Black Voices

Issue date: 5/12/08 Section: Features

The Black Student Assembly (BSA) serves as the umbrella organization for almost all of black student organizations at USC. Representatives from each of these organizations depend on BSA to provide funding for their respective events.

So what would happen to BSA if it no longer had the power to monitor funds? It would essentially be nonexistent.

Recently, the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) Residential Senator Chintan Sutaria along with members from Leadership, Discretionary, Professional, and Philanthropy Funds drafted Resolution No. 124071, Consolidation of Funds to Encourage Appropriate Allocations.

If implemented, the new resolution will "transfer the remaining balances of the Leadership, Philanthropy, Academic Research and Professional funds to the Discretionary fund by the first day of the spring semester."

Clearly stated, BSA would no longer have control over funds. Rather than guaranteeing BSA its own budget for the year, the resolution seeks to use compile all the budgets given to assemblies and create one large funding pool. Thus, the budgets for BSA, the Political Student Assembly and the Women Student Assembly, for example, would all go directly to the Discretionary Fund account.

If the new resolution is passed, the Black Student Assembly will no longer be useful. While the Black Student Unions or Assemblies at other college campuses serve as spearheads for black events and black involvement, BSA at USC simply serves as a medium for organizations to receive funding.

And, if all student organizations must soon request funding solely from the Discretionary Board, BSA will cease to exist.

Over the past four years, several black student organizations have been revived and reconstructed while others have gone extinct.

There's been a wave of enthusiasm for activism and community involvement as well as the yawn of apathy, self-concern and passivism for public service.

As the years progressed, black student involvement dropped just like black enrollment. And to many, it seems that USC's black community has fallen asleep. Student leaders have to "pull teeth" or offer meals as an incentive to get their own members to come to meetings and events.

But there once was a time when Wednesday was Stoop Day, when Somerville Place had an equal number of suites for freshman boys and girls, when the USC Chapter of the NAACP was the best in the west, when Divine Nine sororities and fraternities battled for control of the yard.

Continued...

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