I remember it like it was yesterday. Or do I?
The year is 1995. I’m sat at the back of a lecture theatre on the outskirts of Bristol at 2pm on a Monday, and on to the stage at the front comes a strange, awkward man in a waistcoat called “Cos Barker”, whose stated aim is to deliver the “student union” slot in induction week.
Before lunch we’d been talked at by someone from student services. After Cos, we were talked at by someone telling us to keep our windows locked at night.
Not only do I remember nothing about Cos’s contribution now, I remembered nothing about it that evening – other than that I wanted nothing to do with the “student union”.
Thirty-one years on, I have sat hundreds more SU freshers talks, and the good bad news is that the genre has barely changed at all.
The slides are nicer, and sabbs these days are more likely to be wearing a branded hoodie than a waistcoat, but the basic proposition – a stranger at the front telling a room full of people who don’t yet know each other about an organisation they’ve been reading about for weeks already – remains intact.
So in the spirit of the season, I’ve written up a guide to delivering the SU slot the way Cos did – guaranteed to ensure that nobody in the room can recall a single thing you said by the time they have located the nearest Greggs.
Start with the organogram
Nothing says “welcome to the community” like a slide explaining the difference between the trustee board and the executive committee. Ideally there will be a diagram with arrows, and ideally it won’t be legible from row F.
Students arrive at university with wildly different amounts of knowledge about how any of it works. Some have parents who went, older siblings who explained it, or a sixth form that ran a session, while some have none of that and are silently assuming that everybody else was issued a manual at enrolment.
The case for teaching the “secret codes” of university – the unwritten conventions about what a seminar is for, what “be more critical” means, and who you are allowed to email – rests on the observation that admission doesn’t confer familiarity, and that the institutions which do well are the ones that explain that stuff explicitly rather than assuming it was absorbed in the womb.
The easiest way to avoid doing any of that is to spend your eleven minutes on your own SU’s internal structure instead. Explain what a sabb is without ever saying what one could do for the person listening, and introduce the course rep system as a thing that exists, rather than as the answer to the question “what do I do when my cohort is confused and nobody wants to be the one to say so?”
And use acronyms freely – if they wanted to know what the AGM, the NUS, the OIA, or the VP Ed were, they should have said.
Describe representation, never do it
Closely related is the bit of the talk about “your voice”. We amplify student voices. We take your concerns to the highest levels of the university. You elect us every year. There’s a network of reps, a council, a feedback loop, and a governance structure, and all of it is illustrated with a slide of arrows pointing upwards.
What the slide should never contain is a single thing that is currently wrong. I wrote earlier this year about the “meet the SU” genre – representation described in theory, as a structure to be admired, while the practice of it, the bit where you say out loud what needs changing and who is going to change it, is kept carefully off camera.
The freshers talk is the live version. A room of a hundred people who have just enrolled, and the ask is “come and find us if there’s a problem” rather than “here is the problem, here is who we’ve told, here is how we’ll fix it”.
So if you want to be forgotten, describe the machinery and never the fight. If the rent is too high, the timetable is a mess, or the support plans keep falling through, save it for election week. Nobody was ever recruited by an organogram.
Best years of our lives
This is a classic, and its power lies in being a promise the speaker can’t keep on behalf of anyone, delivered to a room in which a decent proportion of people are already wondering whether they’ve made a huge mistake.
Research from Whillans and colleagues found that students consistently believe their peers are more socially connected than they are – that everyone else has more friends, goes to more things, and has generally cracked it – and that the belief is associated with lower wellbeing and a weaker sense of belonging. The group chatting at the front looks like it has known each other for years. It met at 9.30am in the queue for the wristbands.
So the way to make things worse is to stand on stage and confirm the misperception. Tell them they will make friends for life this week, and tell them that university is one long highlight reel.
Do not, under any circumstances, reveal the reality – which is that most people in the room feel roughly as unsure as they do, that you can’t tell how settled someone is by looking at them, and that friendship doesn’t have a Friday of freshers week deadline. A second conversation with someone from your course next Tuesday is a perfectly good way to begin. It just doesn’t make for a great slide.
Nursing a hangover
The freshers talk was designed in about 1994 for a student who arrived by car with a duvet, and it has proved remarkably resistant to the arrival of everyone else.
The commuter with a 50-minute train and a job at the weekend, the parent, the student who doesn’t drink for reasons of faith, health, or plain preference, and the person who is 34, has already done a degree somewhere else, and doesn’t need to be told where the bars are.
The trick is to talk exclusively about the night-time programme, to describe the daytime and alcohol-free stuff, if at all, as a sort of consolation prize for people who can’t manage the main event, and never once to mention that student life has to fit around the rest of a life. There are bonus points for a joke about hangovers, and double bonus points if the sabb delivering the talk is visibly nursing one.
What you must avoid saying is that nobody owes anyone an explanation for leaving early, not drinking, or pointing out that something costs too much – and that when they are the one organising the pres, the trip, or the social, they might think about who their plan accidentally excludes.
That would involve treating the confident students in the room as members of a community with a responsibility to each other rather than as customers, and that sounds pretty woke.
Fourteen logos
The advice centre! The wellbeing team! The hardship fund! The student activities office! Here is a slide with fourteen logos on it! We are here for you.
The thing about a list of services is that it answers a question nobody in the room is asking. The question they are actually carrying around – and will still be carrying around in week seven when the email from the department arrives that they don’t understand – is “does my situation count?”
Is “I’m worried about money” enough of a problem to bother someone with? Is “something about this feels wrong but I can’t say what” a reason to walk through a door? Nobody knows, because nobody told them, because the slot was spent describing the doors.
The alternative – describing what actually happens when you turn up, saying out loud that “I have received this email and I do not understand it” is a legitimate opening line, and giving people one route to remember rather than nine – takes about ninety seconds.
Rules, not people
There’s another question that almost every new student is asking, and that almost no freshers talk answers. What are people like here? Not what the policies say, and not what the values statement on the lanyard says.
What do students around here actually do when someone sits on their own in the cafe, or asks a question in a seminar that everyone else thought was obvious, or turns up to a society having never done the thing before, or says they can’t afford the trip?
Nobody arrives knowing the answer, so everyone guesses – and they guess from the loudest available evidence, which in week one is the group chat, the flat that has already gone feral, and whoever is shouting outside the venue at 11pm.
This Wisconsin work by Murrar, Campbell, and Brauer is usually described as being about diversity, but the more useful reading is that people calibrate their own behaviour to what they believe their peers think, and that they are frequently wrong about what their peers think.
Show them what the majority actually believes – that it’s fine to arrive alone, that most people would rather someone asked than struggled, that the jokes that land badly are noticed – and behaviour follows.
The way to do it badly is to answer “what are people like here?” with a code of conduct. Read out the list of things that will get you kicked out, say “we take a zero-tolerance approach” to something, and move on. They want to hear from a peer, so crack on and disappoint them and instead talk like a provider.
Describe the culture entirely in terms of prohibition, and leave the students in the room to work out for themselves what the people around them are like – which they will do, on the basis of whoever behaves worst in the first fortnight.
The alternative is to describe the people – second years telling the truth about what they were worried about and what they found, and a plain statement of what students here expect of each other. None of which implies that nothing bad ever happens here, which is the other trap. A culture described is a culture shaped.
Demand that they get involved
Another aspect of the classic freshers talk is the exhortation. Get involved! Run for something! Join a society! Be the change! It’s usually delivered by someone who got involved, ran for something, joined 20 societies, and was the change, and it lands with the majority of the room as a description of a person they are not.
What the involved tend to miss is that almost nobody becomes involved by responding to an exhortation. They become involved because someone asked them to help with something small, or because they found they knew something that somebody else needed to know, or because a person they had met twice said “are you coming?”
The Swedish SUs we wrote about last year understand this instinctively – responsibility arrives by being invited to do a bit, not by being told from a stage to do a lot.
The way to do it badly is to describe contribution as a moral obligation, treat “not making the most of it” as a character flaw, and ensure that the student with two jobs and a caring role leaves the room feeling less of a member of the university than when they walked in.
Lucky to be here
The next thing to leave out is the word “rights”. The classic freshers talk presents the SU as a benevolent charity and the student as a guest who has been let in, and it’s a framing that suits everyone in the room except the students.
Because they do have rights, and quite a lot of them. The course that was described in the prospectus has to be broadly the course that turns up in October, and consumer law says so.
The contact hours, the assessment methods, and the costs that weren’t mentioned are all things that can be complained about, and there’s a procedure for doing it that ends – in England and Wales – at an independent adjudicator that the university is obliged to take seriously.
Students with a disability have a legal right to adjustments rather than a favour. Decisions about academic misconduct, fitness to practise, and being thrown out of halls all have processes, appeals, and standards of fairness attached to them. There is, these days, an entire website about it.
The way to make sure none of that lands is to never say the word. Talk about “support” rather than entitlement, and describe the complaints procedure, if at all, as something for extreme cases involving other people. And never, ever say that the SU exists partly to help students find out what they are entitled to and then get it – because that might sound like a reason to get involved.
The message, if you were doing it properly, takes one sentence. You have rights here, you are allowed to use them, and we are the people who will help you do it. It wasn’t said in 1995 either.
Nothing is ever wrong
Finally, the surest way to guarantee that the SU is forgotten by teatime is to present the university as something that works, and the student’s job as fitting into it. Learn the codes. Find your people. Lock your windows. Have fun.
What goes missing is the bit that makes an SU an SU – that students are allowed to notice when something doesn’t work, when instructions are unclear, when an activity is inaccessible, when a cost has appeared from nowhere, when the same problem keeps hitting the same course.
That there is a difference between something being hard and being treated badly, and that nobody has to work out which is which on their own. And that telling someone what needs to change is itself a way of taking part.
The large belonging trial run by Walton and colleagues across 22 US institutions found that a brief exercise built on older students’ honest accounts of their own wobbly first weeks improved completion – but only where there were real opportunities to belong once students turned up. Reassurance works when the institution behind it does. A freshers talk can’t fix a university, but it can tell students what to do when the university needs fixing.
I still don’t know what Cos Barker said that Monday afternoon, but I do know that a few weeks ago, someone I literally bumped into at Manchester Piccadilly both remembered the talk I’d given to her a year later, and remembered that UWE students were better than Bristol students because we were statistically more likely to intervene when another student was struggling. I’d made it up, of course. Or maybe I’d just made it happen.
