The Undergraduate Student Government’s Student Services Committee announced it is in the process of developing a legal services program which should be available to all University of Connecticut students once complete.
“A lot of students are expressing a need for an advocate for them in certain areas, like housing, due to a lot of students now going off campus and having to deal with new roles as tenants and issues with landlords,” said Director of Student Services Jibreel Akbar. “We also have a large community of international and undocumented students who given a lot of recent changes have again, a lot of questions of how to navigate these new issues.”
The initiative comes as the federal government has targeted international and undocumented students and workers, which has prompted multiple support systems to be created for students, according to USG President Andy Zhang. But Zhang says that he still wants to see more.
“Students are able to get a lot of legal services right now, in terms of immigration support,” Zhang said. “I think that something I also want to see is how can we expand this to a little bit of a broader reach, especially with a lot of students moving off campus.”
According to both Akbar and Zhang, the planned legal service will be funded through student fees as part of USG’s budget. The initiative currently exists as a $30,000 line item under Student Services.
USG is in the process of communicating with The Connecticut Bar Association, as well as People’s Parity Project and UConn Law to find legal counsel that may be interested in supporting the program, according to Akbar and Zhang.
The service model was initially designed after Student Health and Wellness’s Let’s Talk program, which provides students with the opportunity to briefly and informally speak with a licensed therapist, according to Akbar and Zhang. However, both officials expressed doubts and complications with that initial model.
“An issue we found with that was that a lot of legal questions take more than 30 minutes so that model potential could work with how our restrictions work but it wouldn’t actually be the best in terms of how we can provide effective legal services,” Zhang said.
Since the initiative is funded by student fees, services need to be widely available to all students for the program to be legally viable. The difficulty, according to Zhang and Akbar, is fulfilling that requirement, without compromising the quality of the aid.
“It’s a dual challenge because realistically, legal services don’t need to be available to all students because not all students have a need for legal services,” Zhang said. “But there is a subset of students that have really dire legal needs.”
According to Akbar, his committee is experimenting with moving away from the 30-minute model to address these concerns, focusing instead on case work, instead of general conciliations.
“When you go into a 30-minute session, there’s only so many questions that a lawyer can give you reliable, dependable answers to,” Akbar said. “We’re making sure we are able to provide a large number of students with services but also not a cop-out where it caps out at five billable hours cause there’s only so much you can do with that.”
The shift to a casework-based model came largely from the fact that the goal of the initiative is to provide students who cannot afford legal services with the means to acquire them, according to Akbar.
Akbar said that unlike Student Health and Wellness’ Let’s Talk program, insurance cannot subsidize the cost of legal services.
“There’s nothing like that,” he said, “which is why we kind of shifted away from a general consultation and are looking to do some sort of case work where we can provide some actual service on top of initial questions, to bypass that affordability roadblock.”
Affordability is not the only issue which Akbar and Zhang have contended. The two said they have struggled with the legality of exactly what they can offer as a program which is funded by student fees.
According to Akbar, because legal services would be provided by UConn, students would be unable to address legal concerns regarding the university itself.
“We cannot take action against ourselves in a sense,” Akbar said.
Furthermore, according to Akbar, any program funded by student fees must, by definition, benefit students. Because of this requirement Akbar and his committee have been grappling with exactly what benefiting students means in legal terms.
“What if a student comes in with an immigration question that relates to their family as a whole?” Akbar said. “Those are the kind of questions we’ve had to ask and see where we are allowed to use the fee money.”
Zhang said he hopes that the initiative will be effective in addressing the current need for legal services, especially among immigrants and international students, but hopes the program will go beyond just the current moment.
“I’m hoping that this can be something that is larger and more widely effective,” Zhang said. “I think that legal services are probably one of the most direct beneficial uses in terms of student fees and how we’re helping students.”