Transcript: Power at Western Washington University

March 2, 2023

“Before I leave all of you for tonight, I want to talk about power at Western, because as a senator, like change comes from understanding power and knowing how you can affect power really. So, quick overview. The Board of Trustees here at Western, appointed by Uncle Jay Inslee , wonderful governor. They have complete authority, basically here at Western. They of course don’t use it like that.

They delegate it to president Sabah and the VP’s, and the VP’s and Sabah basically make all the decisions at Western except for things that the faculty control. The faculty, they have their faculty senate, they also have a union and they have a lot of control over curriculum. And then us, the Associated Students, get our power directly from the Board of Trustees. (correction 6/16/23: From the BoT through the President)

And our power is very like… We control the AS, yes, so we kind of have complete authority over that. But in terms of actually affecting things at the university on a whole our like voices are very tokenized. The power we get is really from like the student body. If we were to like make change, it would require that like the student body to also support that change.

And generally, just like what I want like at Western is true shared governance. I know, people talk about shared governance at Western. That’s like the whole point of the AS and faculty Senate and all that is. Oh, we have admin, faculty, and students all working together to control how Western is run. In reality, it’s administrators controlling a whole lot of stuff, faculty controlling their curriculum and students controlling not very much, except for the money they they’ve “taxed” themselves with fees and stuff like that.

And I think that one way that there’s like a pathway to true shared governance is through like bottom up power. One way we see this is with the faculty union where the reason they have control over the curriculum is because there’s a union. It’s because they collectively have come together and been like, okay, admin, we want to have control over curriculum.

And that’s where like WAWU and student unionization comes in. If there’s enough people and they’re organized, they have power. And that’s like just another… cause there’s the top-down power that we get from like the state and the board of trustees and all that. But there’s power that you can get from a bunch of people bottom up. And on the topic of just making sure that senators in the future understand power, this is really important because I only… I don’t really… the first quarter I was here did not know what was going on.

There were no… there was very little documentation. That’s just something that like is the case in the AS, unfortunately. So I didn’t know what was going on. And it’s really hard to make change when you have three quarters as a senator to try to do anything but you don’t know who to talk to or the systems of power, how you can interact with them until like spring quarter. And, at that point.. term’s finishing up and a lot of things you can’t really like, a lot of things that you need to change can’t be changed in two months.

Yeah, yeah. That’s just a few thoughts on power.”

Transcript from @wwu_as_senate Instagram takover