Last week, I argued that students are the source of Caltech’s problems with student self-governance. This week, I will look at the centerpiece of our student government and ask, “What is wrong with ASCIT?”

My answer is simple: Donuts.

Of course, anyone who reads this newspaper knows this. Rarely does anyone complain publicly about club funding, the honor system, or student representation, but there were constant complaints about donuts during third term last year. In my entire time at Caltech, the only ASCIT legislation that was proposed by initiative has been a Bylaw amendment regarding donuts.

When put on a ballot, that initiative received only 40% of the vote, and this reveals a deep divide in the student body’s opinion of ASCIT’s proper role on campus. This divide has been growing over the years and has corresponded with a weakening central student government and a decline in student influence on campus.

There are basically two major opinions regarding ASCIT. First, there are students who believe their $60 a year in ASCIT dues buy them various services; most prominently the donuts they pay for every Friday morning. On the other side are students who believe that ASCIT has no business buying donuts at all. They would like to see clubs charge their own membership fees, publications sell their own subscriptions, and ASCIT concentrate on representing student views rather than subsidizing special interest groups.

Most students fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum (actually, most don’t even think about these things at all), and opinions are often split across House lines. This ideological dispute has started to manifest itself over the past year in donut gravestones, ASCIT dropping parties, and water balloons at midnight donuts. Again, it is students against students undermining our ability to stand up to the administration.

It didn’t used to be like this. Even just 5 years ago students were pretty unified in laughing at ASCIT for throwing bad parties and making fun of ASCIT officers for taking themselves too seriously. The two rival factions of today have appeared when Caltech student government has reached something of a turning point.

The ASCIT of the past was focused on student services. ASCIT once operated a coffeehouse in the SAC and managed the monthly phone bills for all students living on campus. When students needed summer research, the ASCIT Research Project was initiated. To help students pick the best courses, the ASCIT Educational Policies Committee began publishing Teaching Quality Feedback Reports.

Today, Dining Services operates the coffeehouse, Telecommunications manages our phones, the SFP office oversees the SURF program, and each department handles their own teaching evaluations. Even further in the past, ASCIT once managed much of varsity athletics, which is now in the hands of professional coaches and administrators.

This transition from ASCIT to Student Affairs has been going on for decades. After all, what better way for Student Affairs to identify valuable student services than to pick from students’ own initiatives? Unfortunately, this model has broken down over the past two decades as Student Affairs has grown much faster than ASCIT.

Clubs can no longer rely on ASCIT to fund their activities without some Institute support. Administrators often create new programs to fit their own vision for Caltech. Students no longer look to ASCIT to provide them with new services, and when they do, instead of asking, “Why doesn’t ASCIT help to implement an online registration system?” they ask, “Why doesn’t ASCIT tell the administration to implement an online registration system?”

The reasons for this shift are simple. ASCIT dues have been constant since 1984 while Caltech tuition has doubled. Students are paying their money to Student Affairs rather than ASCIT, so that’s where services have to come from. Money is power and we’ve been paying more and more of our power to the administration.

Raising ASCIT dues may seem like the obvious solution here, and doing that would certainly help the cause of Friday morning donuts. More money would put more flexibility in the ASCIT budget and allow students more influence to support the things they want to do. However, more money certainly isn’t the only solution to this problem.

Rather than trying to reclaim ASCIT’s role of primary student service provider, we could simply accede to Student Affairs. Instead of trying to compete with administrators we could work more closely with them to identify and respond to student needs. Currently, only the ASCIT President works with the administration on a regular basis. All the other ASCIT officers have jobs related to internal issues – a relic of ASCIT’s past. If ASCIT wants to shift its focus, some major restructuring will need to be done, which should probably start with a stronger focus on student representatives to campus committees.

In either scheme, ASCIT donuts don’t make a whole lot of sense. The traditional Friday morning donuts were first delivered by MOSH’s in the 1980’s and ASCIT took over the responsibility in the 1990’s. They are a cost passed from the administration to the student government, a student tradition created by an administrator, and now they are a polarizing issue. I genuinely hope that someday soon the student body will get over donuts so ASCIT can regain a meaningful role in providing student services.

But what then? Should we raise dues or focus more on representation? How about both?