Menthe is a graduate student in the department of physics and
astronomy and was chair of the ASUCLA board of directors for
1999-2000.
By Lance Menthe
Copeland’s Sports opening in Ackerman Union next month
(“Copeland’s set to move into Ackerman Union,”
Daily Bruin, News, April 17) will mark the completion of the last
major step in the ambitious turnaround plan hammered out by the
Associated Students of UCLA’s board of directors and
management team last year in response to the association’s
critical financial shortfalls.
As Chair of the board of directors last year, I experienced
firsthand some of the pain of this process. But Executive Director
Pat Eastman was at ground zero, having had to implement the plan to
eliminate 44 career staff positions personally, reorganize
Kerckhoff Hall and Ackerman Union, conduct difficult negotiations
to bring new businesses to campus, and accept invasive oversight
from the administration’s specially created Joint Operations
Committee.
I was the lone dissenter against the final plan adopted by the
board, believing that it was too risky. Be that as it may, the
results are now unequivocal. The association has truly turned
around.
In less than a year, ASUCLA has gone from posting million-dollar
losses to $2 million profits, meeting the exceptionally high
targets set forth in last year’s annual budget. The
reorganization of Ackerman and Kerckhoff allowed ASUCLA to bring in
fresh new tenants from within and outside the university.
Most important of all, the morale of the association has
dramatically improved. The air of gloom and uncertainty has been
replaced by optimism and confidence in ASUCLA’s
leadership.
And ASUCLA accomplished all of this without raising any student
fees, a possibility the board was seriously considering before the
financial crisis became apparent to us.
The credit for this remarkable achievement goes to Executive
Director Pat Eastman, with best supporting nominations to Finance
Director Rich Delia and Business Director Terence Hsiao. Frankly,
we on the board raked Eastman and the rest of her management team
over hot coals last year for the evident failure of the
association’s five-year plan. It was not a pretty sight.
Together we charted a new, aggressive turnaround plan with
rather less confidence than we would have liked, and
representatives from every constituency on the board ““
including alumni, the administration and students ““ said
clearly that even meeting 70 percent of the budgetary goals would
be a tremendous achievement for our overburdened management team,
deserving “huge” rewards.
Now it is time to make good on these promises. It is time to
give credit where credit is due and take management out from under
the microscope so they can do their jobs. The ASUCLA board of
directors must streamline its evaluation and contract renewal
processes to make them fairer, more consistent year-to-year than it
has been with the ever-changing membership of the board, and
parallel in practice to similar personnel review processes around
the university.
The Joint Operations Committee must lower its profile ““ if
not disband entirely ““ returning to the student-directed
association the full independence it has enjoyed for more than 30
years and leaving the creditor-debtor relationship between the
university and ASUCLA regarding the Ackerman renovation loans in
the capable hands of JOC’s chair, Vice Chancellor Steve
Olsen.
Finally, the campus community should recognize the hard and
largely unthanked work undertaken by ASUCLA’s leadership who,
by supporting innovative programs such as Fair Trade Coffee and the
Gradbar, help make ASUCLA the most responsive to the needs of
students and faculty of any organization on campus.