In the news today, there’s some discussion of Labor’s intention not to wind back the VSU clock and reintroduce compulsory student union fees. The policy was apparently approved at the ALP conference aka the Ruddfest, but passed without notice until now.
I was an office-bearer of the University of Queensland Union three times, as a Vice-President, Treasurer and Clubs & Societies Officer, and in the salad days of pre-HECS and viable levels of AUSTUDY, spent just a little too much time on student politics and not enough time studying.
Even back then, I had reservations about the compulsory element of student unionism. The comparison, often made, to local government rates was not a particularly apposite one, and I think, as we saw with compulsory trade unionism, a captive membership encourages laziness, profligacy and poor performance among elected officials. Not always, and not necessarily, but the tendency is definitely there. Particularly at the older sandstone universities, there’s no reason why a well managed student union should not provide financially sustainable services attractive enough to induce students to join. Smaller and regional campuses are always going to struggle, because the economies of scale just aren’t there. It was, if people were honest, pretty clear to those of us involved in student politics that those who took an active interest in the union were always a minority – even though sometimes that could be quite a large one at UQ – as in the year of the Victoria Brazil fiasco and for a few years afterwards, where election turnouts rose to levels not seen since the early 70s. A Liberal Party dominated union executive proved quite an incentive for students to vote – with about 5000 votes cast in the last election I ran for the exec – in 1992.
However, there is a valid point made about student services, and student life. And Labor should start thinking about a way to sustain those things aside from reversing VSU. I’m particularly concerned about the absence of vibrant student activity and the quality of student representation, as well as the usual “must make sure the hockey team has funds” stuff that exercised Barnaby Joyce’s imagination.
“VSU has ripped the heart out of many campuses through the abolition of traditions such as campus newspapers, a reduction in sporting facilities and, of course, the removal of subsidised health, welfare and advocacy services that were provided pre-VSU,” Democrats higher education spokeswoman Natasha Stott Despoja said.
Emotionally speaking, because I gave a fair few years and a lot of energy and commitment to the cause of student unionism, it is sad to see the VSU system entrenched. But it’s an area where we’ll have to think laterally about how to preserve and re-create what was best about the old. In an era where the great Rudd moving right show rolls on, I suspect there’ll be quite a few policy areas where we’ll be having to do that.
The lack of life on university campuses has at least as much to do with the amount of part-time work that uni students are currently doing as it does with VSU, in my opinion.
There’s no doubt that’s also a factor.
I disagree on principle and pragmatic grounds. Labor has lost me on this policy cowardice (it is doing this solely to avoid a few negative attacks).
Universities are entitled to levy service fees to socialise the cost of being a community. It’s a perfectly reasonable – and Fabian principled – alternative to the atrophy of user pays.
Labor could have taken the Joyce option and excised non-representative political action from the compulsory funds. (Ditto for its cowardice on bargaining fees – which as capped and regulated ‘agency shop fees’ are commonplace in Canada and that socialist paradise, the US.)
Instead Labor is talking about either letting universities bleed further, or dipping into general tax revenue. The latter is truly scandalous.
At a bare minimum, Labor could have let universities opt-in after a campus referendum, and faced nil flack.
life on campus has dwindled well beyond the students unions in recent years. while a viable student union has alot to do with this, students barely seem to have the time to grab a quick coffee after class much less sit round at the bar opining lefties vs righties.
and yes, being forced into part time work has alot to do with this.
then there’s the huge HECS debt being incurred at $$$$’s/semester. it places a greater ‘responsibility’ on the student to pass, and quickly. no one has time to play politics – its all about the study study study.
universities seem no longer providers of a wholistic education, but merely degree factories pumping out as many graduates as possible…
Carl!
As another person who spent too much time in UQ student union politics (on the evil Liberal side though!) and the most intense year of my life as Union Secretary, for me VSU was more total relief than anything else. I had virtually given up on any hope of VSU in my lifetime and instead tried to get the campus Liberals to focus on fighting the campus Labor Students (as distinct from the “Left”) in debate and student elections. Student Unionism at UQ in particular was extremely weak from around 1999 onwards with very minimal politicisation of the student body on issues.
Certainly, students have a lot more demands on their time now than they did 10 years ago. The other factor is the increasing fist of control that the University hierachy has exercised over life on campus. The subsequent result is that campus life has died. Additionally, levels of membership in student political clubs of all stripes has markedly declined.
The implementation of VSU hasn’t really changed much of campus life at UQ. Refec prices have increased, but students now have a bit of choice and often decide to go to the cheaper non-union shops which the university has allowed to crop up. On many campuses, factions of non-political International students have taken over the student unions and focused them on International student issues. At UQ, the student union has decided to rely on university grants rather than running membership campaigns which has also locked the student union into a continually declining active presence on campus.
The influx of international students, the increasingly constricting hand of the University, the demands on student time and the general lack of interest in unionism on campus means that things are now very different to the 80s when the arguments against VSU were more forceful and passionate. Times are changing on campus and I suspect that future student activism will take place in more spontaneous, organic ways rather than through the traditional student unions and political clubs.
I agree with the Rudd approach in not returning holus-bolus to compulsory student unionism, though it sits a bit oddly with the IR policy. I think Rudd should try something really imaginative on this front and not just for the vote pulling power that it would have.
A joint venture with the states/territories would be a starter, ensuring that all students, including full fee paying o/s students get concessionary transport. Currently NSW and Vic exclude the latter.
Uni admin should be pulled into any solution. The revelations on Macquarie Uni’s previous VC’s activities are an indictment unrelated to VSU but for the sake of some campus vibrancy, uni administrations have to be made more responsible.
Can student services be included in the new $5 billion tertiary future fund? Ok, it is for bricks and mortar, R & D, but even if they skimmed the interest for a couple of years, Rudd would have a few hundred million to subsidise student welfare/well being.
After that, who knows. Some better model could emerge if students wanted it, but the indecent haste and sheer bloody mindedness of people like ratty and Brendan Nelson in getting rid of it should not be allowed to stand.
after than
I agree Mark. Bottom line – forcing students who often don’t have much dosh to pay dues and join a union is a backward way of doing things. Personally I wasn’t that concerned about paying my dues during my uni days, but non-lefty types don’t see how it is fair to force people to join certain organisations, and from their perspective, I don’t see how it is fair either.
I think universities and the government both need to come up with a better way of making it possible for students (or those that want to) to involve themselves in pricey extracurricular activities without having to sell their soul on the black market to pay for it.
In my days at university an inordinate amount of the compulsory guild fees seemed to have been spent on buying grog for the sporting club parties.
Why don’t we encourage the ACTU to start part-funding the student organisations? It would buy a lot of goodwill and give them a decent shot at attracting politically minded students. It might also start to put a bit of round-up ™ on the mindless anti-union invective that powers much of the right side of politics.
It also might shame the business organisations into doing something other than cherry picking graduates and getting a free ride on the education system.
Labor actually announced this change in a higher education white paper they put out last year. I think it was a case of avoiding confusing messages – otherwise they would have had to argue both that tuition charges that could be paid for well into the future via HECS were unaffordable and that an up-front, completely deregulated fee for student services was affordable.
The solution, as I have argued all along, is for universities to be allowed to set their own fees and to bundle whatever services they think the market will support.
Mark
So let’s get this right. You went to uni for free? Hmmm…well, no. Your education was paid for by the working classes, who paid much higher rates of income tax. You also contibuted yourself later on, with equally high rates of income tax.
Also, you were extremely privileged, as the percentage of young Australians these highly-taxed working class types were prepared to educate was half was it is today. To wit, the Whitlam reforms changed the class composition of university attendance very little: it was another form of middle-class welfare.
For all the whingeing our junior academics engage in the4 fact is that access to, and take up of, university education has never been as broad as it is in 2007.
Rudd should just just say to the Vice Chancellors,
“they’re your universities, you sort it out. If you want to fund student organisations out of the revenues you collect, do it. If you don’t want to, then don’t.”
This will (a) get the government’s nose out of somewhere that it doesn’t belong (b) energise students, if they want their organisations to be funded, to engage with their own university, rather than Canberra (c) energise student organisations to get students interested in their organisations, since the VC’s will probably tell the organisations that they will get their money if they can demonstrate genuine student demand for what they do
I never used union services and their newspaper was trash. Why on earth would I want to fork out an extra 200 or so dollars for this when I’m already struggling to come up with 500 for textbooks?
I’ll more than likely never vote Liberal, and would have said the same for Labor, but Rudd seems to be addressing all the gripes I might have had. Now if they’ll vow to ditch that internet filtering at the ISP level that Labor were on about I will be solidly aboard.
The SRC at Griffith’s Brisbane campuses has been well-nigh moribund from the early noughties onward for reasons unrelated to VSU.
I recall a conversation with a fellow lefty in which we both let ourselves speak the profane thought that, whatever arguments we might make for universal membership in principle, there were a range of university student organisations (including at Griffith) where it was indefensible in practice due to the dysfunctional state of the organisation and the lack of any effective means to secure compliance with the constitution (and the laws of the land!) by the office-bearers. The new constitution foisted on students by the Labor Right in league with University management in a highly illegal referendum in 2004 made a bad situation worse.
As to what might emerge to replace the status quo ante, I have my ideas but ultimately it will be the students (of whom I am now old enough to be the father) who will decide.
I was once a full time paid organiser for a student union, but tend to agree times have changed. I must confess I dont feel overly worried about VSU anymore – as the main problems facing students today are work/ study balance and fees.
Once I would have said the problem with University funded services is lack of indepedent advocacy in academic appeals etc. The student unions paid us and we owed nothing to uni, which helped students.
Frankly, however, the problem nowadays is that the ‘consumer empowerment’ of high fee paying students has swung it more the other way – the danger now is declining standards as academics feel pressured to pass no-hoping, cashed up lazy drongos who should be failed right out the front door.
As for policy – I think Spiros is on the money. Rudd should certainly get rid of the legislation prohibiting mandatory fees – but should then decentralise the decisions to universities themselves.
Also what Spiros said on policy, with the proviso that there should be some kind of genuinely democratic deliberative process at individual universities culminating in a referendum of students to decide what arrangements to put in place.
“access to, and take up of, university education has never been as broad as it is in 2007.”
Only because university education has been redefined to include what were formerly CAEs and the like.
Access to, and take up of university education at the best universities is as narrow as ever.
Lefty E wrote:
As a working sessional academic I have not personally observed the latter phenomenon or ever felt pressured to engage in it myself, but I can only speak for myself. Some currently working academics are certainly on record stating that this sort of thing goes on.
However I would agree that some mechanism for independent advocacy in academic appeals, disciplinary proceedings, etc., involving advocates with an ethical and professional commitment to defending the legitimate rights and interests of students in a manner consistent with the values of the university (as distinct from the interests of individual academics, university managers, etc.), is certainly necessary. One of the chapters of the tragicomedy of the Griffith SRC is that SRC Education Officers were AWOL from about 2001 onwards when it came to supporting students in appeals and disciplinary hearings. (I know because I was on the University’s appeals and discipline committees.)
I think I’m mainly with Graeme, except that I don’t object to the general tax payer contributing to a rounded tertiary education experience.
But I don’t like the paternalism of university administrations deciding what they will provide and support.
I went off to QU in 1960 as one of the elite, I guess, as university participation did not extend past 10% of the population. Actually the percentage completing secondary ed was small. Our family was poor, but I had a ‘Commonwealth Scholarship’ which, from memory paid the fees as well as the students union fee, but I’m not sure.
The important thing was that the scholarship was enough to pay for food, shelter and clothing, plus a very modest amount of fun. Barely. We didn’t have to work to survive.
My position is that we should be paying students allowances sufficient for them to survive with dignity without working or resorting to scavenging in rubbish bins for food. There could be a minimum student service level (access to guidance, counselling and legal services should be provided, for example) with an extension that comes from voluntary student fees. There may have to be special arrangement in smaller provincial universities.
Could I also put in that the worst possible arrangement for provision of services such as catering, venues, clubs, student accommodation, etc., is where the governance of such services takes the form of control by a non-elected branch of university management which is neither democratically accountable (as good student unions are/were) nor subject to market accountability (i.e. if a range of providers could compete for the student market). Such a system is in place at an institution which shall henceforth be referred to as the Bjelke-Petersen University of Suburban South-East Queensland.
JG, Mark is a bit busy today and I’m not sure he’ll see your comment.
The notion that he was “extremely privileged” is wrong. I don’t know how Mark feels but I find it offensive.
We form our personal identities largely during the teenage years and the class press of norms and expectations prevents a lot of young people from developing academic talent evident in the primary school. But education is about opportunity and the education system has long provided an opportunity for socio-economic mobility.
This is important in a just society and provides an avenue for many who, like Mark, were not born into extreme privilege.
This is slightly off topic, but I find the idea of students not having to work for money while at uni quite bizarre. I studied at UQ (apparently along with most of this blog community) during the mid to late 1990s, and worked in hospitality throughout the entire experience. The only people I knew who didn’t work were the wealthy, or the poor who made the decision to live on the sniff of an oily rag. I learned as much from my work as I did from a double degree with honours.
While I agree that studies shouldn’t be unduly compromised by work commitments, if HECS payments are deferred, what is the increased burden of recent years that I am missing?
This is my first blog entry, so hi all.
Kymbos, it’s the hours that students are working these days.
I don’t have any recent statistics to hand, but students seem to be spending more and more time at work and less and less time on campus.
What Robert said. Some of my students are working full time, and this is seriously affecting their ability to study, let alone engage in extracurricular activity.
Yup. I work a minimum of 20 hours a week or I go bust, and that’s with centrelink helping out (didn’t qualify for that until final year of undergrad, though). Its not a problem these days, as I have a flexible casual position at the uni, but when I was working nightfill at a supermarket and living on the edge of town, it nearly killed me, and it really shows in my academic record. Many of my classmates work full time, and it impacts their ability to attend field trips and practical sessions to the point where some subjects are dropping off-campus activities almost entirely – this is a huge problem for natural resource studies in particular. Hell, I know students who describe regularly having to flip a coin between ‘attend lecture’ and ‘finish assignment’ because their time is so limited. Most choose to sacrifice GPA for work, finding passes and even low passes acceptable – I’d argue that that’s self-defeating, but hey, so is not eating.
I’m really relieved VSU is staying. I agree that a number of student services formerly run on compulsory fees require support – childcare services, advocacy and counselling, and on campuses not located in the CBD as mine is, cheap and healthy food. However, there’s got to be a way to pay for those without forcing students to fork over the cash.
Mark’s point about the old system encouraging crap leadership is very, very important. QUT’s student guild conducted themselves like angry children as VSU approached, spending a considerable amount of time (and our money) blatantly attempting to shame the student body into continuing to pay their fees. You can imagine how well that went down. They were completely unable to take any criticism from guild members, to the point where the link on guildonline.net’s homepage to the student guild discussion forum was removed, so that students could no longer find the only public place to debate guild policy unless they already knew the URL. It as since been removed entirely. A pathetic performance, but entirely in keeping with their attitude in general – they’ve never once acceded to requests by members to view the guild budget, so we’ve no idea what they were spending on. Meanwhile, UQ’s guild were conducting themselves far better, calmly making plans to cope under the new system and openly asking for ideas from students about how to streamline their operations. The difference was marked, and rather embarrassing…
Speaking as someone who’s been involved in setting up two department/faculty clubs on two Melbourne campuses, I’m with both Paul and Rob.
Of the two clubs. The first died still-born thanks to stuffing around by the university management and union politics – taking four months to approve our request at committee. The second was met with such disinterest from students – this one we largely left the union out of – that it wasn’t worth running. Work commitments was a major reason. The other was university scheduling: classes back to back and no lunch breaks, meaning students generally just came in, went to class and then went home.
University students do need social interaction. Country and international students in particular, but having a bond within a cohort helps too. It is in the interests of the university to facilitate this too, which, I have to say, was recognised by the departmental coordinators. To the extent that VSU reduces the financial burden on students it will probably strengthen clubs – albeit at the expense of the student union. But, from the point of view of someone running a club, the money from compulsory fees wasn’t sufficiently important to make VSU an issue. The problem is finding people with enough time to help organise things.
Kymbos, I did plenty work during the holidays including one stint picking tobacco. While at uni I learnt as much in the refectory as I did in lectures.
Hmmm. I’m not convinced food is an appropriate thing for student unions to be subsidising.
In my experience, most union-run food outlets might be cheap, but the quality of food is terrible compared to the privately-owned outlets.
Lefty E says:
“Frankly, however, the problem nowadays is that the ‘consumer empowerment’ of high fee paying students has swung it more the other way – the danger now is declining standards as academics feel pressured to pass no-hoping, cashed up lazy drongos who should be failed right out the front door.”
Mmmm. I did the Social Science (Environment) degree at RMIT in the early 1990s. Some of my fellow students were clearly borderline retarded judging by their comprehension and spelling skills. The cut off scores should be much higher if the humanities and social sciences are to escape the “cabbage patch” stigma.
VSU has thankfully become a dead issue outside the lunatic fringe. Pro-VSU arguments like union subsidised food are absurd. If a student is truly poor, he/she will take home made sandwiches etc. to uni. Uni clubs are also a private thing. I’m not sure why I had to subsidise other students’ private interests.
I think the student allowance should be equivalent to the unemployment benefit. Students from poorer backgrounds shouldn’t have to deal with poverty or excessive time pressures owing to work commitments.
As a former unpaid student union representative, a student union education research officer, university manager and now an academic I do have some experience. Underfunded organisations with enormous mandates and an absense of any real powers can become internally disfunctional: ATSIC and the Palestinian Authority come to mind. Low voter turnout can enable student unions to be dominated by self-interested cliques, although often managers not students, but Melbourne-style hyper-politicisation can be disfunctional. But remember how contemptous university managers can be of students, any sins of student organisations shrink into insignificance compared to what universities do. My preferred solution; a compulsory deferable fee with voluntary membership, under this system nearly all students would become members of their own free choice, this would increase their democratic legitimacy. Without effective student organisations who will challenge the contempt of universities for many of their students?
I used to be a philanthropist. My yearly income was $5400 and I was giving away nearly 10% of that to the Student Union.
Not anymore.
I am a current student representative on the Murdoch University Student Guild and I believe VSU is beneficial to student guilds. It does create a far more effiecient guild and make it more accountable.
The problem i have with VSU is how it was handled, due to good management the Murdoch guild survived the transition into VSU with a surplus. However alot of guilds didn’t, VSU was just dumped on guild with no financial support from the government.
Most students dont care about politics, as sad as it is to hear, many simply do not have the time to focus on political issues when they have to work and study.
A survey conducted by the guild last year showed student poverty is a widespread problem, many students cannot afford to buy food. These are the students guilds can most readily help , however VSU severely hampers there ability to do so.
Universities suffer from huge deficits because the government treats education like a business . Murdoch university has been extremely supportive of the Murdoch guild but finances are stretched.
My point is that while VSU is a good policy which is fair to students, dumping it on student guilds at a time when education is becoming simply a machine used to churn out people with pieces of paper only accelerates the growing student poverty, destroys political empathy and destroys academia.
VSU may be good policy, but it needs to be implemented correctly .
mel, that’s roughly what I had in mind.
I’ve wrestled with this a lot. I think both the services and representation a well run student organisation provides are incredibly valuable to the university experience – worth far more than the cost of the fees. However, its clear that many student organisations are atrociously run. VSU, unless accompanied by some sort of subsidy means all student organisations will be dysfunctional – there is too much incentive for students to take a free ride, but without it plenty of organisations are ripping their members off.
I heard of a system used at one US university, which if the reports are true solved a lot of the problems.
Elected officebearers could enroll in a subject called “theory and practice of student politics”. They got a lecturer from the politics department as their supervisor and got marked on their performance in office, and this counted towards their degree.
There were multiple benefits. Firstly, the unfortunately common situation of people getting elected and then spending the time either lazing around or doing faction building was greatly reduced – if you wanted a good mark you needed to have something to show for your time.
Secondly, the common pattern of office bearers juggling part time study with their role was greatly reduced, giving them more time to focus on their duties.
Finally, having a supervisor who could provide advice (most had probably supervised many people before and made excellent mentors) would be invaluable to many office bearers, who often spend half their term learning the ropes.
Presumably having a certain level of supervision from academics also cuts down on corruption – if you were doing something really dodgy your supervisor might just turn you in.
The reports I heard suggested that this had been such a success that VSU really wasn’t an issue – the student association provided such a valuable service that no one really questioned paying up. Of course it would take years to get to that level if such a subject was brought in here, but I think it might well repay a university to adopt the idea.
This is speculation, but I think one effect of the increasing demands on students’ time is to make it increasingly difficult for what might be termed the “concerned student citizen” to be more than marginally involved in student representative organisations, meaning that such involvement is becoming (if it hasn’t become already) the exclusive preserve of political party and/or factional cadres who can afford not to prioritise study, whose material needs will often be met by their party/factional patrons (or their politician parents) and who can rely on same for resourcing of election campaigns. This is disastrous for the management of student organisations because the cadres’ agenda is invariably to promote the interests of their party/faction and their own advancement therein, with a crudely (and at times criminally) instrumental attitude towards the student organisation and its members. One naively honest young woman, who had temporarily fallen in with the Labor Right and thereby been elected an office-bearer of the SRC at the Bjelke-Petersen University of Suburban South-East Queensland, admitted to me that “we just see it (the SRC) as a training ground for the faction”.
Of course the cadres have always had a big presence in student organisations. My point is that at one time their influence could be somewhat diluted by the “concerned student citizens”. If Griffith is any guide, the latter vanished some time early in the new millennium.
Spiros
I think you are about twenty years out of date. The percentage of Australians who have degrees nowadays is so far above what it was in 1978 it is not funny.
But I think the point Spiros was making is that many of those degrees are programs courses which would have been diploma programs in 1978, whilst many more are in fields for which no higher education of any kind was required in 1978 (e.g. nursing, golf course management, tourism & leisure, etc.).
That said, I think we would find that numbers of students at existing universities (or bits of existing universities) which were universities in 1978 are considerably higher today. Melbourne University had about 16,000 students in 1978, and has over 40,000 enrolled today. La Trobe had about 8000 students in 1978 and has over 26,000 enrolled today. Much of this growth can’t be explained by amalgamations. However a considerable amount may well be explicable in terms of credentials creep in occupations for which degrees weren’t always a prerequisite.
Credentialism has long been a factor, and a problem.
When I was studying education in the 70s I heard that the requirement for being a garbage man in New York was the successful completion of high school.
The qualification requirement was actually related to peoples ability to get out of bed and show up to work on time, plus the ability to undertake and complete activities that were percieved to be pointless.
I think Paul Norton must have his dates mixed up when he refers to the travails of the Griffith University SRC in the early 21st century.
The Griffith SRC in the “early noughties” was a breath of fresh air comprised of moderate students that were reflective of the true diversity of the students. For some years previously, with a few exceptions, the SRC was controlled by a narrow band of functional Marxists.
The period from 2001 until the introduction of VSU marked a period of real growth in student culture and real services for students due from an reform focused and active organisation. Increased accountability mechanisms also saw students have increased faith in their organisation and the student representatives at the time managed to repair an organisation that had been subjected to years of neglect from an extremist left element on campus.
As opposed to dysfunctional Marxists?
“The percentage of Australians who have degrees nowadays is so far above what it was in 1978 it is not funny.”
It is funny, because the growth in degrees has been sports administration, community hand holding and creative butt wiping.