A powerful student coalition dissolved before COVID. We’re rebuilding it.

David Sengthay ’26 is the Chair of the 27th ASSU Undergraduate Senate and a senior at Stanford.

In January 1987, a group of students at Stanford—members of the Asian American Student Association, the Black Student Union, MEChA and the Stanford American Indian Organization—issued a set of demands they called the Rainbow Agenda. The multiracial Rainbow Coalition behind it organized sit-ins and protested the university’s ethnocentric Western Culture curriculum. In 1989, they occupied the President’s Office. Two years later, the Faculty Senate voted to change the course entirely.

What followed over the next decade was a cascade of institutional change that Stanford’s administration had resisted for years. The introduction of Chicano/a Studies and Asian American Studies. The development of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. The retirement of a racist mascot. All of these goals were achieved.

By 1994, the Rainbow Coalition had been renamed the Students of Color Coalition (SOCC). For nearly three decades, it became the most powerful endorsing coalition in ASSU history. At its peak, SOCC endorsed 15 Senate candidates and saw 12 or more elected in a single cycle. It shaped the composition of the student government year after year.

Then COVID came. Student leadership turned over, institutional memory dissolved with graduating classes and SOCC stopped operating. There was no formal dissolution, but instead a quiet attrition that ends many student organizations. SOCC has not endorsed a candidate in years.

This spring, we are bringing it back.

Stanford is not the same campus it was five years ago. The diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) commitments that the university spent decades building are under sustained federal pressure. Ethnic theme dorms that have housed and sustained communities of color for generations were targeted by administrative policy changes. Co-ops that gave low-income students an affordable path through Stanford were stripped of their status without adequate student input. Across campus, there is a growing sense—felt especially by first-generation students and students of color—that the institutions claiming to serve them are retreating rather than advancing.

Students don’t always trust the ASSU to change this. That distrust is earned, but it is also a reason for SOCC’s existence. The coalition was built not to foster students’ trust in the existing ASSU, but to elect the right people to it.

Without a mechanism like SOCC — a coordinated, community-rooted organization to shape power in student government — Stanford’s stated commitments to equity and inclusion remain aspirational at best and performative at worst.

During my time in the Senate, I have seen what happens when the right people are in the room. This year, the 27th Undergraduate Senate passed a resolution in solidarity with the nationwide student strike against federal immigration enforcement violence, co-signed by more than 50 student organizations. It funded Phase A of the Black House Reimagination Initiative. It unanimously called for Stanford to reinstate cooperative housing status at EBF and Kairos. It supported the reinstatement of Stanford’s land acknowledgment. It allocated funds for FLIP’s First-Generation Week programming. It held the line on student speaker rights at departmental commencement until Dean Satz publicly committed to reinstating them at a Faculty Senate meeting.

Representation in that room matters. The question I am leaving with is: who continues it?

This spring, I am coordinating a joint endorsement process for the 28th Undergraduate Senate anchored by the Asian American Student Association, the Black Student Union, the First-Generation and Low-Income Partnership, Stanford Natives, Stanford Powwow and Stanford University Physics Society. If this coalition vets carefully, endorses strategically and mobilizes effectively, the 28th Senate could be composed entirely of senators who entered office accountable to the communities that matter most.

This is also a structure built to outlast me. I graduate in June. The goal is to build a coalition with its own institutional memory, accountability mechanisms and an annual cycle. I hope that this revival of SOCC is one that future generations of students from our founding organizations and beyond can inherit and build on.

There is a version of Stanford that takes its stated commitments to equity, diversity and student voices seriously — not just in mission statements, but in the policies it enacts, the funding it allocates and the administrators it holds accountable. That version of Stanford does not build itself. It is built by students who show up, stay in the room and refuse to let institutional momentum overtake genuine accountability.

SOCC was built by students who understood that. Its most lasting legacy is not any single election result, but the proof that coordinated, community-rooted student organizing can produce lasting institutional change.

We are not starting over. We are picking up where those students left off.

Election Day is April 15–16, with ballots emailed directly to every Stanford student. The 28th ASSU Undergraduate Senate SOCC-endorsed candidates are:

• Armaan Amin Sharma
• Ashton James Dolce
• Dan Kubota
• Diego Joel Medina-Gutierrez
• Ethan Kyle Quilantang Alfonso
• Intisar A. Alkhatib
• Jan Dwayne Arceo Cacnio
• Kylie Noelle Price
• Laila Walid Ali
• Liliana Simunovna Karesh
• Minji Yeonhee Cho
• Nason Li
• Princess Cierra Ochweri
• Troy Warren Harris

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