As our president at HISA steps down after a two-year term representing UHI students, I’ve spent some time reflecting on the multiple burdens placed on elected officers at a time of great change for the HE and FE sectors.
Elected officers have a lot to take on, often in their first major employed role. While officers provide the student voice for universities, what are universities doing to help them deliver what they campaigned on?
It’s demanding
I’ve worked in HEIs for over 25 years and have seen a lot of elected officers come and go. But since the pandemic, it feels as if there has been an increased burden on officers to be the student representative on increasingly “crisis” type university committees.
These expectations impact an officer’s ability to deliver their manifesto. When preoccupied with “crisis” working groups and emergency meetings, there’s no time to work on the things they took up office for in the first place.
I think of the officers who inherited the pandemic years and how many of their manifestos ended up being largely undeliverable. Or the myriad officers who have had to deal with multiple strikes by lecturing staff, or manage strong student views and expectations around the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, or currently on trans rights. All issues imposed on officers from outside.
At HISA, our president has been involved in so many impactful but “behind the scenes” projects that have absorbed his time. From needing to recruit a new CEO (me!), to attending the numerous graduation ceremonies, sitting on a number of unexpected senior recruitment panels, quality visits, and attending internal meetings about a major university change process. And for the most part all of this has been confidential.
Behind the looking glass
None of this activity was expected when he stood for the role, and it’s the university’s credit that he was involved, but most of it is invisible to students.
And some of it is quite hard to articulate when asked “what have you done in your time as President?”
The answer shouldn’t just be “I sat in a lot of meetings and represented the students’ views” – although this is vital work.
It’s also hard to discuss this work with students and get the “student view” when it is effectively confidential.
The endless meetings, approval panels and feeding in student views across the university’s governance structures takes up a lot of officer’s time. And this isn’t unique to our university, they have treated their elected officers with dignity and respect, and unexpected events will always happen which will affect officers in their time in post, but these items eat into officer time to engage with students on the ground.
And because of the state of the sector, elected officers are now more and more often in meetings dealing with closures, redundancies, strikes and crises, alongside handling strong views on areas like international conflicts, rather than out and about speaking to students, campaigning for what students want and for the manifesto they stood on when elected.
You scratch my back
It’s fabulous that officers are involved and included in emerging university-level items, that they recognise they want and need student voices and that they’re part of the solution. But it does pose a question, what have all these institutions done for officers in return?
If officers have allowed the institution to “tick” certain boxes, what has the university done to help officers “tick” boxes on their manifestos?
How many meetings are taken up with pressing university business, and when is the time made to ask officers what they want to achieve and asking them how they can support this process, even if they might not agree with the manifesto aim?
As student unions, associations and universities prepare to welcome new waves of student officers, how can universities make space for officers to deliver on their goals and support them, like they have supported universities? Especially when, as with HISA’s current President, so much of what they have done rightly can’t be talked about publicly.
I’ll scratch yours
So what are the practical examples that university management can do?
Standing items on agendas to focus on officer manifestos, or protected time to discuss officer aims is a good first step. Does the university sit down regularly with your officers and go through their manifesto with them and see how they could help them deliver on those items?
Have they ever asked about the balance of workload for them? Do they hold town hall meetings with students? Do they visit your union offices and talk to them? Does every committee need a student on, or are there other methods of engagement which might be more effective?
Where this works well it is dynamite. At UHI a joint focus on student mental health has led to the publishing of a much better Student Mental Health Agreement and even more support across the institution for wellbeing activities for students, no matter who they are delivered by.
What is the value of doing this to university senior leadership? It’s a busy sector and their diary is rammed; as a senior manager they’re probably just coping from one day to the next.
A good working relationship with your student body and their elected representatives is vital at a time of great change. The union can be the constant to students through change. And this sort of proactive and collaborative approach can create huge benefits for areas such as quality visits, stories to tell to encourage more students standing in elections in the future, or even more students applying to study at your institution if you can demonstrate this publicly.
And importantly, you may also genuinely learn something!
