Tuesday 16 March 2010

Students: you're in safe hands

It's Students' Union election week: literally one person is going for most of the paid positions, though a massive 4 want to be President.

They're all deeply concerned by the massive job cuts, course closures, class size increases, module choice reduction, campus closures, multimillion £ funding clawback.

Oh, sorry. They're not. They don't even mention such things, which I'd have thought would be quite important, in their manifestos. But they don't want Mars Bars to cost more in the canteens.

TO THE STREETS!

OK, I'm a bit crabby. I left at 10 last night and was back in my office for 8 a.m.

5 comments:

Ewarwoowar said...

How's the anonymity going Voley?

Also, is this rumour about campus closures true then? Can you shed any light on it?

The Plashing Vole said...

On thin ice.
Telford's being 'reorganised'. Compton is definitely being 'mothballed', but not quite yet. Business staff and students will all be taught on main campus.

Graham Quirk said...

Interesting that not one of the candidates running in the activities positions consider it important to have an SU bar on campus. This despite it being the single biggest issue talked about by students. One of them does propose a scheme whereby Wolves students could go on a coach trip to 'party' in other universities' SUs. Shame he doesn't see the rather depressing irony in his own statement. They're all puppets i'm afraid.

Dan said...

The current President collared me today to ask why I'm not voting. I cited the campus closures as a reason to which he told something along the lines of "they're not being fully closed down."
However he was a bit vague on what they will be used as. I imagine they will be guarded by men with large guns whilst secret meetings involving members of the shady echelon upstairs take place.
He asked me to spread the word but unfortunately I've forgotten his name.

The Plashing Vole said...

My problem with them is that they're fixated on 'fun' stuff - pub crawls etc - because they're not independent enough or bright enough to think about the big stuff. Plus the members don't or can't push them to represent them: they don't use the machinery of union governance to direct their officers. They could pose serious-minded resistance to the university's activities, with the support of NUS head office, but they'd rather play with Facebook.

The Compton plan is to retain the accommodation in the short term, but move the library stock, offices and teaching to City Campus.

As to the lack of a bar - I can understand some of the problems. City centre campuses ringed by corporate pubs do struggle, and so many Wolverhampton students live at home that there's little sense of a discrete student community. That said, there should be enough to keep a bar running and make a profit. It's easy: my old union ran the same popular and varied events on the same nights every week, so that any subgroup (rockers, indie kids, ravers etc) knew that something good would happen every week.

We also managed to produce 2 hard-hitting, well-designed newspapers every two weeks, one in Welsh.