because it would have really undercut the UA in terms of budgetary power. Katz: On any other referendum we've ever had, you've had a choice to vote yes or no or abstain. A ton of people I know who were against the referendum voted for it because it was misleading. I think because of the fashion in which it was done, it should have been invalidated. Closing statements Katz: Being chair of the UA is something I feel I would do an incredible job of. There's so much potential that we haven't even begun to tap into in the UA. I would get everybody involved and I would set a tone of positiveness and action. We have to be a united body that the University is forced to reckon with. Conway: I'd like to really show students that we're here and we mean business. We have to come up with issues, and we need to guide people on exactly how to get things done. I consider it the biggest mistake of this year. If we continue to work with student groups, we'll be able to get a lot more done and we'll do outreach in the process. Barend: I think I have a sense of the organizational problems within the UA and what needs to be done within it to reconnect it to students and to reconnect it to the administration. We have to figure out how to make the UA cohesive and also to make each of the UA members feel like they have a purpose. The UA has to serve as a catalyst to bring groups together and to start projects.