The below is a open letter regarding the new democratic structure from a group of concerned students at Birmingham, including myself. We feel that the proposals have been somewhat pushed through and we are no appealing to those in the process of formulating the final model to reassess certain elements of the proposals in the face of the criticism they have received. this has aslo been posted on the radish website
http://j15committee.baylott.org/Dear Guild Decision maker,
We are writing to you regarding the recent cross-campus referendum on the proposals for a new democratic structure for the Guild of Students. In the final formulation of the model you may have some say.
We feel that as a test of student opinion that the results are somewhat invalidated by the way the Guild of Students allowed the 'yes' campaign privileged access to its extensive resources. This included employing students to hand out leaflets and put up posters in support of the 'yes' campaign, using the Guild's professional marketing department for the preparation and dissemination of 'yes' campaign material, granting access to Guild of Students Facebook group and events pages, and Guild and University e-mail lists, as well as respective officers soliciting support from residence associations and student groups for which they have responsibility. Most, if not all, full-time sabbatical officers campaigned in support of the 'yes' campaign against an under-resourced 'no' campaign run by students, many of whom were in the middle of essay deadlines and exams. All at a cost that we can only guess to be measured in the thousands.
We would also question the meaning of 'support' for the proposals given that the 'yes' campaign focused largely on a simplistic and ambiguous 'vote yes' message couched in terms of currently popular memes such as 'change' and 'progress' which did not reflect the significance of the reforms being discussed or the issues raised during the 'consultation'. The only public debate during the campaign(s) was very poorly advertised by the Guild of Students and only around 10 students attended.
We also feel that students, in general, have not been able to participate properly in the development of the model during the consultation process. The focus groups were poorly advertised, seemingly only within the Guild. Their validity for testing the reception of the proposals was seriously undermined by a lack of objectivity by officer participation the organisation of the sessions, the proposals clearly coming from the officers themselves under the guise of market research and the participants in groups would not have allowed for open detached analysis of the proposals and positive responses are not surprising.
The “You” Survey, which has been constantly referred to in Council and during the campaign, could be said to have included the views of many students across campus, but its general and superficial questions are a poor substitute for genuine engagement in how the Guild is run. It is difficult to see it as anything else than a market research exercise which has been wielded as a convenient instrument to blunt the criticisms of students who have engaged more meaningfully in the debate.
In our campaign we singled out postgraduate representation in particular as we felt they had effectively not been consulted at all on these proposals. There is a strong argument that the proposals could cause lasting damage to postgraduate representation within the Guild (which is, arguably, already in a poor state - although numbers have risen on council in the past year). Given this and the fact that postgraduates are a large minority within the university community, we feel that this on its suggests that major flaws existed in the methodology and/or conduct of the consultation process which may on its own necessitate a complete re-evaluation of the proposals apparently informed by it.
Ultimately, we feel that the result is not very indicative of student opinion at-large. Considering the circumstances under which the referendum was conducted which we have outlined above, a 4:1 vote ratio and a turnout of less than 10% cannot be meaningfully considered as support for the proposed reforms. We also would like to see change in the Guild and hope the proposals will now go through a period of genuine (well-advertised!) consultation, where genuine concerns about excluding the voices of groups on campus from the Guild and the ability of students to be involved meaningfully in the decision making process are listened to instead of being met with substance-less and derisory rebuttals from Guild officers.
However, we are aware that the cross campus voting cannot be ignored, but hope that the above points will have pointed out some of the flaws of the referendum process. We also hope that in the upcoming stages students will have a more present voice in the drafting of the final democratic structure and on behalf of the "vote no" group would like you to consider and take into account the concerns that we have with the proposed model.
1) the steering group; in the consultation process students said they did not want officers to vote, the new model removes the officers' voting rights but instead gives them the power to set the agenda of guild council. we feel this has been due to a misinterpretation, something has clearly gone wrong; adequate safeguards need to be put in place to ensure the steering group remains accountable to students, which could be achieve through features like;
=> Removal of all powers to reject a motion other than ultra vires (stated explicitly in the groups terms of reference)
=> non-exec members elected regularly to the steering group from guild council,
=> letting all students attend the steering group meeting in nonvoting capacity , guarantees that the process of overturning a officer decision will only inculde speeches from the floor (none from the steering group) and
=> a clear procedure to get a rejected motion onto guild council agenda swiftly without a delay to a guild council that could well be next term or even next year...
2) Fairer Representation in Guild Council; a proportionate system for postgraduate and undergraduate students and a realistic representation of cultural and religious groups. Postgraduates and undergrads are two groups with very different experiences, with many differing needs which are clearly not relative. Postgraduates should not have to compete with undergrads for fair representation.
The same applies for cultural, religious and political groups.
3) Ensuring responsive decision making; At present it needs 1000s of signatures to calla guild council for a specific issue. this is not a major issue since guild council is regular (3 times a term). However, in the new proposed structure guild council is only taking place once a term, so that there is a need for more achievable guidelines to call an "emergency" guild council. This could include the reduction of required signatures or power given to guild councillors themsevels to call a guild council. However, whatever the mechanisms in place, we believe that it needs clear and fair guidelines to give all societies equal access to the opportunity of calling additional guild councils if needed.
Additionally, and for the same reason, we believe that it must be possible to call a referendum at all times in the year taught to all guild councillors, as the current proposals strongly imply they can only happen once.
5) The problem of the representativeness of decisions taken in the open forums: these forums happen more than once a week (5 per month), and since it is not clear that these are compulsory meetings for all guild councillors we strongly doubt that the decisions taken by these forums will be in any way representative.
We would suggest that the open forums can make consequential decisions only if the subject had been on its agenda in advance (maybe 2 days is sufficient here), to ensure that people who have an interest in this topic know it is being discussed and can contribute to the debates and decisions.
issues brought up at the meeting itself can be discusses but should be decided on maybe at the next open forum (which will prob only be one week ahead).
All the best
Concerned Birmingham students
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