Nobody wants it to go nuclear

When you meet a student officer in Europe and ask them about the big issues they’re dealing with, you might expect to hear stories about student finance, harassment, mental health or even AI.

What you don’t expect to hear is their involvement in a detailed national debate over students and conscription. In recent history young men in Lithuania have been called up at random for compulsory military service – although male students have been able to postpone participation while doing their degree.

But one of the consequences of the Ukraine war and the rising threat posed to the former Soviet countries has been the Baltics taking steps to strengthen their military – and in Lithuania, which borders both Russian enclave Kaliningrad and Belarus (which is now hosting some of Russia’s tactical nuclear operations), that means taking steps to both increase the number of conscripts and speed up the training of the active army reserve.

So the proposal on the table – which has barely been discussed with the country’s ministry of education, let alone student representatives – is to “enable” students to combine their military training with study, giving the increasing number of students who are called up the option of pausing studies for a year or undertaking training every weekend.

And in a country where higher education participation has almost halved over the past 15 years, add in pan-European concerns over student finance and mental health and there’s a real panic that the proposals will make a bad situation even worse.

What goes on tour

It’s one of the extraordinary stories we’ve come across on Day -1 of this year’s Wonkhe SUs study tour around the Baltics and Finland.

Today around 40 students’ union officers and staff from across the UK will make their way to Latvian capital Riga to begin a coach trip aimed at fostering links with and learning from others representing and serving students – and while the trip doesn’t officially start until Monday morning, a small group of us decided to start 300km south in Lithuanian city Kaunas instead – a city with a proud history of students driving change.

In 1929 when it was temporarily the Lithuanian capital, the city was pretty difficult to get around – and students were often late for lectures.

The big problem was that its archaic horse-drawn tram (the “Konka”) was still the main way to traverse the city – and so students, some of whom had seen alternatives in other countries, plotted a dramatic derailment. It was agreed to be replaced a few days later.

Today Kaunas is home to seven HEIs, and a campus of one of Europe’s oldest and most prestigious providers – Vilnius University. It is where VU SU’s talented President Lijana Savickienė still studies – even the one quasi-sabb is still a student – and whose year in office, despite the conscription debate, will still be focussed on personalising the curriculum and improving representation for PhD students.

The big access and participation issue in Lithuania is one of place and class – a majority of students commute to university, leaving young people in rural areas much less likely to get a degree. To help turn that around, Lijana was one of the 50 or so students that the SU recruited for its “Higher education is not TOO high” project, which involves both school visits and ongoing mentoring of secondary age students. English SUs whose universities are under pressure from the Office for Students to strike up school partnerships may have much to learn here.

If the mentoring goes well, in a few short years they may well end up taking part in one of the country’s traditional subalansuotas fuksas (freshers camps), which see new students taking a weekend away to understand the essence of student life – and form lasting friendships.

Camps include discussions, games, and interactive activities – with a focus on inclusivity for all and a ban on what used to be “mockery or challenging ordeals”. It’s the sort of shallow end to student life (building belonging in the process) that often seems to be in short supply in the UK.

Rights and AI

When we were last in Vilnius a few years ago, the student officer who fed us pizza and made us learn about his summer campus was Paulius Vaitiekus – who since has gone on to become the President of Lithuania’s NUS, Lietuvos Studentu Sajunga (LSS).

In 2020 LSS figured that not many students understood the law on HE or how students should be treated, and so a year or so ago it gathered everything it could find and published it as a national declaration of student rights. Local SUs issue it and tailor it locally, and it’s almost certainly a project that a group of SUs in the UK could usefully adopt.

This year for Paulius and his colleague Karolis Katilius from Vytautas Magnus University SU, Ai has been a particular and familiar concern:

We need guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence tools taking into account each study program. In our opinion, it is difficult to apply the same suggestions in medicine and computer science. We believe there is a need to create a tool to audit jobs and detect where artificial intelligence has been used. It is clear that we must not forget to constantly educate people about the use of tools: when it is necessary and when it can be harmful.

And it’s a concern they’ve taken into Europe too:

If students from 40 different countries were able to find common points about artificial intelligence and reach an agreement on how artificial intelligence can be used in higher education, I want to believe that a solution can be found in Lithuania as well.

This sense – that democratic decision making is useful not just as a way of making decisions but as a way to understand others’ views and draw strength for resultant representation of those views – is one that’s been a little lost in the UK’s drive towards “suggestion box” style ideas submission across many SUs, and one we’ll be thinking about in our work reflecting on the trips when we return.

Expertise and power

One notable aspect of our discussion with student leaders here has been their framing of student representation not in terms of “voice” but in terms of “expertise”, and the idea that that expertise on student life, interests and concerns is a natural and essential component of discussions on policy.

It’s helped by higher education law that guarantees 20 per cent of the seats on pretty much every university committee, places duties on universities to fund both representation and student activities, sees mini SUs established in each faculty, and gives students both the right to a “decisive vote” (veto) over university decision making, and more often the ability to force a reconsideration of a decision adopted by the management bodies of the higher education institution if students’ interests have not been properly taken into account.

Even if the “nuclear button” of veto is rarely used, we certainly got the sense that students are taken more seriously here as a result.

And they need to be. For a long time in Lithuania – partly because its academics are poorly paid – corruption and bribery was rife inside HE, with several cash-for-grades scandals dominating the news. LSS campaigning inspired tough political action on the issue – but now for Lijana, the suggestion is that some staff now demand sex-for-grades instead.

It’s a sobering reminder that wherever we go, it’s students that have had to make the headway on harassment – which is why forthcoming reforms to expectations on universities to both prevent and process allegations of it in universities in England are so significant.

More from Lithuania tomorrow, and from Latvia – if our 6.30am (4.30am UK time) train ever gets there. Never let anyone tell you that Wonkhe’s work isn’t glamorous.