Unpopular Opinion at the KSA: Student Fees Should be Spent On Students
If the allegations now before the courts are accurate, the employment contract at the center of the Kwantlen Student Association’s latest lawsuit should alarm every student who pays into the organization.
According to court filings reported by The Runner, a student services manager position carried a base salary of $120,000, guaranteed four-per-cent annual increases, and a severance clause worth one year of salary even if terminated for cause and three years if terminated without cause. The agreement was reportedly negotiated with Executive Director Timothii Ragavan.
Let’s pause on that.
What kind of nonprofit writes contracts that pay a full year’s salary to someone fired for cause? Where, exactly, in the nonprofit or student-union world is three years of severance considered normal? These are not rhetorical flourishes, they are extremely serious governance questions that should be raised by the student membership.
Student unions are not venture-backed startups. They are custodians of mandatory student fees. Every dollar spent on executive compensation or litigation is a dollar that does not go to food banks, clubs, advocacy, or campus services.
And yet, according to the same reporting, the position in question was later reposted at a salary roughly 71 per cent lower than what had been paid previously. If the original compensation was necessary to “align with cost of living,” as similar justifications are often framed, what changed? Did the cost of living collapse overnight—or was the original salary simply indefensible?
The ethical dimension is difficult to ignore. Staff covered under collective agreements often fight for modest wage increases that barely keep pace with inflation. Meanwhile, management contracts allegedly guarantee raises, bonuses, and extraordinary severance protections. The disparity sends a clear message about whose labour is valued and whose is expendable.
Transparency is another glaring problem. Students only learn about executive compensation through court filings, leaks, or investigative reporting. Why? In practice, the KSA has been a publicly funded society in all but name, financed almost entirely by compulsory fees. Students should not have to wait for litigation to understand how their money is being spent.
There needs to be transparency rules to show exactly how much executives, the board, and management make without obfuscating or hiding among the staff budget line. Those need to be their own, separate, budget lines.
The current lawsuits also reveal a deeper governance culture. The KSA has declined to comment publicly on the proceedings, stating that matters are confidential until resolution. Yet confidentiality can easily become a shield—not merely for legal strategy, but for avoiding scrutiny altogether. When legal counsel is funded by the same students seeking answers, the optics are troubling.

Image: Plaintiff in the litigation against the Kwantlen Student Association, Yakshit Shetty.
There are also serious questions about management effectiveness and oversight. In his claim, Yakshit Shetty alleges he received little negative feedback and was dismissed in bad faith. That is one side of the dispute, and it will ultimately be tested in court. However, multiple individuals familiar with KSA operations have privately expressed a very different view, describing longstanding concerns about management performance that were allegedly raised but not acted upon. If those accounts are even partly accurate, it suggests a breakdown not only in supervision but in institutional accountability.
This is the paradox of the current situation: an organization claiming to act in good faith toward students appears to have tolerated governance practices that, at minimum, invite skepticism.
Beyond any single contract or lawsuit lies a larger structural issue. Student unions can become insulated ecosystems, where former executives return as consultants, where governance roles circulate within the same networks, and where institutional memory serves to preserve power rather than reform it. When oversight is weak and turnover among the student body is constant, accountability becomes optional.
That is precisely why transparency and restraint in compensation matter so much. Students graduate; contracts and precedents remain.
The KSA often speaks about representation, advocacy, and student welfare. Those words carry weight. But representation is not measured by press releases or mission statements—it is measured by how carefully an organization stewards the money entrusted to it.
Right now, many students are left with a simple, uncomfortable question:
If this is how the association negotiates, pays, and defends its own leadership, who, exactly, is being represented?
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