Associated Students’ 2024-25 External Vice President for Statewide Affairs Monica Mekhlouf wants to improve disabled student resources, housing accessibility and basic needs of students on campus while lobbying on a statewide level.
Mekhlouf hopes to focus more on how UCSA statewide goals can be concentrated on UCSB this year due to the upcoming shift in administration. Maddy Fangio / Daily Nexus
Mekhlouf, a fourth-year communication and sociology double major, works closely with the University of California Student Association (UCSA), a student-led advocacy organization that aims to provide a voice for all students and create tangible improvements to their needs.
Over the summer, Mekhlouf attended the UCSA Student Organizing Summit where students hailing from all the UC campuses gathered to discuss goals for five primary campaigns — Racial Justice NOW!, Fund the UC, UCweVOTE, A Campaign for Quality in Resources and Education (Acquire), and Students Enacting Environmental Defense (S.E.E.D.).
The External Vice President for Statewide Affairs (EVPSA) office volunteered to host the November UCSA board meeting on campus in light of Chancellor Henry T. Yang announcing his resignation at the end of this academic year. She hopes to focus more on how UCSA statewide goals — which have yet to all be finalized — can be concentrated on UCSB this year due to the upcoming shift in administration.
Yang’s departure brews uncertainty for student advocates, Mekhlouf said.
“Our campus has historically benefited from some benevolence from Chancellor Yang when it came to enforcing the encampments, especially when it came to calling police, they didn’t really get to that level until much later into the year, last year, and now we are kind of dealing with a policy that makes it so that everything is evenly enforced,” Mekhlouf said.
They plan to learn more about UC restrictions on student encampments and protests from UC President Michael V. Drake and Chancellor Yang in order to provide some clarity to the student body.
“We’re really wanting in specific, to understand what the intention behind the policy is, although we know the answer we get is going to be dicey. I think something myself and the other EVPs, as well as our UCSA president is going to do is a lot of drilling, do a lot of digging into exactly when, how, why, where is it going to be taking place,” Mekhlouf said.
Mekhlouf discussed how the mask restriction against concealing identity raised concerns about its effects on disabled students. She referenced the lack of COVID-19 regulations after the first wave of virus variants during the 2021-22 school year.
“Mask banning and COVID regulation are all things that are on my mind that I feel should be addressed at our campus, especially because when COVID hit our campus around two years ago, everything shut down. And once everything was opened up, there weren’t any specific regulations on masking, on testing that lasted long enough to actually prevent students from getting sick in mass numbers,” Mekhlouf said. “I’m wondering what that’s going to look like now that we have this new variant that is rapidly infecting people at a rate higher than our last variant was.”
Their other goals regarding disabled student aid include creating trainings for professors on how to support disabled students. These trainings are being created in collaboration with the Commission on Disability Equity alongside the goal of getting the Disabilities Cultural Center (DCC) up and running.
“Disability is such a wide-ranging experience, and academic access and accommodation can be interpreted so many different ways, and we wanted to make sure that encapsulated a lot of that, and that it wasn’t too general, or specific to our experiences and our disabilities,” Mekhlouf said.
Some of the accommodations discussed for the DCC include an evacuation chair and a removable ramp which would assist in getting students out of the third floor of the University Center during emergency situations.
“Something that we did was we took a beat to really research how we can make the space as accessible as possible, being that it is on the third floor of the UCen, we wanted to think about things like evacuation measures. What would happen to students in wheelchairs if the elevator was not working? Do we have backup plans?” Mekhlouf said.
One of Mekhlouf’s larger campaign goals was improving housing availability for students in I.V. Her team is currently collecting student testimonials to inform a bill regarding discrimination against undocumented students searching for housing.
“Our legislative division engaged in a lot of policy research over the summer, [we] partnered with a group to create a bill supporting undocumented students and their pursuit of housing, [including] their experiences being discriminated against while pursuing housing, and we have been collecting testimony for that,” Mekhlouf said.
This year, Mekhlouf aims to place a heavier emphasis on UCSB campus advocacy. She recognizes while state-level advocacy is a large part of her job, she has a commitment to her on-campus constituents which she plans to expand further.
“While I know [for] our Office of Statewide affairs there were certainly some areas of improvement when it came to how we supported [UCSA] statewide goals at our campus itself before we moved beyond that, and that was something that I wanted to have the rest of my staff a little bit more concentrated of this year,” Mekhlouf said.
Other groups Mekhlouf’s office plans to support this year include the Environmental Justice Alliance, Black Student Union, Students for Justice in Palestine and undocumented student groups.
They also plan to address the needs of all students regardless of their personal beliefs about the EVPSA’s more politically centered advocacy goals. Lobbying regarding improvements in homelessness, food insecurity, lack of access to academic resources, mental health resources and physical health resources are issues that concern everyone alike, according to Mekhlouf.
“At the center of my mission is student safety and student respect. I’m willing to engage with students who are respectful and kind to one another and able to share community if they disagree with my office and my office values,” Mekhlouf said. “We host things that are meant to be partisan, such as our lobby days, to some degree. When we’re advocating for student housing, there’s no agenda behind it … I hope to be able to connect with fellow students over the goal of student well-being.”
With a presidential election on the horizon, Mekhlouf aims to get students to the polls in collaboration with the External Vice President for Local Affairs Owen Meyers, through informing students how and where they can vote.
“It seems that this is going to be a large push, organizationally in the fall, and most of our efforts will probably be focused on getting students into the polling centers, making sure they know where they can vote, when they can vote [and] how to register,” Mekhlouf said.
A version of this article appeared on p. 1 of the Oct. 3, 2024 edition of the Daily Nexus.
