Our new Membership Handbook is now available online

Check out our new Membership Handbook!

In addition this year we have also produced guides for Welcome Week (including a pocket plan), our Support Services and the Your Voice guide. Happy reading!

We are a Guild of Students! A response

After reading Ed's (Guild EEO) blogpost arguing that students are excluded from the democratic processes and the campaigns in the Guild I want to start having an open discussion on the topic. In brief, Ed raises two distinct points I want to address. Firstly, that students are excluded as engines of change and, secondly, that the Guild gives students a lower platform than Sabbs to share their views. I will now address these points:

Firstly, I stood on a manifesto of student led, bottom-up campaigns that involve students at every level. Being a Sabbatical is not about leading every campaign but about facilitating campaigns and empowering students to lead their on campaigns. Guild campaigns can only have credibility when the momentum comes from students. At the moment I am looking into ways of how to make this pledge a reality and any ideas are welcome. In the meanwhile, I can only facilitate the campaigns of those students that raise issues with me! Guild Council is the Guild’s policy making organ. Sabbatical officers, while working to achieve their manifesto pledges (on a basis of which they were elected), can be mandated by the students and every student can hold us to account. I agree with Ed that for too long we have allowed students to be disengaged and I hope that this year we can work together to change this!

Secondly, have I been given a platform which is disproportionately superior to fellow student bloggers? Well, according to my google analytics statistics only very few visitors to my blog have come via the Guild website so hence many people have come through word of mouth and my own advertising via facebook and twitter. I do not understand the point that students are being given less of a platform than me. The example Ed cites is Nick Petrie (whose blog I avidly follow). He promotes his blog well through twitter just the way I do. More importantly though he is the editor of Redbrick which gives him a platform of which I can only dream of. What is more any student can write for Redbrick or blog and as I stood on a manifesto pledging that Redbrick should be an uncensored and critical newspaper I fully believe that we are giving students a good platform.

And to all the student bloggers, tweeters and town-criers I have one simple request: share your ideas with me and make me aware of your issues and desires! I read blogs and tweets from students every day. Actually, right now I am working on a blog post on the topic of the 10:10 campaign after I saw tweets and blogs from different students being both inquisitive and constructively critical.

I am confused by the essence of the accusations of the Guild excluding students and would invite anyone to take the time and discuss this with me. I will leave you with this quote:

‘Realise that if you have time to whine and complain about something, you have time to do something about it’

In that spirit, if students feel passionately about an issue then they shouldn’t waste any time radically tiptoeing around the issue but come and see the officers and discuss how together we can actually go about achieving that change.