Why we don’t care about the Student Union controversy

The Student Union (SU) is plagued most by one issue. It is not rent prices or unreasonable exams: it is the complete apathy of the student population. Conversations about JCR politics or the next rugby captain attract plenty of engagement — Oxford is hardly indifferent to who holds power. Yet no one seems able to muster the concern to think about, let alone discuss, the SU. To most of us, it exists as an institution that makes a bit of noise online but has no real connection to our lives — its emails are deleted, its elections ignored. And why should we trouble ourselves? Nearly all problems for students in Oxford can be drawn back to the faculty and the college. Unless the SU transforms itself in a way that makes it functional in the current University set-up, I fail to see how – let alone why – we should care. 

For those rare creatures engaged in the SU, you have to imagine this has been an intense few weeks with the President’s resignation and the abolition of the position itself. Yet I’ve heard nothing of it, whereas someone has already tried to impeach our JCR committee this term over the moving of a meeting. The news coming from the SU could be interesting – if details were available, that is. Despite having an extensive social media presence, access to our inboxes, and their own state media in The Oxford Student, the SU seems strangely incapable of communicating what it does and why.

Any information it provides is riddled with jargon, much of it reminiscent of a Soviet-style bureaucracy. The so-called ‘transformation’ — supposedly driven by a survey that only 61 people engaged with, and who were ignored anyway — perhaps speaks for itself. The focus always seems to be on increasing engagement, but how can one engage when the biggest events are so steeped in internal politics that no one can make sense of them?

Perhaps we could be more inclined to care, ready to fight through the “misconceptions” published in student media recently (to quote the SU themselves) and the supposedly unbiased information from the SU, if they had any tangible impact on our lives. However, implementing any changes on a level that individual students can feel seems near impossible.

A primary cause of this is the failure of any student-representative organisation to integrate into the wider structure of the University. Much of teaching is shaped by decisions at the individual level, with the rest determined at the faculty level. The University neither controls nor seeks to implement change in how we are taught. The History Faculty, for example, stipulates that tutors should give their students seven essays a term, leaving one week open – either with or without a tutorial.

In spite of this, in practice, it is mostly adhered to by DPhil students who could do with the week off. Faculties are removed from a large amount of teaching, especially in the humanities, opting to let tutors dictate the majority of it. Colleges view teaching as something to be organised by the faculty, as does the University. Our teaching is brilliant, with some of the best minds in the world, but functions on a system that’s simply appeared over the years, not a written set of guidelines.

The SU, therefore, campaigning for changes such as a reading week, does not have anywhere to implement them. My tutor, when discussing (lecturing polemically about) reading weeks over dinner, described them as “pointless and bullshit”. I can’t imagine him listening keenly to the suggestion of undergraduates who don’t even study his subject. If the SU wanted to fight for the introduction of reading weeks, it would have to be at the individual tutor level, and that simply is not effective. 

Hope for the SU on the non-academic front is equally misplaced. Housing, food, and welfare are among the most sought-after changes in Oxford, yet these are largely college-level issues. Even the SU’s efforts to reduce disparities between colleges achieve little. No matter how wealthy a college may be, if it isn’t inclined to solve a problem, it simply won’t. SU pressure cannot change that and the University is unlikely to implement a policy that will upset the colleges.

Any issues we have, therefore, go through the JCR. This is practical. I don’t think the SU are going to address why Hall doesn’t think vegetarians need protein, or why we can’t have live music in the bar, or why the English reading list isn’t in the library, but the JCR can. However, there is a paradox that these problems are too small for the SU, yet huge in student’s lives. To be relevant to students, you must solve the issues that matter to students. 

We don’t care about the Student Union, and we have no incentive to. Its impact is negligible, its communication shoddy, its manner self-righteous. The Oxford Union may be off-putting and similarly shrouded in insular politics, but at least they have the decency to burn something now-and-again: it keeps things interesting.

Editorial note: this story solely represents the views of the writer, not of Cherwell, which takes no position.

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