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NewsvineI’m on record as saying that student politics — the Graduate Student Council in particular — are utterly without use, purpose or value, but from time to time I’ll pay attention to democracy, and what it’s pretending to do for me.
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While our illustrious representatives typically work to find ever more inventive ways to fail miserably at socializing the masses, every now and then they advocate for our rights.
One such right is, apparently, the right to travel for free. For some time now, the GSC has been trying to persuade the University to provide the graduate student population (or some section of it) with GO Passes, which grant free Caltrain travel.
There are two reasons that I closely follow the activities of the GO Pass Action Group. First, I’m incredibly selfish. Anything that makes my life easier and cheaper is therefore an unalloyed good. So, since I live in the city, I equate free Caltrain travel with the betterment of mankind.
Secondly, and much more importantly, I have a crush on one of the GO Pass Action Groupies. Signing up to the listserv means I get occasional emails from the girl, and there’s nothing quite like an impersonal mass message from to set your heart aflutter...
These fantasies are far less important than me and my selfishness, though, so let’s focus on that.
Because of the way Caltrain sells GO Passes, the University is forced to buy them either for every graduate student, or for every off-campus graduate student. This means spending a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars), and that money has to come from somewhere.
Except there aren’t that many people who actually want the pass. The only people who find it genuinely useful are those that live in the city, and there really aren’t that many of us.
At the same time, a large number of city dwellers wouldn’t stop driving, even given the opportunity to double our transit time and massively increase our hassle.
So, the GO Pass scheme: Hugely expensive and beneficial to a tiny minority of graduate students — sounds perfect for advocacy.
To begin with, the focus was on getting the University to pay. This failed, for the obvious reason that it’s not really a practical use of the money. Now, Stanford has some motivation for reducing the number of peak time campus commuters (doing so is part of Stanford’s unhealthy relationship with Santa Clara County), but giving us train tickets is hardly the most efficient way to do this.
Once the University’s refusal to pony up became apparent, most of the efforts of subsidizing the San Franciscans have focused on extracting money from the pedestrian students who chose not to live amid the bright lights of the city.
The plans have varied in their egregiousness (my personal favorite required every grad student to pay $45 to fund GO Passes only for those off-campus), but they all rested on the same foundation — a foundation premised on the superiority of my needs over yours.
If I proposed to the GSC that every grad student pay $100 so that everyone with a birthday in November could get $1200 a piece, I’d be laughed out of the room. But here’s the thing: dress up the proposal with a little environmentalism, a dash of universality and just a pinch of entitlement, and suddenly you sound reasonable.