Like most SUs these days, the onset of summer at the union where I’m an external trustee means it’s awards season.
Unlike some unions who are generally bigger than us (can anyone beat York’s fifty or so fabulous different award ceremonies), we combine our student-led teaching gongs with awards for our outstanding volunteers, officers and activists into one big night of fizz.
This year’s was, as ever really inspiring (even if my annual moan, both about Winchester and most other unions, is still an issue – that it’s hard for future staff and students to work out why folks won, so it loses its practice spreading purpose.)
Hearing the stories of staff that have made a real difference to students either through their teaching or support work, and hearing the tales of students whose volunteerism has both brought benefits for them and the wider community at Winchester is one of the reasons to love the sector where we work.
It wasn’t perfect. My top tip for awards organisers is that trophies that look big in the online catalogue can sometimes turn out to look like you’re giving out awards at the University of Bekonscot.
There was also a moment, on award 5, where we realised on the top table that of the three nominees listed on the screen for each category each time, it was always the one at the top that was about to be announced as the winner. It was more amusing than disaster, not least because Winchester is the sort of the place where the room laughs and smiles than condemns and sneers.
But something else did trouble me. In several of the blurbs about the staff and student nominees and winners – in fact I’d go as far as to say the majority – variations on the phrase “went the extra mile” or “went above and beyond” were included.
That wasn’t a problem with the script or its able and authentic delivery by our fantastic sabbs at Winchester SU. And the winners absolutely did deserve the praise they got. It’s a problem with the way that we normalise heroism.
These are the heroes of our time
In the traditional representative democracy and club/society committee model that has dominated UK higher education for centuries, we have always depended on heroes – those that step up, taking on positions of responsibility to serve other students.
The same is true of staff too – not everyone volunteers to join the committee, or take on an extra PhD student to supervise, or agrees to work the Open Days or staff the welcome week talks. We depend on heroes.
We perhaps all know students and staff that work weekends, that are there late at night at the academic society event or are putting the student paper to print in the early hours. University life outside of the formal timetable – and sometimes even within it these days – depends on these sorts of efforts.
As such it’s always been the uncomfortable case that some students and staff are in a better position to be a hero than others. Some – perhaps because of life events, or economic circumstance, or because of part time work or where they live – have much less time than others.
And in a system which often elevates those who are popular to these roles – either through formal election or encouragement – often it’s ethnicity, or accent, or domicile or “dedication” as a proxy for free time that means opportunities to be the hero are not fairly distributed.
Given the personal benefits that can accrue to those that serve others, that’s an injustice in itself. But it also has a reinforcing effect – because we know that those considering “stepping up to serve” are more likely to do so if they can see themselves reflected in the current crop of those that are serving.
And it can also be the case that some roles end up highly gendered. Guess who’s more likely to take on a caring or welfare role both across students and staff in your average university – roles that can start off rewarding but quickly become unmanageable, manifesting in unfair and unbudgeted burdens on those individuals.
And come awards season, it sends a signal on the socials – making those who can’t go the extra mile feel like absolute shit.
So the dangers are fourfold. First, a sector that depends on heroism to deliver the student experience suffers when times are tight – because there’s less of it to go around. Second, if those that benefit from it have particular characteristics, there are equality issues in the way that the leadership opportunity and its rewards are distributed.
Third, sometimes service becomes a burden that it is unfair to place on people. And fourth, activities and decisions and representation and planning undertaken by those who can rather than those who can’t, even with the best of intentions, can end up not understanding or serving those that need the service the most.
Put simply, if you’re the affluent and popular hockey player that ends up captaining the First X1, you might not be the best person to think through what it would take to get students from low income backgrounds into sport. And you are much less likely to understand why Black or Minority Ethnic students, or those first in family who played little sport at school, might need your welcome week activities to change.
Pyramid schemes
This is a particular problem across SUs because of what I used to call the inverted pyramid of participation. Around 15 years ago, most SUs would have a slide to show in a welcome talk that had students at the top, sabbs and staff at the bottom and then any number of layers and rows of reps, committees and bodies involved in doing things.
There were usually a couple of rows of superheroes (these days often paid) – faculty convenors, part time officers, that kind of vibe – and the superstar sabbs at the bottom.
This had three functions. First, it spread the load of the overall delivery of the student experience amongst the student body. It allowed for some communication both “up and down” in eras where social media was an SMS on a Nokia 6210 (ask your CEO).
The layers acted as a kind of auditioning ground for the next level – the best reps in their first year became super reps in their second year and sabb candidates in their third year. It was like whittling down the audition rounds in a series of the X Factor through auditions, bootcamp, judge’s houses and then into the lives.
But things have changed. It never was a great system for communication, and the speed and directness of comms these days coupled with the information and messaging overload involved in late capitalism means that reps and repping like that can get lost in the notifications.
The diversity of the student body means that students can find other ways and groups to build social capital in than through their programme rep or sports captain – although the relative dismantling of the house of cards in importance does mean that many students never find their group.
These days, not all students are around long enough to go through the layters to get to the top (bottom) – with PGTs either shut out of gather top jobs, or finding ways to shortcut the route only to flounder in office.
And when we make it easier to get straight through the live finals, the vocals suffer – because those performing haven’t had the experience that they used to gain in those earlier stages.
The slow centralisation and professionalisation of the SU sector is a good thing in many ways, but hasn’t helped here either. The truth is that more SU activity is loosely governed by a board than it is student led when compared to 20 or 30 years ago – more broadway musical than school play, or at least provincial panto in many cases.
Quality takes time
But the key problem is time. We know that students have less time than ever, an issue exacerbated by where they‘re living, the responsibilities they have, the part-time employment they’re undertaking and so on.
It’s why there are annual debates about paying reps or part time officers, why we tend to view sabbs as employees rather than full time volunteers, and why we often now frame the contribution that students can make to each other on a working group or a committee as labour to be paid rather than freely given passion to be harnessed.
The problem is that resource is finite, time is tight and volunteers are necessarily not to be depended on for necessities – so over time, the top layers of the inverted participation pyramid get hollowed out or dismantled. And the more the student body grows (in size and complexity), and the less the proportion of students is that is taking part in serving others, the less of a community it becomes.
I should say that paying people for their labour is in principle right, especially when the key beneficiary is the big bad university. But where students are graduating having never done things for each other, and having never had something done for them by others – I’m less of a fan.
Fewer and fewer students think of the community’s success alongside their own. Fewer and fewer students learn how to think laterally, solve problems and incorporate the ideas of others. Students baulk at rather than embrace assessed group work on their programme. And students expect more and more remuneration for their spare time – remuneration that is funded through others’ fees.
I can be your hero baby
Alternatives are available. It has long been the case that the general pattern of participation in UK SUs (and amongst staff in universities) involves a small band of heroes that go the extra mile, rather than a more spread out and evened out level of participation.
For me, it remains the case that asking a group of 250 students who wants to be the one course rep is hugely wasteful of talent.
Asking who wants to help out, and harnessing all of the volunteerism in a room, is probably messier but better.
Expecting every student to undertake one of the roles associated with being a rep is probably better even than that.
And rewarding each of those little roles with academic credit in recognition of the time put in and learning gained is surely the prize.
The UK’s SU system is also oddly focussed on individuals. The rep or committee leader – and the election to it – is the dominant way of thinking, but probably ought to be deprioritized. If nothing else, if there’s an officer or position without a group to lead, it will probably fail.
Building those groups – rather than dragooning folk into positions and then pumping them full of induction training on the hero model – is surely the strategic choice to make.
The moves, for example, in many unions to focus effort on academic society development as a means to improve student representation – rather than seeing them as two separate things – are surely about broadening the base of those that care and those that can do things in ways that should reduce the requirements on hero reps to know everything, know everyone and change the course of their course.
We’ve discussed before the ways in which European friends distribute welcome activity between hundreds of leaders rather than one ents manager. When Twente SU tells us that at any one time, there’s hundreds of students taking a semester out to be a full-time volunteer, it’s hard not to draw comparisons with our charity-based rather than mutual model.
More people, doing less things each, all in collaboration with each other, feels like a decent strategic goal to try to work up into a plan.
To you I belong
But this isn’t just about efficacy or the distribution of opportunity. It’s about belonging too.
We know that feelings of belonging are good for mental health, god for outcomes and good for students later in life.
We also know – even though university marketing departments keep ignoring it – that putting up posters that say “you belong here” when a student doesn’t feel like that and when there’s no scaffolding or investment to stimulate it, can make matters worse.
But what we also know about belonging is that it usually involves doing things.
The first aspect of that is that working together on something allows us to value and hope for the success of others beyond our individual concerns.
The second is that when we work in a group and we connect and contribute we’re suddenly not in competition, and so less likely to lose. When you’re editing someone’s essay or planning a route for a bar crawl, you’re not performing for your success – you’re performing for others.
But the third is that we start to see ourselves differently. Suddenly we’re not characterised by our characteristics, judged by our accent or ranked by our background. We start to transcend the labels and become the artist, the coach, the consultant or the cook.
That’s what makes belonging so powerful. And it’s why student representation, student democracy and student opportunities strategies should always be about more than efficacy, efficiency or the volume of participation.
They should also be about broadening participation, devolving power and helping students to not just comment on or vote on the world they want, but to shape and build the world they need – both now and in the future.
Building bridges by building bridges
There’s an interesting book out now on solving wicked problems called Bridgebuilders. It argues that in the past, things were easy – in the “vending machine” model a problem is identified, a department or organisation or role is formed to address it, and funds are fed into it with hopes of results.
Both SUs and universities are riddled with vending machines. But they’re increasingly out of order – because the world is more complex than the model pretends, and because it;’s hard to get separate vending machines to work together.
The world then moved to identity leadership – taking a group and its characteristics, giving it agency and capacity and leadership and then asking it to influence the deliverers. But while that worked at first, now there are so many competing and confusing charters and best practice guides for this or that student that those doing the delivery are overwhelmed.
With complex, cross-boundary problems like housing or harassment, the need for flexibility and constant rethinking is high – yet departments or experts struggle to adapt at the necessary pace, and advocates lack the influence or capacity to influence those functions. Heroes with capacity and money are there, but it increasingly takes much more heroism and much more resource to claim a win.
And so many of them aren’t actually doing things together, and building the belonging that we know will save the world.
The book proposes a “blended government” approach that doesn’t junk the experts, and retains the advocates – but that gives power to communities to lead. It puts place centre stage, devolves responsibility, and fosters care for others.
It turns big wicked problems into wicked opportunities – where more people wake up at night worrying about the community than their own success, and believing that they have a role to play in making things better rather than knowing how bad things are getting.
Satisfaction doesn’t become the key metric. Feeling part of a community does.
Solving problems for each other
This is important partly because we know that belonging is not evenly distributed. At an SU the other day, we were trying to work out why what is now the old Q21 on the NSS (“I feel part of a community of staff and students”) was so high for some subject areas, but so low for others. Is a better Q26 score in a medsoc about the SU doing lots of work on placement quality or the sense amongst students that they see themselves in what’s being done, becausae they themselves are doing it?
It’s also important because “centres” like “the university” or “the union” can’t do everything for everyone all the time. Can student awareness of housing rights be solved with a marketing campaign or through WhatsApp groups? Is student mental health as much about support from others as it is getting the counselling wait times down? And is social networking and social capital about watching the Broadway musical or making the costume for the school play? They are questions we all ought to ask.
It’s about switching – from being in a university committee discussing why students aren’t coming to careers events, to handing those events to students to make happen, drawing on the expertise of professionals and the intel of identity advocates to triple participation and quadruple their impact. It’s about “we” when we talk about achievements never meaning those of us that work there, and always meaning those that don’t.
Building purposeful belonging and community – whether that’s through academic societies, near-universal micro volunteering programmes, family-style induction programmes, community organising or pumped up projects that worry less about the society and more about the festival they’re staging – means more innovation, more experimentation, more personalisation and more forgiveness of failure. A blackout in a Broadway musical triggers a demand for a refund. When an actor loses their lines in a school play, we give them a hug.
The differences are subtle and the change needs sustained effort. It’s about stopping and thinking about whether to advertise a new vacancy or switch to a team of student staff. It’s about relaxing a bit about liability and risk, and worrying more about those who we don’t notice. And it’s about aligning SUs work as educational charities to a vision for the student experience, the rounded graduate and the empowered, capable community.
And for boards, it’s about being a bit less worried about the KPIs on the train set, and a lot more knowledgeable about the passengers and their intended destinations.
A good exercise for a summer away day is this – what would we do if 10,000 students said they could give us three hours a week instead of 1,000 of them giving us 30 each? What opportunities would we create? What kinds of structures and scaffolds would suit? What support would we offer? How much control would we seek to exert? What platforms would we develop for them to shine and share on?
And if we pulled that off, how many of them would turn up and turn out when we needed them to?
Another is to think about the trifecta of social activity, representation & advocacy and careers work. What if the lead responsibility for all three was given to academic societies, as we’ve seen across Europe? What would we do to enable success? What would we stop doing? And how would we overcome fears about dumping labour onto students or panics about liability, safety and consistency of service?
Being part of something and making things happen is the sort of education that students say they want, and imbues the sort of skills that we need to make the world a better place. It means that over time, the sabb induction will be more about helping students to make things happen than filling in the blanks. It means campaigns to save self-certs or increase hardship funds can draw on the stories and passion and push of the whole, rather than just the lobbying skills of the superhero.
Above all, it means that next year’s awards ceremony might depend less on going the extra mile – and more on the miles gone being something we ought all get an award for.
