In May last year, Cherwell broke the news that our student union had copied a crucial document from the student union of another university. The OUSU Rent Document, which is supposed to provide helpful advice for Oxford’s JCRs in negotiating rent increases with colleges, was found to be 80 percent identical to the Cambridge’s Student Union (CUSU) version.It was striking not just because it had been copied in the first place, but because it had been done with such utter incompetence; several references to ‘Cambridge’ and ‘CUSU’ remained in the text when even a basic ‘find and replace’ would have removed them.At the time, then OUSU President Alan Strickland explained it away as an administrative error: the wrong version of the file had been uploaded onto the website. This was at least plausible, however unlikely it seemed. OUSU promised to rectify their mistaken immediately and all was forgiven and forgotten.Nine months later, the same rent document is finding its way into the pigeon-holes of JCR Presidents and Treasurers. It has been amended somewhat cynically to remove the explicit references to Cambridge, but even with this blatant detail excepted, the document is still 78 percent identical.
As OUSU Rent Officer Dom Weinberg tells us encouragingly, “I also changed the order of the guide and made an overview page.” It’s nice to know that our elected officials put so much effort into these matters. It is difficult to decide what is most shocking about this. There is the fact the rent officer deigned to remove the named references to Cambridge, yet did not feel it necessary to alter the document any further. Then there is the absurdly unapologetic reaction to the revelation that, despite much flapping and red-faced apologising after the original expose, the bloody thing still hasn’t been changed.Despite the stereotypes, Oxford is not 78% identical to Cambridge. It is an absurd failure of our student union to not only hand out advice originally written for another university, but to neglect to rectify it when prompted. Fix it.
Editorial: Get your act together, OUSU
