Zach Ingber’s ’15 recent opinions piece (“Ingber ’15: UCS should stay focused on Brown,” Nov. 18) was well-meaning but regrettably misguided. The piece makes a strong argument against a “UCS dictum” related to Citizens United, and the author correctly states that such a unilateral stand would be beyond the Undergraduate Council of Students’ authority.
But what Ingber fails to understand is that both the proposal and the ongoing debate surrounding UCS action are pushing for a referendum, which is far from a unilateral dictum.
This referendum would be a tool for students to express their opinions as individuals, using UCS as a platform, to tell the council whether to take a stand against Citizens United. It would be a direct expression of opinions on campus and more representative of student opinion than any decision made within UCS — if anything, a decision to not allow a referendum seems to be the more unilateral form of action.
It seems a convenient side-step that Ingber would choose to criticize the referendum and disregard simple facts. Ingber regrettably missed the open event that discussed the referendum and would not have misread its objective had he attended.
National politics has campus relevance, and even if one argues that it doesn’t, the students that UCS represents have opted to make it so — just ask members of Divest Coal. UCS is a forum for student representation, and a referendum is just one tool for making student voices heard.
Uday Shriram ’15
Vice president, Brown Political Forum
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