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Debate: do we really need OUSU?

Proposition:

Part of the reason OUSU exists is to work alongside common rooms. This year we have worked hard to ensure that our undertakings are complementary to their work: we have focused on providing common rooms with tailored support, information, and advice. This has included an intensive programme of officer training, multiple information sessions, regular consultation, and one-to-one welfare support.

In order to avoid duplication we have also worked to facilitate campaigns that are necessarily centralised, whilst ensuring that they are relevant to students and shaped by the priorities communicated to us through common rooms and OUSU Council. The main policy areas this year have been: supporting graduate students, student teaching awards, mental health awareness, campaigning for a living wage, improving the conditions of student residents, and raising academic standards.

Furthermore, in spite of the devolved nature of the University many decisions are still made centrally. OUSU can focus at a University level, providing representation and a strong student voice after consultation with students. All of this helps us to support effective student representation in Oxford, enhancing and supporting the work already carried out by common rooms.

A criticism oft levied at OUSU is that we do not take enough time to consult students; this year OUSU has made it a priority. We conducted the final review of reports focussing on teaching and consulted hundreds of students; using this to set OUSU’s academic priorities. We have also tried to give controversial motions a full airing: the White Paper Response was debated in multiple Common Rooms before it was taken to Council and several drafts were sent round the whole student body for input. The full-time officers have visited over sixty common rooms this year and met one-to-one with hundreds of students. We have also made the Council agenda extremely public. OUSU is working to make sure we are a more representative and accountable union.

As affiliation fees have been abolished the only change brought by disaffiliation is the removal of a common room’s voting rights. Since February last year a host of MCRs have re-affiliated to OUSU and graduate issues have become one of OUSU’s priorities. With the support of these MCRs, we have repeatedly won on graduate issues. Affiliation gives common rooms direct influence over OUSU’s policies and actions, thus keeping us accountable. It also gives the student union collective, unified bargaining power so that we can win on the issues you really care about.

 

Opposition:

The nitty-gritty business of student politics happens in the JCR. Facilities, welfare, and academic issues are all handled in college. With the day-today concerns of students managed so close to home, it is hard to justify a further, more distant organisation in a collegiate university.

That is not to say that we don’t need some kind of representation for the student body as a whole, but the real question is not ‘what does OUSU do?’ but ‘what does OUSU do that could not be done, in some way, through JCRs?’ A straw poll of students in hall this morning revealed nobody felt particularly strongly about OUSU, and several didn’t know what it was. Whether you put it down to bad PR or just lack of effect, this isn’t the hallmark of a successful students’ union.

Just look at the elections that are, after all, OUSU’s justification for representing us at all. The most I remember of the last one is the over-blown centrespreads in the OxStu and the occasional poster on Turl Street. Short on policy, short on personality. No student I know actually felt like it would make a difference to them. The entire process left us disengaged: even with internet voting the turn-out was 19%. Hardly a democratic mandate. The ‘hackocracy’ criticism is an easy one to level, but it contains a grain of truth: it is hard to see how OUSU is not run for hacks, by hacks.

Compare that to the local democracy of the JCR. Presidential elections are hard-fought and engaging: Corpus even managed enough interest in the process to have a plant both run and be murdered. More importantly, if I vote in a JCR election, or even in a JCR meeting, I know my voice is being heard on an issue that matters to me as I represent a good couple of percent of the electorate. That gives a sense of empowerment that OUSU completely fails to provide. The organisation receives £200,000 from the university each year, but surely that money would be best spent by those closest to the students they stand for. OUSU is the European Parliament of university democracy: distant and inscrutable, disengaged, and – according to most of the electorate – pretty much irrelevant.

The real powerhouses of university politics are the JCRs, their committees and presidents. They are transparent, approachable, and we can see them making a real difference in our day-to-day lives. Surely these truly democratically elected people should be the ones we trust to communicate with the University and the outside world, without the expense and bureaucracy (and, dare I say it, hackocracy) that comes with an external organisation.

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