OUSU hands out copy and paste rent pack (again)

OUSU has distributed a guide to college rent negotiations that is almost entirely copied, despite having vowed to change it in Trinity last year. In May the 2007 edition of the rent document was removed from the OUSU website after it was revealed that four-fifths of it was taken from the equivalent guide produced by Cambridge University Student’s Union (CUSU).The guide is intended to help JCRs successfully negotiate with colleges to keep student rents down, and contains legal and tactical advice for organising rent strikes.Anti-plagiarism software reveals that the new version, circulated to JCR treasurers on Tuesday, is 78 percent identical to the CUSU guide, and still does not accredit the Cambridge original.The edition of the rent pack taken down in May contained repeated references to CUSU. OUSU claimed that the wrong version of the pack had been uploaded to their website, and said that a new one would be released. However, the new pack is almost identical to the one removed last year. Dom Weinberg, the OUSU Rent and Accommodation Officer who updated the rent pack, said that he was aware that OUSU had been criticised last year for plagiarising the CUSU document, but “didn’t see it necessary” to attribute it to CUSU.He said, “I worked on what I had last year. Not a huge amount has been changed but some has. I added in bits on making sure the whole college is involved in the negotiations. I deleted the references to Cambridge. I also changed the order of the guide and made an overview page,” Weinberg said.He said that there were no plans to create a new document or take the current one down, and maintained that the inclusion of CUSU’s advice was beneficial to Oxford JCRs.“Surely it’s inevitable that a lot of the negotiation processes are to be similar to those at Cambridge,” he said.OUSU President Martin McCluskey said that he had been largely unaware of the controversy when it erupted in Trinity as he had been studying for Finals, and that the new guide was only a slightly revised version of the 2007 edition. “I’ve basically got the documents I’ve inherited,” he said. A reference to a non-existent appendix, left over from the CUSU original, had still not been removed from the new document. McCluskey admitted that this was an example of “sloppy drafting.” But he said that the rent pack was still broadly useful, and that it was only part of the help OUSU provided to JCRs fighting rent increases.“I don’t see why it’s an issue,” he said. “We’ve got a basic rent document that JCR and MCR Presidents seem broadly satisfied with.”“OUSU also provides support to JCRs in one-on-one meetings. We also provide co-ordination across colleges,” he added.The 2007 document repeatedly referred to ‘College Councils’, bodies which do not exist in Oxford but do in Cambridge. It had been available for four months before OUSU removed it from the website.Maanas Jain, President of Worcester JCR, said that OUSU should have acknowledged that CUSU had provided most of the material for the pack, saying, “I think there should be some tentative recognition that they were going to be similar.”But he defended OUSU’s role in helping JCRs to fight college rent increases, saying, “The whole process this was an extensive one. All JCR Presidents gave in their rent details to the OUSU committee.”