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Bob Williams was appointed executive director last week after working for Associated Students UCL

The recent hiring of Bob Williams as the executive director for the Associated Students UCLA signals a shift in management from directors hired outside of the association to a director who has had a long history with ASUCLA.

Williams, who has worked for ASUCLA for 25 years, notes that the visions he has for the student association may be different from past executive directors who were brought in to save the association from past financial crises.

While the student association must balance financial viability with providing services to students, Williams said he intends to strengthen the relationship between students and the association.

He adopted this approach of prioritizing students as soon as his first day on the job as night manager of the Treehouse, a cafeteria that was on Ackerman Union’s first floor.

“I first came in telling students what to do and they didn’t like it,” he said. “Within the first few hours, I realized that ASUCLA was a very unique organization and that students play a vital role in all aspects of the organization.”

During his first 20 years, Williams said he changed his approach and developed student leadership by asking students to take on complex leadership roles and interfering as little as possible.

“I’m a great believer in students,” he said. “I’ve never underestimated them, and they’ve never let me down.”

During the tenures of past executive directors, the association has seen drastic changes, from the structure of the ASUCLA Board of Directors to the types of stores in Ackerman as it handled a precarious financial situation in the mid-1990s.

The two most recent executive directors of ASUCLA – Patricia Eastman, who served from August 1996 to September 2003, and Charles Mack and Douglas Drumwright, who served as co-directors for the year before Eastman’s tenure – spearheaded efforts to improve ASUCLA’s financial situation.

In the mid-’90s, ASUCLA saw consistent losses, starting with a loss of over $400,000 that ballooned into over $3 million in losses. During that time, the association also took out a $20 million loan from the university in 1996 to fund capital projects, mostly toward the renovation of Ackerman Union.

Before working for ASUCLA, Eastman was in charge of business development at the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Jerry Mann, director of the student union and student support services, said Eastman emphasized developing the association as a business rather than developing student services.

During Eastman’s tenure, more third-party operations came to ASUCLA, like Copeland’s Sports and Sbarro’s La Cucina, which provided services that would be difficult for ASUCLA provide, Mann said.

The student association also became profitable again while Eastman was director. Starting in 2001, the association saw a profit of over $2 million.

The renovation of Ackerman was also finished during Eastman’s tenure, during which a temporary $51-a-year fee increase was implemented from 1997 to 2002 to further help ASUCLA’s financial situation.

The renovation completely changed Ackerman, said Todd Sargent, a student in the mid-1990s and alumni representative to the undergraduate student government, who noted that the union was “antiquated” and that there was a demand for better quality food from students.

The association did not only change the look of its facilities, but also student leadership in its board of directors. The structure of the student-majority board of directors changed in April 1996, when the board voted to oust elected officials from the student governments in order to receive the $20 million loan at the insistence of the chancellor and former executive director Mack.

Then-Chancellor Charles Young said that the direct political influence of elected student officials was partly responsible for the troubled financial situation the association was in, according to a May 1996 Daily Bruin article.

A year before, Mack and Drumwright, who worked with an outside firm specializing in financial turnaround, likened the board to a “mining company run by environmentalists” that focused on short-term student benefits instead of capital investment.

While elected student officials from the student governments could serve on the board in the past, currently the board is still composed of a student majority appointed by the presidents of both student governments after an application process. The chancellor can change the structure of the board if ASUCLA does not comply with conditions established in the loan agreement.

According to the loan agreement, if ASUCLA does not follow conditions like submitting its budget and a five-year forecast to the university or repaying the loan according to a payment schedule, the chancellor can change the board.

There were positive and negative aspects in changing the board’s structure, Mann said. Depoliticizing the board made it so board members could focus more on the financial health of the association while still maintaining student involvement, he said.

“The bad thing is we lost a direct connection to the governments, and that’s something we’ve been trying to make up,” he said.

While ASUCLA and its board have changed, Sargent feels that the relationship students have with ASUCLA is not much different from when he was a student.

“I think people saw it as a place to go buy your books, to get your food at lunch time,” he said. “There isn’t much of an ASUCLA identity.”

Williams said he prioritizes establishing a better contact between the association and students, the association’s shareholders through the student association fee.

“I believe students should see ASUCLA as their organization,” he said.