That the University is going to pay for the no-on-54 spending is actually the least surprising or troubling of the University's proposed resolution for the situation.

After talking it over, I was convinced that the University had a reasonably weak legal case to deny the Prop 54 spending. Here's the relevant guidelines. There's different available readings, but the gist is that A) Organizations can spend however they want, so long as there's a refund mechanism, and B) Student Governments can spend money on lobbying so long as its student related. 54 was pretty student related-- there's a lot of research out there that would be cancelled should it have passed.

So the University would've been forced to prove that the Graduate Assembly is both a Government, which it barely is, and that 54 wasn't very student related. Of course, they might've won, but it was hardly a sure thing, and the University is not interested in risky bets.

The Graduate Assembly was expecting the University to come out with a compromise. That is, to allow the spending in some sort of fudge. This is exactly what they ended up doing.

They said the reimbursement will come from ASUC commercial activities instead of mandatory student fees, the other source of ASUC revenue.

The University's carefully planned 'Well, we'll let this one slide,' message is pathetic, incidentally. This is a matter of law. There's no 'letting things slide,' in the law. Either it's legal and you have to let it happen, or it's illegal and you don't. Redirecting the spending is a tacit admission that the spending is legal. They could've used Auxiliary money from the first day and been apparently free of legal problems.

But anyway, the GA was expecting a compromise, where the money issue was a fudge in exchange for the GA not setting a precedent of allowing this kind of spending. BUT this, in retrospect, seems naive. The University knows how the GA works, by now. They know that compromise was unlikely, and would probably just end in a GA lawsuit anyway. Hell, they probably knew that the GA had already retained lawyers. So they've gone on the offensive.

Despite relieving ASUC officials of thousands of dollars of debt to vendors, the university’s carefully worded explanation reaffirmed its authority over student government spending.

Indeed, university officials said they will increase oversight of ASUC spending, putting authorization in the hands of Horace Mitchell, vice chancellor of business and administrative services.

And university officials are asking the ASUC and the assembly to bring their rules in line with current university policy.

That oversight part should send alarm bells ringing. At the moment it doesn't appear like it could legally have much effect. The UCOP guidelines haven't changed, so any new 'authorizers' will still have to use the lenient UCOP rules. Although this certainly means that the VC could tie up spending with ease, preventing precedents from being set and ensuring that the University will have the first say in the ASUC/GA's forays into national politics.

But the Chancellor has considerable powers in assigning or taking away abilities from the ASUC. There's several passages assigning that right, with a lot of vagueness. Here's just one:

Chancellors are responsible for the fiscal soundness of student governments. In the discharge of this responsibility, Chancellors may make audits of the finances of student governments, exercise control over expenditures of their funds when and to the extent necessary to maintain financial solvency of student governments, and where necessary may take action to ensure that any activity under control of student governments is operated in accordance with sound business practices consonant with University policies and procedures applicable to such practices.

So for all the GA's bravado, they're playing with a bad hand. If they get the money, they have a reasonably strong case to spend it broadly. But the Chancellor can move to keep them from getting the money. They should keep that firmly in mind.



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