Myth 1: We get a say on OUSU’s policies in the elections every year.

In an article for this publication, Alex Bartram claimed that we already have “some kind of election where people put forward ideas which could then be voted upon by all members of OUSU”. It’s called “the OUSU elections, where, in theory, candidates talk to people beforehand, find out their concerns, put them in their manifestos, and are then elected or rejected on that basis by the electorate.”

There are three ways in which this myth needs busting.

Firstly, a shocking number of candidates in OUSU elections are unopposed, including three of this year’s sabbatical candidates. Sure, there is the option to vote to re-open nominations, but most warm-hearted people keep that for candidates who are clearly inept or inappropriate.

Secondly, even when the elections are contested, there’s typically little choice. Except on the question of how to solve OUSU’s engagement problem, barely anything divides this year’s presidential candidates: certainly not on blockbuster policy issues. In the race to be Vice President for Access and Academic Affairs, those of us who have been to the hustings have heard time and time again the line that every candidate believes education is a right and that candidates need to be judged on their experience. There aren’t big policy battles happening in the OUSU elections there rarely is a real choice.

Thirdly, OUSU’s policies are not set by its sabbatical officers; they’re set by OUSU Council. Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates highlight a few key issues they’d like to prioritise – something I’d keep the same – but Council has the last word, and many important policy issues don’t even earn a mention.

Myth 2: There’s no good reason why a voted-for manifesto would increase engagement.

There are two sides to OUSU’s engagement problem: deficiencies in communication, and high barriers to participation.

As hard as it tries, our student union finds it difficult to communicate what it’s working on. The additional publicity that could come from voting on OUSU’s policies – especially if people chose to campaign for particular policy choices, as one might imagine Oxford’s broad left doing – could help, as could any publicity around the final manifesto itself, which might become a key negotiating tool.

Making the manifesto easily accessible online would help reduce some of the informational barriers to engagement with OUSU: you could find out in a few clicks what OUSU’s position on an issue was. More significantly, however, introducing direct democracy into OUSU’s policy-making would allow students who felt strongly about particular issues to make their voice heard far more easily. A vast number of students do care about individual issues (some of the key ones for me are access, housing, homelessness, and mental health), but don’t have the time or energy to play an active role in a campaign, bring motions to OUSU Council, or become their common room’s president or OUSU rep.

Myth 3: It might not work, so we shouldn’t try.

It doesn’t matter whether, in Alex’s words, the process would “just get scrapped in a year’s time”.

Year after year, satisfaction with OUSU, participation in it, and turnout in its elections has been painfully low. No number of “more of the same” policies is going to get us out of the situation we’re in: at some point, we need to give up, get creative, and try something new.

No-one can promise that having a voted-for manifesto would solve OUSU’s problems overnight. What we can guarantee is that keeping doing what we’re doing now – or adding little quick-fix, recycled, ‘back of a cigarette packet’ patches – is not going to deliver the change our student union needs.

Myth 4: Letting liberation campaigns come up with their own methods for policy-making is equivalent to cordoning them off.

If a liberation campaign wanted to offer up its proposals for a wide open vote, I’d happily support them. If they wanted to decide on policies in their area within their working groups and campaign executives, I’d wholeheartedly support them in that too.

The broader student body shouldn’t be able to dictate to oppressed students on liberation issues, and for me that includes how they set their stances. Liberation campaigns are politically autonomous and I want to preserve their autonomy. It’s not about cordoning them off; it’s about not dictating to them or speaking over them. That’s a red line I’m not going to cross.

Myth 5: What works at other universities will work here.

Oxford has a particular kind of collegiate system, and one in which students will always engage more with their common rooms than with the university student union. If we want to increase engagement with OUSU, we need to reduce the distance between it and students. In a collegiate system there’s an extra degree of separation to bridge.

If we want to make OUSU engaging and relevant, we need to find a way that students can feel like their voices are heard and matter. That won’t happen as long as OUSU stays distant from students and carries on doing what it is doing, whether it’s engaging with them or not. The most obvious way to fix the problem is to feed students’ voices directly into OUSU’s policy-making: like a vote in a common room poll, but online and on a much bigger scale. That’s what I’m advocating.

I really didn’t expect to come to Oxford. For a long time, I didn’t expect to go to university at all. I didn’t really expect to get through my A-levels; quite honestly, getting through one day to the next felt like enough of a challenge.

But to the outside world, I was doing fine. My schoolwork was okay — actually, quite good — I had some great friends, a wonderful family, and I was always busy. And yet I was increasingly feeling like I was drowning. I was high-functioning, but depressed.

I was diagnosed with clinical depression a couple of months before my AS levels. I remember crying so much that day, partly out of fear that I was going mad, and partly out of sheer relief that I wasn’t. Does that make sense? If you’ve experienced similar, it just might.

I won’t go into too much detail, but what I will say is this: depression drove me to some horrible places. I remember feeling so scared of failure that I sometimes avoided it altogether by just not getting out of bed. Oddly, sometimes I felt okay. Sometimes, I felt everything. Sometimes, I felt nothing at all. I remember feeling numb, completely devoid of emotion. That lack of emotion was — for me — the scariest thing.

With the support of my family and friends, I began to feel better. It took a long time, and not a few roadblocks, but I got there. I got to a stage where I could start to think about the future again.

I thought my AS exams had gone terribly. One of the worst parts of depression, I found, was having serious impairments to concentration and memory. But when, to my surprise, my marks were okay, I applied to universities, including Oxford. I was terrified of being interviewed, and nearly didn’t go. I had to stay in a Holiday Inn with my mum the night before, because I was too nervous to stay in the college where I was interviewed.
But then I got into Oxford, and lived happily ever after.

So, why am I talking about this now?

Because that, friends, is not the end of the story.

First year was great, really brilliant. But second year was a bit different. I’d put on weight and my confidence had taken a hit. This reached a head in Hilary term. And, despite being JCR President, I had no idea where to turn to get the help I needed. When I did reach out for help, I didn’t get what I needed. I think a large part of this was due to the fact that I was really good at hiding how I felt — I was still on top of my presidency, really enjoying it a lot of the time, and getting many wins for students — but when I was on my own, I wasn’t doing so well. I was given a counselling service appointment in 3rd week, and then was offered a further one in 9th week. Not ideal, really.

Cutting a long story short, I worked a lot of stuff out over Trinity term and the summer, and I’m now doing great. It wasn’t until I went to a Mind Your Head meeting at the beginning of this term that I decided I’d start talking about my experiences with mental illness. And since I have, it’s been really eye-opening. Everyone can relate. As soon as I started talking, people told me their stories, or the experiences of those close to them. I realised just how many people here are used to wearing that mask: the “I’m not really okay but I’m getting by anyway” disguise. This place really can make and break us at the same time.

There are two things we must do, now, as a student body:

We must get rid of the stigma around mental illness. That’s why I’m writing this. It’s not something I’m doing lightly, either, or without a lot of consideration. I’m hoping that if people see an OUSU presidential candidate speaking up about their experiences of mental illness, it’ll emphasise that doing so is not an admission of weakness. It’s an admission of being human. The wonderful OUSU campaign, Mind Your Head, has started this conversation — let’s take it up a notch.

We must create the welfare support system that we need. I’ve heard a lot of discontent with the support systems in place here. Let’s review what’s working, and what’s not. Let’s make it clear what services we have available to students on college and university levels. Let’s investigate other models of welfare provision, and see how feasible they’d be at Oxford. Let’s collate a really strong evidence base from which to make concrete proposals to improve pastoral care at Oxford.

Creating a welfare system stronger for the long-term is one of the main things I’d want to focus on as OUSU president, as this would allow the Vice President for Welfare and Equal Opportunities to work on contemporary issues.

My other pledges are all geared towards making sure students are supported in key areas. I want to give better support to common rooms in pushing for the best rent deals for their students. I want to found an Oxford University Festival to celebrate in our communal strengths, and I want to open up the conversation about ‘lad culture’ with inclusive forums and discussion groups.

Running to be president of OUSU is not a particularly glamorous thing. Yesterday, in a college hustings, I found a receipt on which someone had written “FUCK OUSU”. I wouldn’t be doing this unless I wanted to see real improvements in the university, or unless I believed I was the best candidate for the job. I’m doing this because I want to see a happier, healthier, and more cohesive Oxford.

So let’s make a student union which works for us.

OUSU Elections 2014 – On the Eve of Voting

Goodness, what on earth’s going to happen in the OUSU elections over the next couple of days? Many, many, many will not care. Many more will point out that I am hardly best qualified to opine or predict on the matter given that this time last year, when I was running, I didn’t exactly have my finger on the psephological pulse. Others yet will say “who?” and “what?” and “what are you still doing here?”

Things are different this year, though. The joke candidate’s dropped out before things even began, the Labour Club has remained in its kennel, nobody’s running any big nasty slates – in fact, there’s been quite a marked lack of nastiness so far, to such an extent that The Tab hasn’t run any articles at all about the elections. What’s going to happen between now and Thursday night, when the results are announced? Here, in a combination of listicle and wall-of-text, are my thoughts and non-predictions.

1.     These elections should show us whether the Age of the Mega-Slate is dead

So, Team ABC, why did you run with only three candidates (two from the same college)? Was it because you were worried about seeming too much like the mega-slates which were soundly beaten last year, or was it because you couldn’t find anybody to run with you (as an insider suggested to me)? Right to Education, why the strange mix of positions? Again, because (as claimed by one of your own) you have a legitimate interest in non-sabbatical positions, or because there’s a paucity of lefty finalists this year?

Whether opportunistic or deliberate, there’s been a change to the way slates look this year. They’re smaller and more oddly-shaped. Even For Oxford, the biggest to run for sabbatical positions, has only ten candidates. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get some important information about the way OUSU elections are likely to look in the future from 2014’s set. If the two teams with a sizeable number of candidates win unexpectedly big in key clashes – President and VP Access & Academic Affairs in particular, but not forgetting VP Grads or Common Room Support – we can expect to see a return to the blockbuster slates that came up so short against Louis Trup, Dan Tomlinson, and Ruth Meredith.

2.     These elections have been quiet, too quiet

As anybody with a perverse interest in student politics and a chip on their shoulder might do, I went to see all the Sabbatical candidates hust. I was struck there by how polite and warm the candidates were to and about each other, which is nice, and by how consensual and even similar what they said was, which can make everyone’s eyes glaze over. I noticed this also in media stories about the elections – the main antagonist so far seems to have been lack of access to husting venues (fair enough), and The Tab hasn’t breathed a word about any of the candidates, so it’s definitely been a nice one.

Now, I would be the last to call for a return to last year’s rhetoric and campaigning style, which I regret and for which I am partly to blame, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pointing out rotten policies and I don’t think that’s been done enough. So I asked the candidates for President to criticise each other’s policies, and I felt a great deal of relief at hearing what sounded like a couple of weeks’ grievances condensed into thirty seconds of criticism from each one. Adam Roberts’s single (sort of) manifesto pledge got both barrels—deservedly so, I’m forced to admit (sorry Adam, I thought you were lovely!). Will Obeney’s Out of Hours Pledge, it was rightly pointed out, was unlikely to change anything at all; Becky Howe’s welfare-dominated manifesto would, it was suggested, have been better-suited to a candidate for VP Welfare and Equal Opportunities.

I think legitimate criticism of other candidates is a really important thing, as long as it doesn’t turn sour. Last time, the mug-painting workshops and petting zoos got dropped from mentions in husts very quickly. I don’t think there’s been enough of it this time round, and I think it will affect turnout negatively at a bad time. Then again, I was wrong about most stuff last year, so…

3.     Some positions are hugely over-subscribed; others are painfully under-subscribed

I felt a bit sad watching the husts for VP Access and Academic Affairs. There are four candidates, and all of them are really good – in different ways, even though they all seem to agree on almost everything. This brings out my soppy side, reader, and I confess to wishing they could all be elected and implement their realistic, well-informed, achievable, worthy ideas. They can’t.

In contrast, half of the Sabbatical positions are uncontested. A disclaimer: I don’t know Ali Lennon, I’m sure he’s a very nice person, and I wish I could give him the benefit of the doubt. But I have some very serious reservations about his decision to run for the Welfare and Equal Opportunities position following the allegations against him of electoral malpractice only a couple of weeks ago (which I admit to knowing little about beyond what I have read in the newspapers and word of mouth). I didn’t think he husted well, and his manifesto is seriously unbalanced between Welfare and the other half of his probable future role. I feel appalling writing this, but I think that it’s something of a shame that the position is uncontested.

4.     The Oxford Left is quietly becoming huge (and closer to the centre)

Two years ago, and the far-left slate was so shambolic that it elected no candidates and lost its deposit. These days, Nathan Akehurst’s spiritual successors are running the tightest operation in town, with the best-designed manifestos of any slate, a host of candidates already elected, and… wait, are those a load of Labour Club members?

It’ll be interesting to see who wins out in the remaining contests Right to Education have in these elections – particularly in the four-way VP Access and Academic Affairs, but also further down the list in the Part-Time Exec roles. Whatever happens, they will have ensconced themselves in OUSU’s machinery very effectively.

With things as they are, it seems hard to avoid concluding that the equivalent slate’s Presidential candidate will sweep to victory next year. But who will it be, and how far left will they risk leaning? Already, the rabble-rousers have given way to the reformists. Elliott, Teriba, Raine, and co. like winning things, and unlike the previous lot, know how to do it.

5.     Manifesto designers needed

I hate to make this a big thing when it’s the content of manifestos that’s important. But couldn’t a little more effort have gone into designing the current year’s crop, especially when clearly the candidates’ time wasn’t all being spent buttering potential running-mates in coffee shops? Right to Education and Emily Silcock are excused: theirs look great.

6.     Some positions might be becoming too unassailable

Lucy Delaney is all but certain to become VP Women, and quite right too: she’s a superb candidate with an excellent track record. But she will be the third Wadham WomCam graduate in a row to do so, and her running-mate Aliya Yule has a similar profile.

WomCam is an extremely important Oxford institution and the most effective of the liberation campaigns, highlighting and improving one of the most significant issues with Oxford life. I should also note that my team last year put up a candidate for VP Women who was soundly defeated by Anna Bradshaw, the WomCam-backed candidate who has since been tremendous at OUSU. However, I worry that independent candidates with a great deal of good things to say might be put off. No matter how good the institution, it shouldn’t have a monopoly, and in this, WomCam could be the victim of its own (deserved) success.

Meanwhile, the Vice-President Charities and Communities role has gone to an independent candidate for the last few years, usually on the back of an extremely well-organised and well-supported campaign: Ruth Meredith’s stunt with the RadCam balloons last year, for example, made her the only non-Trup candidate to break 1000 first-preferences, and Dan Tomlinson pulled off an extraordinary coup in thrashing the Tom4OUSU candidate the year before that. This year, a slated candidate hasn’t even bothered to run, as Emily Silcock’s success in launching the On Your Doorstep homelessness campaign (and more generally in her OUSU Charities role) has scared off any rivals. Will C&C continue to be the slates’ bogey election?

7.     Novel manifesto ideas are good. Novelty ideas are bad.

Adam Roberts in person was engaging and friendly, though nervous, and his ideas were delivered with some charm. Adam Roberts on paper, however, I just cannot get to grips with. He’s attracted qualified praise for his ‘every year a referendum on what OUSU does’ single-idea manifesto from sources as radically opposite as Jack Matthews and Nathan Akehurst (who agree with each other rather more often than they should be comfortable with). Personally, I can’t see the attraction in the policy, and I can’t see even remotely how it would work.

First: the principle. If elected, Roberts would hold some kind of election where people put forward ideas which could then be voted upon by all members of OUSU. Sound familiar? It already happens, and it’s called the OUSU elections, where, in theory, candidates talk to people beforehand, find out their concerns, put them in their manifestos, and are then elected or rejected on that basis by the electorate. It seems to me that Roberts, in his admirable but misguided desire to be as boundary-busting as possible, has missed this point and missed the many obvious advantages to electing candidates based on manifestos that actively make pledges. (Ok, Trup was an exception.)

Nowhere that I’ve seen has Roberts satisfactorily explained very much about how he’d get around the many problems his idea would cause. (I wanted to ask him loads of questions, but thought it’d be a bit weird given that I don’t even go here.) In the interview video posted up by this paper, his response to the sensible question of ‘what would you do about Sabbatical Officers elected on their own manifestos?’ all he says is ‘I do think there is an issue with the way the system works at the moment’ before the editing kicks in, depriving us of any further explanation.

My questions are: why would this increase engagement with OUSU when even fewer people vote in referenda than in elections? Why, given that elections happen every year, won’t the ‘annual referendum’ just get scrapped in a year’s time? Have you asked the hard-working permanent staff at OUSU how their jobs might be affected by this idea, and what have they said? What will you do about other sabbatical officers elected on their own manifesto pledges? Will your pledge involve huge structural change of OUSU that goes unmentioned in your manifesto? Won’t the suggestions all be made, and to some extent voted upon, by the people you don’t need to engage in the first place? What makes liberation campaigns the exception in your ‘I’m a democrat, not a dreamer’ rhetoric, and what was your rationale in including that caveat? Why should members of oppressed groups without a link to one of the liberation campaigns not get a say in how policy that affects them directly is formed? Where do you draw the line in policies that would get decided by those groups, and do you agree that liberation can’t just be cordoned off to a corner of OUSU decision-marking?

8.     OUSU needs to do more to get people running

Another year, another set of elections without many independent candidates. With one exception, graduate students are running on slates, as they have been in previous years. Saying that OUSU should do more to encourage people to run is comparably obvious and unhelpful to saying that OUSU needs to work to engage students more. But I think that more effort could be made in some areas. Jack Matthews notes the decreased advertising for the elections in The OxStu. I’ve probably noticed it less because I don’t even go here (so why am I writing this? You ask. Good point). But some important positions won’t even get filled by these elections, and many more are completely uncontested.

It’s usually in the interest of slated candidates to try to get as many people running on their team as possible. This year, that’s happened quite a bit less, and there hasn’t been a rush of indies to fill the gaps either. We keep hearing that Oxford students do care passionately about a whole range of topics; is it that OUSU is the wrong platform for students to do what they care about, or is it that the idea of running continues to seem daunting and nebulous to many (and never occurs to others)? It would be good to see a packed roster this time next year.

9.     Door-knocking: good, necessary evil, or unnecessary?

Last year, when I went round knocking on people’s doors asking them to vote for me, I actually quite enjoyed it. Although my many victims probably enjoyed it rather less, they were almost always polite, mildly interested in what I had to say, and tended to care about at least one thing around Oxford. Some of them even thanked me for coming to talk to them in person. Very few of them realised an election was happening, and very few of those that did knew much about it at all. I was surprised by how receptive they were, although clearly not an awful lot of them then logged onto their computers and bothered to vote for me.

Unless almost everyone was doing a very good impression of politeness while secretly hating me for subjecting them to a two-minute conversation and a flimsy leaflet telling them how to vote, I came out of the elections believing that door-to-door canvassing, or ‘door-knocking’, was both important for and beneficial to the democratic process. Apparently, some loathe it, and fair enough.

I don’t know how the candidates are planning on campaigning this year, but I’d be surprised if they don’t do some door-knocking – especially in the teams that don’t have good College spread. Nobody has been carried on the same wave of viral success as Louis Trup, and so it seems unlikely that a repeat of the no-door-knocking trick will work quite so well this time.

If it is the case that there’s a fair-sized door-knocking operation, I will be interested to see whether the bigger slates can reap the benefits. Certainly, St John’s students will be sick to death of the two short knocks by the time Thursday evening comes.

10.  Mopping up

I don’t seriously believe anybody’s got this far, but if you have, perhaps you ought to leave a comment with your own thoughts below, or get in touch with me via Facebook or Twitter. Generally, I think that the press coverage of these elections has not been terribly good – Cherwell has shown the most interest by far, but only really in the Presidential candidates. The Oxford Student has been rightly criticised for washing its hands of the whole thing; as I mention above, The Tab has not even bothered to mention the election, presumably not managing to find a way to infantilise it into not being ‘boring’. Here’s hoping that the good work by OUSU officers in recent years to promote the Student Union drives turnout, but I worry about another sub-15% election. In case you were wondering, no, I really don’t have anything better to be doing: the pursuit of the safe Labour seat that every OUSU candidate longs for is going more slowly than anticipated.

Nick Clegg’s recent comments regarding the “prejudice” faced by Oxbridge graduates pursuing a career in the public sector represent a misguided view of the expanding range of prospects which recent graduates enjoy.

In fact, many public sector employers are working hard to increase the number of Oxbridge graduates applying to their schemes, as evidenced by both the presence of recruiters at Oxford and Cambridge and the number of Oxbridge graduates within public sector industries.

Some of the most successful schemes in the sector, including Frontline, Teach First, the Civil Service Fast Stream and the NHS graduate programme, ran a highly successful panel talk in Oxford two weeks ago, in which the representatives from each scheme were Oxbridge graduates.

Furthermore, the presence of Frontline and Teach First at Careers Fairs in Oxford and Cambridge for the past few years has been impossible to ignore.

While it may be the case that certain public sector employers are shunning Oxbridge graduates in an attempt to shed the image of “elitism”, there are plenty of others who are aiming their grad schemes specifically at Oxbridge students.

For students who want to make a difference and, in Clegg’s words, “give back”, schemes such as Frontline and Teach First are leading the way. 1 in 10 Oxbridge students apply to Teach First, and Oxford University alone contributed 96 graduates to Teach First’s 2013 intake of 1200 people.

Frontline, a brilliant new graduate programme that has a similar structure to Teach First and focuses on child protection social work, has also contributed to a surge in Oxbridge applications to public sector jobs. Of Frontline’s first cohort, 73% are from Russell Group universities, including 20% from Oxbridge. Only last week, a Frontline representative was in Oxford calling on more final year students to apply before this Friday’s deadline.

Frontline’s success represents a real change in attitudes towards public sector jobs among Oxbridge students. Clegg’s claim that employers from the public sector do not want Oxford graduates is far from the truth and potentially damaging to both teaching and social work, at a time when both are benefiting from a real surge in top graduates.

Upon gaining a place on the Frontline programme, Francis Goodburn, a recent Oxford graduate in Computer Science, said, “The two things I most want from a job are to know what I am doing is truly worthwhile and to take on varied, challenging work every day. With this in mind, social work seems like a fantastic career choice. I’m particularly excited about Frontline’s model of on-the-job training, and learning leadership skills that could help me make a difference to the lives of children and families. Having now secured a place on the Frontline programme, I’m looking forward to embarking on a career I may not otherwise have had the opportunity to do.”

Students like Francis must not be put off from applying to life-changing schemes like Frontline. Public sector grad schemes are not prejudiced towards Oxbridge graduates Mr Clegg; they are targeting and having great success in drawing in the brightest students and graduates.