Everyone is facing a budget crunch in the United States. The state. The university. The University of California Students Association. And Chris Neal, apparently.
Neal, the Undergraduate Students Association Council external vice president, believes he needs to be paid for “the extreme amount of time” he puts into his position on the UCSA board. So now, the board to which he serves as vice chair has approved giving Neal $3,000 in compensation for his work this year, along with $4,200 for the board’s chairman, Steve Klass. Previous to this allocation, board positions were not stipended.
The problem with Neal and Klass asking for stipends now is UCSA’s current difficulty balancing their budget. UCSA already has about a $10,000 deficit for which it needs to somehow account through their savings or otherwise. By paying Neal and Klass, the hole gets bigger: UCSA now faces a $17,000 deficit because Neal and Klass believe the work they chose to do is too time consuming.
And that’s the key word: choice.
Neal chose to run for EVP knowing that he would sit on the UCSA board and that it would be a time consuming job. And, Neal chose to run for vice chair of the UCSA board, knowing it would be an even more time consuming job.
There is no mystery here. Neal might argue a stipend is necessary to avoid the need to take on additional time at an irrelevant job to subsidize his personal expenses, therefore allowing him to dedicate more time to representing student interests. But it seems sparing UCSA of almost doubling its deficit is a pretty important student interest in itself. And if he doesn’t have personal expenses he needs financial compensation for, why ask for a stipend? The more noble thing to do is leave the money with the entity that currently needs it more: UCSA itself.
There’s no logical drawback to leaving the positions without stipends. Perhaps Neal might say not having stipends lowers access to those positions for lower income students who might need to work a second job to supplement their USAC stipend, thus making a commitment to serving as chair or vice chair impossible. But it’s much more important for students to have access to education than access to UCSA board positions. The $17,000 debt Neal is helping impose on UCSA could have been used by the organization to help subsidize more lobbying of this nature. It will be sitting in Neal’s bank account instead.
USAC members might not receive luxuries, but they shouldn’t be running for office expecting financial gain in the first place. Being a student representative means making sacrifices for the overall student body – Neal failed to do his job in this respect. It may be true the EVP office is more time demanding than other USAC offices, but it comes with the territory. Other USAC members don’t get additional stipends for sitting on committees and boards on campus in addition to sitting on USAC, because it is their job to do so.
If Neal is so pressed for time, maybe he should reconsider such things as taking week-long detours to Ghana for purposes completely useless to UC students.
It’s a leader’s job to sacrifice his own comfort or time for those he represents in tough times. Taking money directly away from students’ pockets for his own benefit, and doing it as a UCLA representative, makes Neal an embarrassment to our school.