Flick Osborn, CUSU President

CUSU – why should anyone care? Why do students need a central students’ union anyway when JCRs and MCRs do so much excellent work in colleges? What does CUSU even do?!

Central students’ unions have a fundamental role in protecting the quality of students’ university experiences in a time of unprecedented turbulence in the Higher Education sector.

Tuition fees have risen and several Vice-Chancellors have made statements advocating further rises. The student loan book is on the verge of being privatised, with potentially terrible consequences. International students could be charged to use the NHS; landlords may soon be permitted to check student visas possibly resulting in dangerous racial profiling. National political issues do not bypass students. A central students’ union with a strong, united voice is absolutely essential in campaigning about such political issues.

This isn’t just a debate about one college’s affiliation to CUSU; it’s about the importance of representation of students beyond the walls of the college. Your JCRs and MCRs do excellent and important work ensuring your college provides what it should; they’re an essential part of CUSU’s structure. Through affiliated common rooms with good channels of communication, CUSU can represent your needs and interests at the highest level of University decision making. This is where your educational experience is defined, which is much of what CUSU’s work entails. CUSU is an organisation run by students, for students.

From policy-setting at CUSU Council where any student can propose a motion to direct the sabbatical team, to its engagement with the student body through your JCR, MCR, faculty and autonomous campaign representatives, CUSU relies heavily on student involvement. If you think CUSU is irrelevant, engage with us in dialogue; the more you’re involved, the more effective and productive CUSU will be. Withdrawing only makes the student voice weaker; there is power in numbers and CUSU is only as strong as the students behind it.

CUSU provides free sexual health supplies to your JCR and MCR to distribute to you, it runs a huge Shadowing Scheme – the first of its kind in the country; it runs the Student Advice Service; it’s conducting research on the cost of living in Cambridge; it has got extra funding from the University to provide support for societies; it’s improving the tutorial system to ensure equality of provision across the colleges; it’s campaigning for a student hub building in the city centre; it funds the autonomous campaigns which are crucial for underrepresented groups.
Don’t give up on the students’ union; don’t remove your voice from having a say. Add your voices to change CUSU for the better - don’t just assume that someone else will do it for you.

Nathan Akehurst, OUSU Candidate

To say that Louis Trup’s victory spells ‘the end of student politics’ is somewhat overly millenarian, but it certainly represents a severe – and to my mind positive – shock to the system. It’s important to understand that Trup’s voters are not a homogenous block. There are those who voted for no other reason than the fact that they found him funny. There are those who enforce apathy and pretend that their ‘apoliticism’ is not the defence of the status quo that it amounts to, but that think it’s cool to hate student politics without any especially defined reason for doing so. And there are those who simply haven’t ever seen their student union do anything that affects their lives.

Then there are those who are fully aware of what their union does and oppose its existence or its work for political reasons. There are those across the political spectrum who aren’t opposed to OUSU but do perceive it to be dominated by wannabe career politicians.

I was a candidate in this year’s election, but had I not been, I’d have voted Trup. Every year in OUSU there are slates named after their presidential candidate, drawn from informal bureaucracies such as the Labour Club or the common room presidents’ committee, who form on a basis of mutual self-interest and very little shared vision. There is no space outside elections where every student can vote on what their union does. I stood because I wanted a union that made itself relevant, firstly by giving everyone a chance to vote on policy rather than personality, and secondly by being willing to take tough campaigning action on issues such as the soaring cost of living or the arcane elements of the Oxford disciplinary system. There are those in the Trup camp that agree with such a message and those that militantly reject it. But regardless, his win sparks a debate that has been bubbling under - should we have a central student union, and if so, what should it do? What do words like ‘representation’, ‘engagement’ and ‘democracy’ mean in practice?
Personally I believe that central student unions, even at Oxbridge, are necessary and do important work on welfare, representation and liberation issues. Common rooms are important but not ubiquitous.

I am however disenchanted with the machine-like nature of student politics and certainly do attribute the perception of irrelevance in part to the failure of student unions to properly engage. Trup’s win is to be applauded because he is more than just a joke candidate. In a week he sprung from nowhere to a victory that campaigns which had spent months preparing couldn’t come close to. Despite his unusual election promise of a monorail around Oxford.

He represents ‘something new’, in his own words. Time will tell what that something is, and how the bureaucracies of student politics will react to it.