Editorial: Do we need the USG?

Midway into the year, and the USG under President Migi Moreno and the rest of the Executive Board has been coping with the structures that they have been left with from the previous administrations. Saint Anthony Tiu’s vision of a USG that served primarily as a policymaker rather than project implementer is a challenge taken to heart by Moreno, the core of his campaign as President. The reformist vision, however, faces the challenge of daily operations, and large offices such as the Office of the Vice President for Internal Affairs among others may experience difficulties in transition due to the scale of responsibility the office has been set by previous systems to assume, as justified by institutionalization.

These difficulties should have been addressed as early as summer, where the elected officials and their teams should have undergone the intense preparations necessary for reforming the system without totally sacrificing the student government’s operation. Lacking a comprehensive transition into the system, student officers are faced with the difficulties of addressing concerns that sprout up during the year, especially during times of crisis and emergency, as well as procedural mechanisms such as the real-time updating and uploading of public documents. Moreno has described this behavior as “reactionary”, harking back to traditions passed on from previous years, and has criticized the lack of proactive mechanisms designed early on to facilitate the USG’s handling of unforeseen concerns, ranging from disaster response to donation drives, from enrollment to sexual harassment.

Beyond the USG, the Legislative Assembly is continuing to exert efforts at making itself felt through the creation of publicity materials, but the direction for relevant policy is lost under the authority of a procedure that student representatives find pressing to challenge, a procedure that unfortunately creates an unwanted legalism whose effectiveness is hard to gauge. Chief Legislator Wendy Peñafiel alone cannot dictate the concrete direction for policies: it would have to come from the LA representatives themselves, who are expected to reflect the concerns of their constituencies. But the question as to whether LA resolutions hold any clout over the lives of students is a question that should inspire these representatives to kick off the slack passed on from previous assemblies and push for the student-centered quality and not quantity in their enacted resolutions.

The Judiciary, on the other hand, has been trying to rework itself by coordinating more closely with the two other branches and taking over the duties of grievance cases from the OVPIA. But from within the judiciary there remain those who say that the expertise of the branch is less practical, disconnected with the student body, deriving its purpose more from the textbook definitions of law and constitutionality and threatening to abstract itself from the more practical concerns – the real needs – of students.

The dreaded question of whether students still effectively need a USG comes to mind upon examination of its current process of management. While there are many stakeholders from within the USG who would share on how the USG’s essential functions – tuition deliberation, administrative consultation, facilities examination and maintenance, and others – are taken for granted, Moreno continues to assert that if the USG does not re-examine who it is genuinely supposed to be for the students, then yes, the students may actually be able to survive without a USG. The USG should in this aspect remember that it stands first for its constituents more than anything else, and that this standing for constituents is not a cordon sanitaire but a fundamental responsibility.