For half a semester now, the UP Diliman University Student Council (USC) has been left incapacitated after the May regular elections left all standard bearer and councilor seats unfilled.

Without the university-wide officers, the council only has 13 college representatives divided among 12 colleges. Even if the three candidates running for college representative are elected in the coming special elections on October 24 to 25, the USC would still be short of two local representatives.

But for now, electing new leadership is of utmost importance to the highly limited council, which was granted the unenviable task of running a USC in its directionless state with only half its members.

“Hirap pa kami mangapa ngayon,” Kierstin Camasis, the AIT representative to the USC, told the Collegian. “I do think our power is there, but I don’t think we can forward it yet given that there’s no direction on how we will be executing.”

State of Paralysis

Given their lack of manpower, many of the activities, campaigns, and projects the USC was expected to mount were instead put on hold, including the planned University Freshie Month.

Lacking clear directives on how they are supposed to move forward, the college representatives were largely left to their own devices. While resources—including the council’s email and Facebook page—were supposedly turned over to the remaining college representatives, the transition mostly ended there.

In the meantime, other student organizations, networks, and local college councils had to step up to fill the void left by the USC. Organizations like Rise for Education - UP Diliman, for example, have been the ones present for disaster response and issues of campus safety.

“Other formations took on the challenge of welcoming the freshies, while the USC was kind of on standby because we really had to address, first and foremost, the vacancies in the USC,” Sophia Beatriz Cruz, CSSP representative to the USC, told the Collegian.

Filling the open seats became the sole focus of the college representatives. One of the few initiatives they took was writing a letter to request the conduct of a special election in October, which was pending for nearly a month before Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Jerwin Agpaoa’s approval.

After the terms of the previous council lapsed, the USC started dissipating from mobilizations and student activities. The council was most noticeably absent from the 2024 emergency convention of the General Assembly of Student Councils, and a resolution they co-authored was pulled from the program a day prior.

Notably, the supposed resolution would have urged the assembly to conduct a study on the decline in student participation at the campus- and systemwide level.

 The absence of the USC also meant that vital student communication to the university was cut off. The Office for Student Projects and Activities (OSPA), under the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, then had to pick up the work of reaching out to students that would have otherwise been done by the USC.

“So for the meantime, we try to reach out sa students through, of course, yung ating mga social media pages, email blasts, and then sensing survey,” OSPA coordinator Jay-Ar Igno said to the Collegian.

Operations Held Back

While the representatives are still holding meetings behind closed doors, the council has faced setbacks over the last three months due to a lack of organizational hierarchy, no onboarding of standard procedures, and failures to reach quorum many times.

“We agreed that we would only make decisions in the manner of collective action,” Cruz said. “Given we have no presiders in the form of a standard bearer or a councilor, no one can really kind of set the agenda.”

As no one could convene them without presiding officers, USC committees also went defunct shortly after the term of the outgoing council ended, despite plans for continuation before the start of the academic year.

“Hindi nagkaroon ng very smooth na turnover or orientation ng mga committees na ito and the tasks that have to be done. Kaya admittedly, parang hindi pa masyadong sanay yung USC college reps noon,” USC engineering representative Andrew Miguel Pagdanganan told the Collegian.

The previous USC set up transitional committees composed of both the incoming representatives and the lame duck officers. But the committees naturally dissolved when the outgoing officers had to officially leave their posts.

Most of the representatives were left situated within their local colleges, as the council could not operate at the university level.

“I am more focused on creating initiatives now in my local college council than participating more on the initiatives of the USC, given that, yun nga, wala pa talagang nangunguna sa mga initiatives at proyekto sa USC,” Camasis said.

However, the college representatives have supposedly reached breakthroughs in the past few weeks, with plans for temporary working mechanisms and committees during a UP Diliman council convention initiated by the student regent and the chairperson of KASAMA sa UP, the systemwide alliance of student councils.

The Push for Special Polls

With the special elections coming up, the remaining members of the council have been focusing their efforts there, hoping for improved political participation and better voter turnout this time around.

This has included local college forums, room-to-room invitations to vote, and requests to professors for academic ease during the election period, among others. But these forums, which are a place for candidates to present their platforms and take questions, have only been conducted at the big colleges and the far-flung extension program in Pampanga and Olongapo.

These local assemblies serve as a buildup to the general Miting de Avance, which will take place in-person on Wednesday, 4 p.m. at the Vinzons Hall-Student Union Building Complex.

Whether the college representatives’ efforts to motivate students to the polls will succeed remains uncertain. With the threat of another abstention win, the USC might have to grapple with a lack of leadership for longer.

“As a member of the USC, I really want to encourage all the students to vote, to exercise their right to vote. Let’s fight for student representation,” Pagdanganan said. ●

EDITOR'S NOTE: The representatives clarified that they offered initiatives to professors, which included requests for academic ease in some colleges, but primarily focused on incentivizing students to join the Miting de Avance and vote in the election. Requests for academic ease were not given university-wide.