So storming fortnight is out of the way (or is it), the afternoons are pretty dark, and nobody’s yet in the Christmas spirit.
The second half of this first term can feel pretty bleak for plenty of officers – especially those who pick up the bulk of university committee work.
If there’s one feeling that characterises this time of year, it’s a mismatch – between the messages of change and possibility that surrounded manifesto writing and summer planning, and the misery of trudging from committee to committee achieving little in the hours spent in those rooms.
Not only is there no time for campaigns or engaging with the membership, there’s now pretty much no time even to do the lobbying of the people on the committees that we know is required to get something done in them.
As a result, this is often a time of year when well-meaning offers to go through the diary of the “committee sabbs” kicks in – and sometimes decisions are made to focus officer time on the meetings that matter.
The problem is that a couple of years later, it’s often those unions telling us that the university has started to appoint its own students to university committees – a pendulum swing that undermines the union’s sense that it’s supposed to be representing students independently.
So how did we get here – and what is to be done?
Old father time is wanging on about the olden days again
This is a broad description, and is by no means universal – but the idea that (usually pretty much all) the university-wide committees and meetings should be attended by sabbs is both a historical accident, and almost uniquely British.
Until the 1990s, most SUs were operating large(ish) union councils or SRCs. Usually populated by both (all of the) course reps and (all of the) clubs and socs, it was not uncommon to find university committee positions filled by those standing for election to those posts from these large representative councils.
Six big shifts have happened since.
The first is that the idea that it’s still possible to even fit all the reps and a couple of people from every club and society in a room, let alone hold them together as a functional “rep co” has been destroyed both by student numbers expansion and club/society expansion.
Endless experimentation with alternatives to the “rep co” have ensued – forums, referenda, splitting activities from representation, directly electing a smaller body – there’s been a lot of reviews, and not a lot of success.
And whatever people have picked for a couple of years, it’s not usually lent itself to encouraging someone to be on sustainability committee for a year during the comfort break.
The second has been the relative thinning out of numbers on university committees. Save for university courts and councils in the elite-end of the sector, committees have tended to get smaller and more efficient – and more often than not, it’s one student in the room rather than two. That’s ended up being one of the ones we pay to be there all year as a representative almost by default.
The third has been the shift towards managerial decision-making in universities – they are simply less democratic in character than they used to be 20 or 30 years ago. That doesn’t necessarily mean that committees have disappeared – but it does mean that scrutiny of performance rather than actual decision-making now dominates committee agendas. There’s just less space for challenge and ideas inside those rooms.
The fourth is the relative inexperience of those who become sabbs these days. 20 or 30 years ago it was fairly rare for someone to become a full-timer that hadn’t had some experience of committee work – either running a society or being on some kind of union or university committee. The hollowing out of what we might call interim positions – something between course rep and sabb – means that it’s more of a shock and uphill struggle for those who end up taking on the roles.
The fifth is the way in which university senior managers have come to operate their partnership with SUs. It was just less common for universities to want to build a partnership relationship a few decades ago – now for most it’s at least in theory part of the job. Getting to know the education sabb and President is pretty much a mandatory for most PVCs now – and if we’re honest, it’s all a lot easier if it’s one or two (or at a push, one of the other sabbs) on the committees rather than a rag tag of 20 or 30 random reps.
And the sixth is the decline in what we might call “policy”. It’s genuinely hard to know what an SU thinks about things these days – in an era where “motions” are sporadic or out of fashion rather than debated once a fortnight, few unions could say that they have an agenda for improving the PGR experience, or amending the university’s academic regs, or improving the campus – and even if they do via the passions of officers or their manifestos, it’s often an agenda that is swept away via the cosmic ballet of July 1st.
But history is history. It doesn’t work – it puts too much responsibility on those committee junkies, runs too large a volume of the “student interest” through narrow, inexperienced funells, is not very enjoyable (work is supposed to be enjoyable) and too few officers can say hand-on-heart that they’re achieving anything.
Lemmie look at your diary
As I noted above, just saying “well we’ll go to less meetings” isn’t the easy answer – partly because students should be represented on all of those bodies, and partly because the danger is that the quality and breadth of student voice is left to the luck of the spring election draw. And neither is the answer, if we’re being honest, replacing officers with staff.
If nothing else, if the sabbs are international, it really does make little sense for a university in England to have one in the Access and Participation Committee. And the lazy deployment of sabbs on student disciplinary panels, faculty quality bodies or the latest working group leaves students without a voice if those allocated are ill, bored or simply weighed down by a diary that prevents even reading the papers.
Our first taste that we might have this all wrong in the UK came on one of the study tours in Sweden. We were downstairs having lunch at Gothenburg students’ union – when the two sabbs (for over 45,000 students) revealed that they only sit on one committee each – the President on the equivalent of Council/Board of Governors, and the Vice President on the equivalent of academic board/senate.
“But how are the others elected” was my first question. They’re not – they’re democratically appointed. The elected appointments committee organises the recruitment of reps to sit on all the other bodies – but students apply for the roles, just as all the research always tells us they’d prefer to do.
“But how do you coordinate what they say” was my next question. Sometimes they don’t – but a “third leg” of the constitution, developed over time, does at least give both new sabbs and new committee reps a guide to the issues and the sort of positions on them the union holds. And any way, they do – the two sabbs get everyone together on Zoom every couple of weeks to share updates and track issues around the organogram.
“How do you persuade them to stand” was my third. The student finance package is better in Sweden – but the President gave us three clues.
“First, some of the committees align with their passions” – pointing out that for some students, being able to impact the university’s sustainability efforts was directly related to their course.
“For some of them, it looks great on their CV”. It’s true that saying you’ve been on a university Board is a step up from being a rep or being the parties rep for the Chess club.
But it was his third that was the most telling. “And anyway, there’s plenty to choose from”. In a system where there is no artificial divide between academic societies and programme level representation, there’s a large number of people that the sabbs can tap on the shoulder to encourage them to stand.
And the point about that is that in almost every country across Europe, there’s school and faculty based bodies – not reps, but bodies – who do the socials and the quizzes, but also represent students and organise what we give to a single rep coordinator who lasts about 8 months in the post.
In X Factor terms, pretty much every other country has bootcamp, the six-chair challenge and judge’s houses. Here it’s often auditions and the lives – and little link between the two.
There are seven steps
So strip all that back, and I suspect the answer is pretty simple. We do have to broaden and diversify the students that sit on university committees – and as well as a set of underpinning reforms (of the ilk described in this piece elsewhere on the site), I think it involves a set of steps that look something like this:
- It absolutely should be the case that students are in the room where decisions are made – a central principle that everyone should hold on to.
- It should also be the case that it’s for the SU to make that happen – the independence of the union gives the reps it supplies important credibility.
- SUs should actively decide to cause their own culture and that of their university to wean off the narrow funnell of the super-sabbs doing everything. It doesn’t work.
- Democratic appointment is not a weird crossing of the streams – it’s normal. Shifting towards it is what students want (they hate standing in elections) and would then still give university staff and SU staff a role in encouraging participation (even if it is a tap on the shoulder).
- SUs should commit to developing long-term policy statements like this to guide their work and induct new reps into.
- Having faculty or departmental or school reps is not the same as having faculty or departmental or school power through bodies that self-sustain. The need to crack the nut of the artificial split between academic societies and voice work has never been stronger – either formally or even just via things like this.
- Paying participants and/or allocating academic credit for their work on the bodies are both ways in which those positions become more viable for students – and should at least be trialled and piloted.
It was, a couple of years later, a President of an SU in Lithuania that really did it for me. “I would never have stood if it wasn’t for the placements working group I was put on”, she said – describing the passion she had for improving it as the spark that sucked her further in.
Her observation of the UK as we’d described it was astute. “You do all talk about what the union does for students. It is surprising because we talk about the way students do things for students through the student union. I think that is important”.
