By FARIS MOHIUDDIN

There are plenty of theories about why the ASSU doesn’t ‘matter’ to the average student. After four years as both an insider and a spectator, I figured I’d give it a shot before I leave the Farm. It’s simple: the ASSU provides candidates no incentive whatsoever to make practical or well-informed promises.

You can’t really blame candidates. If they want to win, they have little option but to amass that laundry list of token issues, to mangle their names into something witty, to hit the endorsement trail and flood dorms, kiosks and even YouTube with propaganda.

I contend that the following steps would realign candidate interests to foster a more experienced, informed and accountable ASSU Senate and Executive. For some background, the ASSU endowment, not your student fees, finance salaries for some members of the Undergraduate Senate and the ASSU Executive. Altering the way ASSU office holders are compensated may change who chooses to run, who wins and their degree of commitment while in office.

First, provide incentives to encourage Senators to run for reelection. Empirically, most Senators opt not to seek reelection. While some turnover is advisable, retaining Senators enhances institutional memory and issue-specific expertise. The majority of one’s time in the Senate is spent figuring out exactly why your campaign promises were either absurd or cannot be implemented for very sensible reasons. It’s not until you’re about to leave office that you truly develop a sense for the space in which the Senate can affect tangible change. Hence, retaining Senators that already understand what works and doesn’t would help the new Senate avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and to focus on tenable, fruitful endeavors. How do you encourage senators to run for reelection? Pay them more than first-year senators with comparable responsibility.

Second, create incentives for upperclassmen to run for the Senate. Sure, rising sophomores bring fresh insight to address campus issues; but I believe there are meaningful benefits to increasing the proportion of upperclassmen in the Senate. Upperclassmen are more likely to understand how things work at Stanford and why they are that way. Students who have already taken on leadership roles in other groups and experienced different facets of campus life intuitively seem better-equipped to tackle ASSU policies or problems than students still growing acclimated to campus. Upperclassmen opt not to run for the Senate likely because they face greater academic and extracurricular opportunity costs than freshmen. It’s easier to lose a week to flyer campus as a freshman, but with the greater class and leadership obligations of an upperclassman, running for and serving in office represents a greater sacrifice. Thus, upperclassmen should be compensated more so than underclassmen with comparable responsibilities to offset that disparity in opportunity cost. In the U.S. government, virtually no one leaps from college to public office. People work and live in their community to develop a sense of what issues matter most to them and then partake in politics. It follows that Stanford students who have forged identities outside the ASSU first could add a unique and rich perspective to the Senate.

Finally, make the compensation for ASSU Executives performance-based. Since ASSU Execs rarely can (due to graduation) or even want to (due to exhaustion) run for reelection, they have little incentive to follow through on campaign promises or to persuade students that they’ve done a good job in office. If their compensation was contingent upon tangible goals achieved, they’d really have cause make sound campaign promises and to keep students in the loop. Say half of the ASSU Executive’s total compensation (approximately $12,000 a year for the President and $7,000 for the Vice-President) became the “base” salary for the time which they put into the job. The Elections Commission could then have the newly elected Executive slate mutually agree to a contract by which the remaining compensation becomes a function of accomplishing specific tasks or benchmarks. Consulting and law firms routinely structure compensation to be tied to success; why make the ASSU any different?

Alternatively, compensation could be tied to an “approval rating” measured by student votes. The following Spring Election could include a question about how much students approve of the Executive’s performance. Based on percentage thresholds of positive assessments or the mean score of 1-10 point assessment, the Executive’s bonus could be calculated. It may seem unreasonable to make the ASSU concerned with how it is perceived. But normally politicians care about perceptions since they want to be reelected. In so far as we have this pesky habit of graduating, reelection simply isn’t a sufficient ‘carrot’ to ensure follow through on promises. Perhaps tying with the current compensation scheme is the answer. Sure, there are consequences to leadership which panders to public opinion — the US is a prime example. I’m simply arguing that the ASSU might become more relevant, responsive and effective if it received tangible benefits from garnering more approval.

This is by no means an indictment of Senators or Execs past or present. Plenty of ASSU officers make a good faith effort to do the best job possible. My point is simply that if we truly want the nature of ASSU campaigns to change, the system needs to change first to reward reasonable and researched goals. Otherwise, we’ll have to settle for the omnipresent “more funding, lower costs, more fun” platform for the foreseeable future.

Faris Mohiuddin was Chair of the Appropriations Committee in the 7th Undergraduate Senate and is currently a 2007 Senior Class President.