A stark change in opinion characterized the Associated Students
Legislative Council, the lawmaking branch of UCSB’s student
government, at evening meeting Wednesday, January 24. Whereas
members of the council had voted in favor of freezing funding to
the Daily Nexus during the previous week’s meeting, they
had decided not to pursue the effort, much to the surprise of those
in attendance.
Last week, a conflict about journalistic morality and integrity
erupted over the Nexus’s running an ad for Conquest
Student Housing, the company that manages the Isla Vista apartment
building that became a center of controversy last fall when its
owners evicted its residents, which were mostly Latino families. In
response to the eviction, many campus groups rallied in support of
the evictees. Campus resentment of Conquest Student Housing was
such that many A.S. officials became upset when the Daily
Nexus ran a full-page ad for the now-renovated apartment
building. Citing that the advertisement represented a moral
disconnect between Nexus staff and the student body,
several A.S. Leg Council members—foremost among them Off-Campus
Representative Jeronimo Saldana—motioned to restrict A.S. funding
to the paper. The paper’s editor in chief, Kaitlin Pike, responded
to the charges by saying that the student government group did not
have the authority to manipulate the funding, as students had voted
that quarterly funding into effect decades before.
Following last week’s meeting, A.S. President Jared Goldschen
vetoed Leg Council’s resolution, employing a rarely used power of
the president to prohibit the council’s rulings. Though Saldana and
other Leg Council members had indicated that they intended to
overturn the veto at this week’s meeting, they did not. Meeting
attendees arrived to find the item removed from the meeting’s
agenda.
The meeting was also characterized by some student sentiment in
favor of the paper. A handful of students, some wearing T-shirts
bearing anti-A.S. slogans, spoke against the council’s efforts to
retrain funding to a publication.
Adding one more noteworthy event to an especially turbulent week
for UCSB culture, A.S. advisor Marilyn Dukes also announced that
UCSB has selected Jerry Roberts to take over the position of
publication director, which was left vacant when veteran Tybie
Kirtman retired in September 2006. Roberts, who formerly worked at
the Santa Barbara News-Press will chiefly be in charge of
the financial side of the newspaper, which the most recent
A.S.-initiated audit places at approximately $600,000 in debt.
For more information on the Nexus history, read
“A
Nexus of Troubles,” the feature news story from the January 25
issue of the The Independent.