Ashok Kumar on democratizing student government and structural reforms - For Student Power

http://www.forstudentpower.org/blog
Filmed in Montréal, QC, in October 2007.

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What happened in our university, we had this thing called the Alliance for Democracy, which a lot of people were a part of and it was just like -- there were like over a hundred students that would come to these meetings, and it was from every women's group, and multicultural group, and any left of center group other than the Democrats. And they ran a bunch of candidates and literally took over every part of the student government. And then they instituted a series of reforms -- I'll give you the example of Venezuela, right? You have a government that comes into power and institutes a series of social reforms, but then structural reforms. Social reforms like universal healthcare, all these services, and then structural reforms so it builds capacity -- you know, like community councils that build capacity, so that radicals actually retain power.

When Alliance for Democracy took over it was about a 2-3 year period, and in that time they instituted all these -- bus pass, basic health care, they gave money to the tenant resource center, they created a legal assistance -- all this stuff. And none of those things got taken away, because when students realize these are basic services even conservatives can't take them away -- even if they want to, they're not going to be able to.

If this country, for example, got universal health care, they couldn't take it away -- like they can't take away social security, even if a right wing government comes into power that's the reality.

But the reality is that the Alliance for Democracy never democratized the process; they never made the structural reforms so they never stayed in power. So the social services that existed in '99 to 2002 when they were in power exist right now at UW, but it's still a student government model. So let's say we do take over student government. How do we institute structural reforms, structural changes, that'll actually retain this radical, democratic model beyond 2-3 years?

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Special thanks to generous funding from the Democratizing Education Network: www.democratizingeducation.org

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