By constitution and by law OUSU is a democratic organisation. Anyone who gave up an hour during the OUSU elections filling in preference after preference for all of the positions on the ballot can testify to that. Furthermore, it is not just the sabbatical officers that have to be elected, but a myriad of part-time officers, student trustees and NUS delegates – all require democratic approval. To stop those officers from becoming an elective dictatorship, OUSU has a council. This is a sort of parliament to represent the student body. It is supposed to hold the officers to account on behalf of the rest of us, particularly the sabbatical officers who work full-time and are paid for their work. It also sets policy and authorises various discretionary expenditure. Where JCRs have elected officers and a JCR meeting or GM, equally OUSU has its officers and OUSU Council.
Who sits on OUSU Council? It consists mostly of JCR presidents, OUSU officers and other common room representatives. Strangely, it also gives votes (roughly 1/5 by my reckoning) to the elected officers and OUSU campaign representatives, meaning that not all students end up getting represented equally. If you were in the majority that elected one of the officers, or work on a campaign – your voice counts for a bit more. But that is a comparatively small problem. OUSU Council has much bigger issues elsewhere.
The first of these is much discussed. The atmosphere of Council is ‘politics-on-my-sleeve’ left-wing; it can be intimidating and even hostile to speakers from the right. Jack Matthews, current OUCA presidentand a graduate student who has been to OUSU Council so long that he has been called it’s ‘institutional memory’ was in the student press just last week raising this issue. He remembers, when he first revealed that he was right-wing: “There was a clearly audible gasp from the members of OUSU Council. My first experience of student unions and the take home message was you’re not that welcome.”
Student politics is possibly one of the few areas of human activity where being right-wing is more of a disadvantage than being BME, female or gay. Certainly, the perception of OUSU as hopelessly left-wing and right-on is both widely held and broadly accurate, and is ultimately responsible, I suspect, for the disaffiliation of more right-wing JCRs, such as Oriel and Trinity. The old notion that the Oxford Union is for more right-wing people, and OUSU for the left is a damaging one. The Union – a private club, can do what the hell it wants. But OUSU is invested with the right to speak for all of us, which makes Council’s alternative universe of intersectionality-expounding, vegetarian RadFeminists all the more perplexing (I joke, slightly).
Then again, Council is a political body, and unsympathetic as it might be to those of Matthews’ ilk, most students, even at Oxford, are pretty left-wing. Right-wing positions are not comparable to unchosen components of someone’s identity. They can be critiqued in a political forum, and, unsurprisingly, they tend to lose out against the greater mass of student left-liberalism. As Churchill said: “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart” (for those familiar with the full quotation, we will conveniently ignore the second part).
OUSU Council’s run even deeper than petty squabbles over political bias. After sitting on it as a JCR representative since the start of the academic year, I am beginning to worry that it is failing to adequately fulfil its most basic role of holding officers to account. It only meets every two weeks, and when it does there are often only three or four motions – that is fewer motions than in many JCRs, an organisation smaller in staff and budget by orders of magnitude. Most motions at OUSU Council pass without opposition in any case. It is kind of hard to amend a policy document that multiple stakeholders, OUSU officers and the University have often been negotiating on for months before they present to Council a virtual fait accompli.
We only really know what officers have been doing from what they want us to hear that they have been doing in their reports, where of course they have been busily working to ‘win for students’ rather than (hypothetically) spending all day playing tiddlywinks at OUSU offices, or getting thrown out of hotels for mischievous hijinks. There is a scrutiny committee, but its termly reports read like interviews with the officers, pronouns changed from “I have been working hard” to “they have been working hard”.
These failings are understandable. Everyone on council is part-time and, just like any Oxford student, is juggling multiple other projects and work. The sabbatical officers we are meant to oversee are full-time professionals. I doubt that Rowan Atkinson sat on OUSU council during his time at Oxford, but it would have been appropriate. The whole structure is rather like trying to put Mr. Bean (OUSU council) into a boxing contest with Ricky Hatton or a diving contest against Tom Daley. The professionals are always going to win. Members of council have less time, less information, and fewer incentives to perform their role than the officers they are meant to oversee. Of these, it is the lack of information that is the most damaging.
OUSU officers need to communicate more about what they are doing day-to-day rather than writing the self-congratulatory emails everyone in the University currently receives. Maybe the sabbatical officers could begin by actually writing in those blogs attached to their pages on the OUSU website. Someone in the student press also needs to start doing a bit of digging through OUSU reports and documents and OUSU contacts to see what tit-bits they can unearth. At the moment OUSU is working, but more in the Mussolini ‘trains on time’ way than with a meaningful democratic connection to the students it purports to serve.
