Posts by Kyle Matthews
-
In every university except for Auckland and Otago, they chose to go compulsory. If they want VSM they can vote for it. It's in their hands. This is about taking that choice out of the hands of students.
Ahem. Auckland and Waikato. Otago won its referendum by 79%.
I'm not sure there's quite the dichotomy you suggest - 'part of' vs 'merely coincidental' - but that may well be the case. You can't go to a university without being a member of the student body, but I'd argue you could without being a member of a students' association.
Certainly 70 or 80 years ago its not even a question you would have asked. Students Associations had a much smaller role then, but their role was somewhat integral to the institution, in much the same way that prefects might be integral to a high school. They were relied on to organise a number of events, they built the university unions around the country, sporting and cultural life etc. At Otago, pre-WWII, for example, it was the students association that applied minor matters of discipline, not the university.
Their political role outside the university is largely a post-WWII experience. Their role in governance and providing a student advocate perspective inside the institution is also much more recent.
It really depends on what you define as a tertiary education. If it's just the lectures, tutorials, labs, workshops etc, then a students association is not integral. That would be a very limited perspective of tertiary education, particularly university education, however. The University of Otago, as much as it disagrees with OUSA over many things, views their role as crucial in the university. Given the 'critic and conscience' and community requirements of being a university, I think that's important to remember.
-
No, you asked if there was etc. which, yeah, there is.
Actually no I'm quite confident I was talking about physically moving, as noted by my use of the word "moves":
Find me a multi-million dollar business with about 40 staff that moves every year depending on whether some other business has done well.
-
It wasn't technically compulsory at Auckland Uni when I was there, but if you opted out then you couldn't borrow books from the library, which was pretty much required in most courses. Not that the Union owned the library - it was just a deal they'd struck with the Uni to make unionism pretty much compulsory.
I'm not sure when you went to university, but I think someone misled you there.
But I did object deeply to very large donations being given to the Labour party, and I never did find out what happened to that speedboat which was supposedly purchased for the waterskiing club that had no members.
I should point out that the legendary speedboat money was spent by an Auckland President operating illegally under the AUSA constitution. He's also a passionate right-wing VSMer.
-
I'm still trying to locate the point of contention here. So, is your beef not with the tyranny of the majority within the student body, or the fact that an institution makes membership of an organisation a prerequisite, but that the institution has a state mandate to do so?
CSM doesn't have its origins in the state, it has its origins in the universities, dating back many decades. The VSM law made that optional upon the vote of students (over the opposition of the universities, who want students associations to be compulsory) but they were all compulsory well before that.
Newer universities (ie, Waikato, in the 1963 Act had the power to take money for students associations put into their Act), and everyone university was empowered to do it in the 1990 Education Amendment Act (Section 215), but older universities (Auckland, Otago) begun it off their own bat, not due to the state.
It hasn't really got too much to do with the institution. VUW hasn't made membership of VUWSA a prerequisite to study.
It has. I'm not sure when it happened at Victoria, but it would have been enforced by the university council some time last century (VUW is about 110 years old, I'm not sure how long it took them to move from the students association being created to it being compulsory).
-
It was always darkly amusing watching naive young students who had voted for VSM suddenly faced with the consequences of their actions. "Hang on, where have all the student services gone? Why does everything suddenly suck?" It was like an inadvertent lesson in the benefits of unionism.
Unfortunately, because of the transient nature of student populations, the next generation in three years wouldn't even know what they were missing out on.
Which, by the way, is an utterly incompetent lapdog of the administration, and currently appears to be so far up the arse of Peter Dunne it isn't funny, so hardly a hotbed of lefty radicalism.
Ironically, UCSA would be one of the students associations that would find it easiest to survive under VSM. At some time in the distant past they purchased a forest and they get a significant annual income from road access rights and forestry.
Equally, I'd have no problem with an employer saying they'd only employ staff who are members of a union (however unusual that may be). CSM however, is like a government department saying they will only employ staff who are members of a union - outrageous.
Universities will fight tooth and nail before you get to claim them as government departments. There's a debate going on between them and the government as to their exact nature, but certainly they consider themselves to be independent bodies.
I may have missed something but can someone explain why this Bill is a parliamentary process, not one at university level?
Because most significant students associations won the battle in 1999 (only Auckland and Waikato went voluntary, Waikato has since gone back). Grass level advocates of VSM know that they won't win a referendum on the issue, and its much easier to just chop off the head and put a bill through parliament which over rides what universities and student bodies want, and make them all voluntary.
As I pointed out upthread, "historically" Oxford and many other universities have chosen to exclude women, place a religious qualification on admission, and required dons to be unmarried and at least ostensibly celibate. I think anyone who tried to justify any of the above on historical grounds would get extremely short shift.
Because those three things are equivalent with compulsory student membership, honest.
Labour's Grant Robertson was OUSA president in '94 and co-pres of NZUSA in '95, so I expect he'll be mulling over how to attack the bill in the house.
Grant was OUSA President in 1993. Adrian Reeve was President in 1994, his primary contribution to student politics was selling weed from his office (I'd struggle to think of a right-wing President that has been much good in the past 20 years of OUSA's history).
-
The Premier League does something pretty similar, as does almost every other football league in existence, including the Champions League.
As Hadyn pointed out, I was talking about physical moves.
I have a question. Has any union other than the 5 current ones expressed an interest in being a S14 franchise? Just wondering.
Hawkes Bay definitely wanted to be the expansion team. As did Taranaki I think?
-
Err, dude, if it is a business, then why should they be protected from their dismal on and off field performance?
It's not protection from being crap, it's protection from having to move base every year at short notice. super rugby will have already appointed coaches and support staff, head office staff will all be in place. November is too late to uproot that for February.
Find me a multi-million dollar business with about 40 staff that moves every year depending on whether some other business has done well.
And they're not just businesses. Super Rugby is part of a sporting structure which has a purpose. Part of their purpose is having geographic spread so that all parts of the country have coverage, and players from everywhere have a team they could play for.
I couldn't particularly care less if the highlanders moved, but if they did, it should be done long term.
-
VSM turns the sound down, CSM amplifies it 10 fold - but neither truly reflect the opinions of students.
I seem to have missed where you made an actual point.
-
Oh, and another point on governance/representation. Until sometime in the early 00s, postgraduate students were not members of the Otago association. I'm not sure exactly how it went down, but now postgraduates are members of OUSA so that they can elect someone to represent them on all of the postgraduate committees &c.
The university agreed that postgraduate students should be represented through OUSA as being best for them. Previously they'd been represented through the university postgraduate office and a... it was kind of a postgraduate social club. The 1999 VSM referendum (which included all students including postgraduates) meant that OUSA could make them members legally. I think all postgraduate students were surveyed and their returns came back largely in favour.
They pay half the levy of an undergraduate (which I argued was stupid, but OUSA were weak).
-
NZUSA speaks on behalf of "students" all the time.
And John Key speaks on behalf of "NZers" all the time. That's not the same as telling them what they think, which was what you were bemoaning.