Members of Churchill College JCR have voted overwhelmingly against disaffiliating from CUSU.

In a referendum held on Thursday, college members decided not to follow in the footsteps of Corpus Christi and Gonville and Caius by splitting from the students' union.

The results, which were released early on Friday morning, showed 153 students voting to remain affiliated to CUSU, with only 31 voting to leave.

The college's JCR hosted a debate on their CUSU affiliation on Monday night ahead of the referendum, which closed on Friday 30th October at 1am.

The debate saw discussion between a group of Churchill students supporting disaffiliation, and CUSU President Priscilla Mensah making the case for the university-wide students’ union.

Around 40 JCR members out of a total of 485 undergraduates attended the meeting with the debate being led by JCR committee members.

Last year Fitzwilliam JCR also considered disaffiliation, but the student body voted not to have a referendum on membership.

The head of the “leave” campaign opened the main proceedings before Mensah arrived, joking: “Not only does Churchill not need CUSU, but CUSU, as shown by its President being late to the debate, clearly does not need Churchill.”

Mensah justified her lateness explaining she had just left a meeting from a platform produced for BME women in Cambridge University in partnership with CUSU.

Speakers arguing for disaffiliation focused on the financial aspect of their membership. The first speaker referred to recent student press reports, claiming that CUSU suffered from “endemic financial mismanagement” – with Mensah retorting that this had been misreported in the student press in a way that was “verging on libellous” and “based on a poor reading of minutes”.

The Junior Treasurer at Caius at the time of the college’s disaffiliation in 2013, invited as a guest speaker, continued the debate, arguing that CUSU “does not give you value for money”.

He stated that college JCRs would be better off “taking responsibility for their colleges” by seeking to convince their college councils to grant them the money used for affiliation for spending on college welfare, sports and music committees; or to outsource to charities other than CUSU for officer training.

Speakers arguing against disaffiliation pointed out the centrality of CUSU networks for individual college’s JCR officers including welfare officers and access officers.

Current Churchill Access Officer Natasha Michael stated that organising the college’s Shadowing Scheme would have been impossible without the training and support she received from CUSU. Refusing to “make an argument about value for money”, Mensah underlined the centrality of college affiliations to CUSU’s power to effect change within the University.

“If you disaffiliate, the message you give is that a central students’ union is not necessary. I would be happy if you could extend an alternative… but there are hundreds of meetings where decisions are taken in this university that are sometimes very problematic for students, and I don’t know what would happen if CUSU wasn’t part of these meetings.”

When asked to provide evidence that CUSU was the best organisation to promote and enforce changes within the University, Mensah cited actions taken recently by the CUSU team – including training for sexual consent workshops, providing support to organise Shadowing Schemes in different colleges, and giving out sanitary products to protest against the tampon tax. Churchill JCR committee members added to this CUSU’s role in preventing cuts to allowances for disabled students.

Mensah went on to declare that many of the services provided by CUSU “are not about numbers but about lived experience.”

She responded to criticisms of some autonomous campaigns, notably CUSU LGBT+ and the Women’s Campaigns for so-called “no-platforming” controversies, by stating that she “would not apologise for the fact that we fund these campaigns.”

Mensah conceded to a student accusing CUSU of low engagement with the wider student body that “CUSU’s communication has been poor in the past” and outlined several steps the current committee was taking to remedy this situation.

Of those, a redesign of the CUSU bulletin to allow students to click through and immediately see how they can get involved with campaigns; weekly communications reviews; plans to increase opportunities for consultation by encouraging JCR and MCR committees to report CUSU’s work to students and ask for their opinion; and direct involvement by CUSU committee members in the student press, were all mentioned. Mensah underlined this change by stating that she was “the first president in the last five years getting involved with The Tab.”