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EVP Chris Neal, shown at an Undergraduate Students Association meeting early this summer, is the council’s representative to the outside world.

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Student government involvement in broader university issues has kicked into high gear now that the largest state and national student coalitions have begun work for the coming year.

The University of California Student Association recently held its annual congress at UC Irvine and approved the three issues to lend its primary focus: tuition control, student voter registration and opposing the Racial Privacy Initiative.

Keeping student fees from rising has traditionally been an important issue for the association, with the goal of maintaining access to the university.

Undergraduate student fees have not risen in eight years – they even experienced a 10 percent decrease in the past few years – but this trend is not likely to continue in the face of a multi-billion dollar state budget deficit.

“We’re going to have to step it up,” said UCSA Chair Stephen Klass. “We can be positive of some sort of increase in the future, and we’re getting people ready to work against it.”

A related movement for the UCSA – a coalition of all the UC’s undergraduate and graduate governments – is to stop graduate student research and teaching assistant stipends from being taxed before they are distributed.

But in order to bolster movements like maintaining student fees, the student voice has to hold weight with legislators. Thus the association is working to increase student voter turnout in the backdrop of an upcoming gubernatorial race.

“This is the power students have as a lobbying group,” said Chris Neal, external vice president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council and UCSA vice-chair.

Arguably the most ambitious point on the association’s campaign is its movement against the Racial Privacy Initiative, a policy that if passed would ban the collection of racial and ethnic data by the state.

Spearheaded by UC Regent Ward Connerly, the policy is on the March 2004 ballot, and UCSA is working now to properly frame what it calls the “Information Ban.”

“(Racial) data is often used for keeping officials and administrators accountable to social inequality,” said Klass, a fourth-year ethnic studies student at UC San Diego.

“It would completely shift our ability to see how social inequality plays out,” he added. “We wouldn’t be able to gather data on who’s admitted and who’s left out.”

Supporters of the policy say racial and ethnic classification is no longer relevant or even accurate, and that anyone who wants this data should collect it themselves instead of relying on the state.

On the national front, Neal represents UCLA in the United States Student Association, a coalition of student governments across the nation. This past weekend he traveled to Washington, D.C. to become certified in teaching students how to organize grassroots movements.

He is also learning to organize electoral work, including how to study demographics and redistricting, which should come in handy with the UCSA’s voter registration movement.

“This way we bring (organizing) to the level of students, who don’t usually have this tool,” Neal said.