Emily McLain and Chii-San SunOwen are going to school as “normal students” today after one year as ASUO president and vice president. McLain will be graduating soon and SunOwen will return to a leadership position in the Asian Pacific American Student Union next year.
While in office, they helped to pass constitutional reforms that spread the work of the Programs Finance Committee between four committees.
Their campaign a year ago focused on three areas: defending access to vital student services, expanding access to higher education and ensuring academic quality at the University. As with most ASUO presidents, several specifics promised during the campaign never came to fruition. But McLain said other accomplishments during her term fell into these areas.
Ensure academic quality
McLain and SunOwen pledged to increase student seats on University Senate and to work with the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation to increase the availability of graduate programs at the University.
Of the University Senate’s 50 members, five are student senators.
The University did reapportion seats this year, but McLain said she supported giving votes to classified staff who did not have any. There are currently three seats devoted to classified staff.
“When the subject was broached with University faculty, it sounded like it was going to take a year or more” to gain support for increased student seats, McLain said.
No graduate programs have been added, but McLain said she reached out to graduate students and placed them on ASUO committees. “Student government was undergrad-heavy and we tried to balance that out this year” by opening the door for graduate students to “advocate for more and better programs,” she said.
McLain touted the release of course syllabuses before the beginning of a term as her biggest success in ensuring academic quality. Access to a syllabus can help a student decide whether to take a course, McLain said, and it can reduce the number of students adding and dropping classes each term.
There has been no change in policy mandating the early release of syllabuses, but McLain said “pushing for a policy isn’t necessarily even going to fix the issue.” She said a cultural change was needed within the faculty first to understand why students needed syllabuses in advance, and faculty need the technological skills to post the syllabuses.
She said she gained the support of University President Dave Frohnmayer last summer, and new faculty members were taught how to post syllabuses during orientation last September.
“I think that’s going to be really big in new faculty orientations since we started it this year. And we got the University Senate training from the Registrar’s Office to learn how to do it,” McLain said.
Defending access to vital student services
McLain and SunOwen promised to “vehemently defend” important services including bus passes with Lane Transit District, student tickets to sporting events and hours and services at the Student Recreation Center. McLain also wanted to change policies at the University Health Center so insurance providers would be billed directly.
“This is an issue that I think my opinion of it evolved a little bit,” McLain said of reforming policies at the Health Center. “It couldn’t be a top priority because there’s a lot of students on this campus that don’t even have health insurance, and so it was a really small focus, limited vision of the issues of the Health Center.”
McLain said she also ran into roadblocks because the changes she sought would have resulted in an increased workload for Health Center employees.
“We worked on it, we lobbied on it, but it didn’t really seem possible at the moment. I still think it’s something that should be done,” McLain said.
The ASUO signed another contract with LTD and bus service remains intact. McLain also pledged last year to make contracts more transparent and itemized, and she said she was satisfied with the result. Next year’s LTD contract requires a ridership survey to demonstrate how many students ride the bus.
SunOwen said the current state of the Student Recreation Center is “not a failure on our part.”
Although the 2006-07 Student Senate approved moving rec center funding out of student control, the ASUO’s relationship with the rec center did not change until summer when the University administration officially removed the rec center from the incidental fee.
“I think that was probably one of the biggest issues and the biggest pieces of contention between students and the University administration,” McLain said. “I’d imagine the University would probably regret the way it was done. I certainly regret the way that they did it.”
Because the rec center is no longer funded by student incidental fees, student government no longer approves the rec center’s budget or any increases in the eventual fee that the Oregon State Board of Higher Education is expected to approve to fund it. A student advisory board makes recommendations on the center’s budget and policies.
McLain has long opposed such advisory boards and she said she hopes students will continue to do so.
“There’s a big difference between having a voice on a committee that is purely advisory and having actual votes and recommendations, like we do within the executive or within the senate, that can go directly to the president (of the University),” she said.
Expanding access to higher education
The largest piece of McLain and SunOwen’s platform placed textbook prices, resource fees and promises to lobby the state legislature under the broad umbrella of educational access. McLain claimed success in each case, though each initiative turned out a little differently than planned.
McLain pledged to meet with department heads to gain commitments to accept previous editions of textbooks. She also promised collaboration with Jim Williams, The Duck Store general manager, to allow students to buy and sell previous editions of textbooks at the bookstore.
McLain said Williams “got a little defensive” as a result of a proposed ASUO-funded textbook exchange, and the executive didn’t work with the bookstore much after that.
But McLain said one of the first pieces of legislation for which she lobbied the state legislature was an “anti-bundling” bill to eliminate the CDs and workbooks often attached to a new textbook. The bill, SB 365, passed the legislature and a similar bill is now in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The State Board of Higher Education voted to eliminate all programmatic resource fees, which universities add to a student’s bill on top of tuition after financial aid has been awarded, by 2011.
McLain had promised to force all departments to justify new fees and show how they were spent. She also said she would use the support of local elected officials to pressure the University administration to track fee usage.
It turned out neither of those measures were necessary. McLain said she lobbied the board of higher education to make the changes.
McLain spent time in Salem lobbying the legislature for higher education funding. She also went, first by herself and then with a larger group, to inquire about the University’s new arena.
“You never get to work on all you say you’re going to work on because your job will present new issues and different ideas will come up,” McLain said. “I think the arena was one that was a challenge and one that was very educational.”
Budget reform
Perhaps McLain’s most lasting legacy within the ASUO will be the constitutional amendments passed this spring that changed the entire budgeting process.
“Emily McLain was a great student body president,” Senate President Athan Papailiou said, “and I have enjoyed working with her throughout the course of this year, specifically in working to change the constitution.”
Budget reform talks bega
n last year, but McLain said the 2006-07 Senate “was not ready or willing to take it on because it was a daunting task.”
“It was exciting to be the exec that finally took it on because a lot of people had been talking about doing it for years, and we finally got it done this year,” McLain said.
Papailiou said, “Less tangible goals were fulfilled under the previous administration, so it’s difficult to make an accurate comparison.”
While McLain’s predecessor Jared Axelrod was criticized for appointing mostly students with previous experience in the ASUO, many of McLain’s appointments came from diverse backgrounds around campus.
McLain pointed to Patrick Boye, an appointee who eventually became Senate vice president, and former Sen. Steven Wilsey as two particularly good appointees.
Sen. Lee Warnecke, who was elected with an opposing slate of candidates last year, said McLain had “some really solid” appointees. Some of them, such as Sens. Sean Jin and Nick Meyers, often disagreed with McLain, but Warnecke said they were effective and smart senators.
“People could say whatever they want about Emily and San being one-sided, but you look at their appointments and it says the opposite,” Warnecke said.
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