Controversy struck today at the LSE SU’s Union General Meeting (UGM) as students put forward an amendment to the constitutional bye-laws. The motion, which can be found on the Students’ Union’s website, proposes that the UGM change it’s current voting format back to a “voting in person” system, which was removed under a constitutional reform package last year in favour of online voting.
YOU CAN VOTE ON THE UGM MOTION AT WWW.LSESU.COM/VOTE UNTIL 5PM ON FRIDAY 20TH JANUARY 2011
Now I’ll say this first off, until I walked in the room and started listening to the debate, I had no idea how I was going to vote. I had an instinctive feeling that this would be a bad thing to do, but couldn’t come up with any one valid reason to oppose the motion off the top of my head. As such, I was going to let it fly on by and see how it turned out (I would have probably electronically abstained to try and achieve quorum, but of course, there’s no option for that on the voting system!). Instead, a rather different thing happened. Daniel Kroop, the Postgraduate Officer for the LSE SU, opposed the motion and, for me at least, hit the nail on the head, and gave me the answers I was looking for. I decided to get off the fence and second his opposition.
There have been problems with the new voting system since it was first introduced. It isn’t very user-friendly as a piece of technology, on most occasions motions don’t achieve quorum – i.e. not enough people vote for it to be valid, and if you haven’t been to the UGM, the only thing you can see online to know how to vote is the motion itself. At the same time, UGM attendance has been decreasing on average, with the biggest UGMs only being ones where keynote speakers like the Director or the President of NUS is in attendance, so people can have a crack at authority bashing (For the hacks out there, thats normal person speak for accountability). Legitimate concerns therefore have been raised about the future of the UGM and the legitimacy of that sacred institution that LSE SU prides itself on. We’re the only students’ union in the whole of the UK that holds a weekly general meeting, don’t you know?!
And this of course leads to the question of causality. What caused a highly politicised campus, that has been engaging in SU campaigns in their thousands, to desert one of the ways it can control the direction of its students’ union? Clearly the proposers believe this is due to the change in voting system, and of course the logical solution to that is to change it back. Or is it?
I ask the question whether the UGM is poorly attended because people can’t vote at it, or because they don’t care about the motions being put forward; whether it’s because they can’t vote there, or because it’s an inaccessible monolith, filled with the same old hacks week in, week out; whether it’s because they can’t vote there, or because they find other ways to engage with and shape the students’ union; whether it’s because they can’t vote there, or because they simply don’t know it exists?
Now I don’t have the answer to those questions, and neither will the proposers of this motion. What I can tell you, is that as a member of NUS’ National Executive, I go to students’ unions, and I go to general meetings all across the country on a pretty regular basis, and all of them are struggling with the same question: why don’t people turn up to make their voice heard?
Most of them come to the conclusion its because students’ unions are too inward facing, don’t reach out to their members enough, and need to try harder to involve those hard to reach groups. And here comes the main reasons I decided to oppose the motion. It isn’t a broken voting system we need to deal with, its a broken culture at the LSE.
If you want people to vote for your motions, it will and it should take more than a 2 minute speech and 1 minute rebuttal in a room of 150 people. A students’ union can and should be about transforming students’ lives, but its their job to engage them in the way they want to be engaged. And I’m sorry, but a one hour meeting every Thursday is not an accessible way to engage the majority of students at our university. 4% of our students are part-time students, likely with working responsibilities outside university, you can’t expect them to have a voice with an “at UGM” vote. Some students at our university have parental and caring responsibilities, you can’t give them a voice with an “at UGM” vote. Some students aren’t fortunate enough to not need to work to supplement their studies… I could go on, but you get the idea. Online voting might not be perfect, but at least it gives everyone the opportunity to voice their opinion.
Not only that, the new constitution is all about widening the reach of the SU beyond the four walls of the Old Theatre. Assemblies might not be well attended, but they are there, and do we blame low attendance on the voting system, or because we’re getting something wrong as a student body making sure people turn up to them? And its precisely these structures that are meant to support students to have a voice.
In the long run, we need to stop considering whether we want to protect our traditions and start thinking about the people this actually matters to, and that’s the students that currently don’t have a look in; not because they choose not to turn up to UGM, but because they don’t know anything about the democratic processes of the SU or we’re having the wrong conversation with them. It’s easy to blame our failings on structures when in fact the problem lies much deeper and is embedded in the very fabric of our institution. People don’t engage with the students’ union’s democracy because they don’t know about it or its not accessible, not because they of the voting system.
In sum, and to use a timely analogy right now, it’s useless swapping the taps on the bath when your entire plumbing system isn’t working – you won’t get any more water.
I have written on the challenges of student engagement previously, after delivering keynote speeches to the DCQE at University of Portsmouth and QSN’s Student Engagement Symposium. You can read the articles here: