In a few days, as two dozen freshmen vie for seats on the Undergraduate Assembly, our fair campus will again be blanketed with the colorful posters of democracy. (P.S. You’re not allowed to hate democracy).
Two weeks from now, nine of those freshmen will be elected to the Undergraduate Assembly and will commence the serious business of putting into action what they promised their peers on the campaign trail.
Every one of those freshmen members will have their own agenda, just like the 24 upperclassmen you elected last year had their own plans, platforms and aspirations. Each of them got support from different constituencies; each promised different things; each will achieve different results. Each of these projects — whether it be departmentalizing minority studies, expanding late-night dining, hosting a larger College Day, or challenging Penn to be bolder in its plan to fight climate change — impacts different students in different ways. And all of them are important.
They ought to be. Everyone comes to Penn for a different reason. What matters to a senior political science major living off campus without a meal plan and with a leadership role in the International Affairs Association will naturally be different than to a freshman in Hill who is really interested in dance. With 33 individuals with equal democratic mandate, as well as partnerships with 34 coalitions and service providers representing the discrete interests of Penn students, the UA has the manpower and support to work — either alone or in partnership — on every issue affecting a Penn student. There is always an extra seat in our meeting room, an extra slot in our legislative calendar, and an extra hour for another meeting with an administrator.
That’s why this year our focus is not on a laundry list of specific policy priorities — you voted for those when you elected your representatives and coalitions. Instead, we hope to return the UA to its origins as a grassroots organization, one where every student’s interests, no matter how out of the ordinary, are advocated for. Thererefore, the UA will, more than ever before, seek your opinion and feelings on the issues you feel need to be addressed. We will have face-to-face conversations with you across campus. We will move our Sunday meetings (with its Open Forum where you set the agenda) outside the Ben Franklin room to the places you work and live. We will continue to provide the services you love — free legal services, free New York Times, cheap airport shuttles — and expand our service offerings based on your feedback. We will work directly with the peak organizations you participate in to ensure that everyone’s agenda is on our agenda.
Moreover, we will finally embrace Web 2.0. Through Facebook, Twitter, and our weekly e-newsletter “The Assembly Line,” we will make it easy for you to know what we’re doing and participate in the UA. Finally, our website, pennua.org will be updated daily with news about Penn and us and will contain detailed voting records so you can keep us honest at the ballot box.
Last but not least, we have restructured internally to flatten our hierarchy and expand the power of members (elected and not) to pursue their projects. Completing projects has been incentivized and our meetings reformed to be more efficient and focus on discussion, not parliamentary procedure. Ironically, while this change will be the least visible, it may yield the most results for Penn.
This idea of the UA as a pluralist body, not a majoritarian one, is both old and new. It is old in that pluralism is in the very warp and weave of our decentralized system of student government. It is new in that this year we hope to enhance it. The net result will be, we hope, a better university for every student, in every way. And if student government can achieve that, then all those fliers and posters, no matter how garish, will have been worth it.
Alec Webley is a College junior and the chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly. His e-mail address is chair@pennua.org.
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