| the observer |
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 'Help Me Mah & Louie, You're My Only Hope ... ' Feb. 26, 1997
Last weekend saw the nationwide re-release of The Empire Strikes Back, the second movie in the Star Wars trilogy. Also last weekend: faculty, studen
ts and alumni paid tribute to UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien with a public ceremony held Friday on campus in Zellerbach Hall. A coincidence?Probably. But it's more fun to argue that Tien is the embodiment of evil. And by that yardstick, ASUC elected officers must be having a blast. So must the Coalition to Defend yadah yadah yadah, but they don't have an $18 million per year business, plus they think everyone is the embodiment of evil, so screw them. Much like the Star Wars trilogy, the Store Wars between student government officials and campus administrators will eventually return to center stage -- spruced up, no doubt, with expensive special legal effects to more fully immerse you in the courtroom drama. Store Wars redux will be louder and more realistic than the original. And it will certainly cost you, the student/audience member, a good deal more money. It was back in June, when the drama first unfolded, that ASUCkers started comparing themselves to the Rebel Force, waging a nearly impossible battle against a menacing Imperial Fleet. The implicit comparisons: Tien was Darth Vader, Sproul Hall was the Dea th Star, Campus accountant Tom Vani was a hapless fleet admiral, ASUC Executive Director Frank Brandes was Obi-Wan Kenobi and ASUC President Grant Harris, of course, was Luke Skywalker.
The university that month had announced its takeover of the student store; the ASUC ignored it and appealed it to Darth Vader before UC attorneys sued to enforce it. The case, which is essentia lly a battle over whether the university can evict the ASUC from a building the association owns but that rests on university property, has been sputtering along slowly in Alameda County Superior Court ever since.  In the past, both sides have officially said they'd accept an out-of-court settlement but don't expect the other party to budge. In the near future, the ASUC's willingness to compromise can be expected to vary inversely with its historically unstable bala nce sheet. Will the Rebels budge? Well, the ASUC's customary business cycle is to earn loads of money at the start of each semester, when it sells lots of textbooks, and then proceed to bleed its profits away during the remainder of the academic term. This means tha t the association is likely getting poorer and poorer as May approaches. Legal fees will cause it to lose money faster than usual this semester. That makes the next two months critical in terms of negotiations. If anything is going to be resolved out of c ourt or without the student store's collapse, it going to happen in that period of time. If it doesn't, the senate just has to make sure it doesn't let Tien trick them into telling him the location of their secret base.
The big winner in a negotiated settlement, of course, would be Frank Brandes Any agreement reached before the university filed its lawsuit during the summer would have surely included the fo
rmer mayor of Pleasenton's ouster from the 4th floor of Eshleman Hall. Now, however, it is unthinkable that student leaders would sell out their executive director, who after all has kept the store afloat for almost a year on an anemic $400,000 credit lin
e from the Bank of the West (it used to be $1.5 million) while fighting a university lawsuit. Of course, he did get a $2 million university loan in June (which still hasn't been repaid).Let's hope Brandes has set aside the money needed to repay that campus loan; without doing so, it will be hard for the ASUC to reach any kind of settlement with the university and avoid a court ruling that hands the student store over to Tien or his succe ssor. |