Last Mood: Thanks, USG 

I understand that this might get lost on The Daily Campus readership, but please indulge this weary old author as they pen their last ever column and reminisce about their time at this incredible newspaper. I promise that I can be accidentally insightful at times.  

At this time of this column’s publication, I will have written 85 bylined articles and a few dozen editorials for The Daily Campus. I’m most certainly not the most prolific writer at the paper (there are at least three writers for the Sports section that beat me by a factor of two or three), but regardless, I sometimes find it hard to believe how much time and effort I’ve put into this volunteer position-turned-job. If you’ve ever seen a lanky South Asian person staring at the desktop computers in Bookworms Cafe until the fluids in their eyes evaporate, they were working on cranking out one of those many articles.  
 
Reminiscing about my commitment to the paper — and worry not, there’s still the Graduate Edition — has opened my padlocked vault of memories concerning activist steps and missteps through my time at the University of Connecticut. For the past four years, I’ve worked with several activist organizations (each one making me less desirable in the petit bourgeois job market than the last) trying to move university of leadership on issues of sustainability, gender and sexual justice, anti-war and militarism, housing justice, anti-racism and more. I’ve yelled outside the library, carnival barked in the Student Union and given more Involvement Fair elevator pitches than I can count. I’ve amassed more niche institutional information about this university and how it works — particularly its cursed bromance with war profiteers and the fossil fuel industry — than any one student should need to know, and even then, I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of how a university with so much corporate and military backing can hemorrhage so much cash. 

This is all to say, I have a lot to reflect on. But before I laid down in the mouse trap of campus politics and grabbed the cheese, I had an unlikely stint with an even less likely group: Undergraduate Student Government.
 
Just over three years ago, I co-authored a resolution with the USG Sexual Health & Education subcommittee titled “A Statement of Position Regarding the Rights of Queer and Trans Students at UConn.” On my part, the resolution was borne out of an accident. Babbling my way through an interview for an advocacy job I didn’t end up getting, I pitched the improvised idea of organizing a virtual town hall for members of UConn’s LGBTQIA+ community to share where UConn falls short in its treatment of queer and trans people. From that town hall, which we ended up hosting in March 2021, we gathered enough firsthand input from UConn students to create a list of demands of the administration of former President Thomas Katsouleas. These included an easier name change process for trans students, expanding gender inclusive housing, strengthening mental and physical healthcare for LGBTQIA+ students and more.  
 
I explicitly remember the atmosphere of the USG Webex call when it passed. It was the last meeting of the semester, and the Executive Board exchanged niceties and words of encouragement as the sun set on USG 2020-2021.

To this day, I don’t think that legislation did anything.  
 
It was at that point that I learned USG is not a particularly powerful organization. Beyond distributing funds for clubs and sponsoring events for the student body, USG’s power is inherently advisory, confined to cranking out resolutions and statements of position ad nauseum while the university’s institutional harm remains. UConn can continue doing research and development for the U.S. military; meanwhile, USG will continue its righteous crusade to rename Koons Hall for its incidental resemblance to a racial epithet and to reprimand the Student Recreation Center for sometimes not playing music on the weight floor. Occasionally, they will be uncritical, pseudo-activist mouthpieces for the administration while it rips off students. At best, student government is an executive janitor for UConn’s administration and board of trustees; it exists to clean up the messes created by our leaders, but not make fundamental changes. 
 
However, for all the shit I’ve given USG during my involvement at UConn, I have something to sincerely thank them for: teaching me that the best way to force institutional change is through grassroots people power. Having recently been down to Yale during its occupation of Beinecke Plaza to protest the investment of its endowment in military contractors and the State of Israel, I was moved by the dedication of students organizing autonomously and realizing the power they hold as a collective. Though nearly 50 protesters were arrested for their peaceful encampment, this demonstrates that enough collective action by students against institutional injustice can constitute a legitimate threat. The inefficacy of UConn’s student government is in stark contrast with activists at Yale and Columbia, whose own student government overwhelmingly passed a divestment referendum in response to a weeklong encampment on various university lawns. Their struggle isn’t for the purpose of building a resume, but to end the real, devastating oppression happening before our eyes.  
 
In my final days at UConn, I’m heartened by the actions of students around the country breaking with the status quo of complacency and performative activism. I want to extend endless gratitude to all the student organizations that averted my eyes from toothless reformism and toward the power of the people.