Reaction Time: The Politics of Postponement
USC’s diversity revolution will not be pushed aside.
Last night, senators of University of Southern California’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG) chose to postpone a vote on a so-called “campus climate resolution” that aimed to create an environment of inclusion on USC’s campus by asking the administration to hire a Vice President for Diversity and an additional Title IX investigator, increase resources for cultural centers on USC’s campus (like El Centro Chicano, a resource center for Hispanic students and the LGBT Resource Center) and mandate “diversity and cultural competency training” for student leaders and faculty.
When this resolution arrived on the desks of the USG senators, it had already passed by the Graduate Student Government and the Faculty Senate. Furthermore, it had been supported and/or co-written by several student assemblies on campus, including the Queer and Ally Student Assembly, the Women’s Student Assembly, the International Student Assembly, the Black Student Assembly and a host of others. Almost one hundred students attended the USG Senate meeting yesterday to speak in favor of the proposal, causing the meeting to last over 90 minutes longer than usual.
The bill has not been met with unanimous support. USG Senator Jacob Ellenhorn, first on Facebook on an event page called “Stop Racial Quotas and Tuition Hikes @ USC” and then at the meeting staunchly spoke against the resolution, saying that it would lead to tuition increases and repeating over and over again, “Who’s going to pay for that?” when met with comments about how the proposed additions would benefit the campus atmosphere. During the Senate meeting, USG President Rini Sampath argued that the resolution could be funded by existing funds already given to USG as long as those funds were reallocated, without causing an increase in tuition.
Perhaps due to a lack of actual compelling arguments against the resolution, opponents began making distasteful jokes about “trigger warnings” and seemingly argued that the goal of a diverse campus is not important enough to warrant any spending at all, with one opponent writing on the event page that “a resource center would be great, however Lyon [USC’s gym] has 3 squat racks for 18k undergrads so fix that and I’ll consider it.”
Because decreasing instances of discrimination (like the one where our student body president was called “an Indian piece of sh*t,” or the one where a party populated by black students was overrun by LAPD officers while a party across the street of white students was left alone) is marginally less important than making #gainz at the gym.
That these largely baseless points of opposition did not “win” at USG’s senate meeting last night could be seen as a small victory; that is, the resolution was not completely denied. However, in postponing their vote, the USG Senators did something even worse than flat-out denying the resolution — they attempted to use time to break USC students’ resolve and diminish their support for the bill so that they could then quietly reject it later without causing too much of a public outcry.
The Senators who voted to postpone the vote, of course had different justifications for their decision than this. They said that they had been too busy to look over the resolution (and hence needed more time to make an informed decision), and also that the atmosphere of the meeting was too “charged” for them to make a reasonable decision. They failed to admit that it is part of their job to look over these types of documents in a timely manner (as in before their Senate meetings) and that they might have added to that “charged” atmosphere by sponsoring a Facebook page whose claims hit SC students right in their pockets.
Let’s not call this postponement anything but what it is: a political move, a slight of power that is structured solely to decrease the passion and fire in the hearts of students who seem to have had just about enough, who speak emphatically and tell stories of discrimination or pain that USG senators would really rather not listen to on their Tuesday night.
Postponement is actually used in this way all the time.
Consider, for example, a common tactic used by defense attorneys where they attempt to delay a lawsuit’s proceedings so that the plaintiff will eventually run out of patience, time, or money and settle out of court. Furthermore, consider the very existence of the senate filibuster — where a senator can make a prolonged speech to postpone and perhaps totally avoid the progression of a legislative assembly to a vote. Using postponement as a political tactic is nothing new; neither are the types of excuses that the senators used last night.
After all, if the USG senators think the bill costs too much, postponing the vote won’t make it cost any less. That would take actual work, amendments perhaps. But if they truly believe that diversity is unimportant, or that it is less important than the students at large seem to think it is, then postponing the vote just might ensure that fewer students show up to this vote, that fewer students will dare to show that they actually give a shit this time around, and USC’s lack of diversity initiatives and discrimination, as well as the pain they cause for real students that these senators claim to represent can yet again be ignored.
I wholeheartedly hope, and believe that they are wrong.
Karl Marx often wrote about revolution — he thought that when the suffering of the people reached the greatest level, when it finally reached the point where they could not take it anymore, the revolution would finally be able to occur and succeed. As students who watch videos of a police officer dubbed “Officer Slam” choke a black student in class and slam her to the ground, who read about UCLA students wearing blackface at a party, who have lived with tiny or understaffed resource centers as we watch our school finance failed football coach after failed football coach, it seems that our suffering has almost reached a point where the revolution is possible. Perhaps the senators of USG see this and believe that two weeks time will decrease our suffering or distract us with midterms or papers just enough so that we will forget what is actually at stake here.
Unlike these senators, however, I believe in the students of USC. I believe in the ability of students at this university to prioritize their collective needs above their individual needs, to remain strong and passionate in the face of political postponement and to show up and speak up yet again on November 10 at 7pm in the face of certain senators that are too cowardly to openly attempt to kill our resolve and instead hope that it will quietly die out.
I believe that in two weeks, we will speak yet again, we will make ourselves heard and we will win at least this preliminary battle towards bettering our campus, not for ourselves but for the generations of students who will come after us. I believe that in two weeks, we will show our senators that purely political postponement is not enough to bury our pain, our voices and our stories.
Get more “Reaction Time”, a column devoted to common-sense reactions to every-day craziness. Reach Columnist Ariana Aboulafia here, or follow her on Twitter.
