The Minefield of Students Union Elections

By Opinion Editor Baneen Talpur

It’s election season, meaning people all over campus are walking around clipboard in hand, asking for your signatures to make them official candidates and ultimately, for your vote. These candidates are hoping to represent you, and your wants. The elections are great craic with people finally talking about what is happening on campus, issues are raised to the surface and solutions are drafted in candidates’ manifesto. However, there is a problem: this is a minefield! With election season coming out of nowhere, how are any students supposed to know how the Students Union works?

There is the Students Union, the Societies Executive, and the Clubs Executive. There is senate, council and many other meetings constantly occurring. Unless you are in the loop, an active member of multiple societies/clubs or intensely engaging with the happenings of UCC, chances are you do not have an idea of what is going on. The union can be highly inaccessible and very difficult to understand. The main source of information is the SU Instagram, which does highlight events on campus and initiatives, but a lot of this is surface level information.

I did not know how the union worked until I became class representative for my group. I had to be trained and even then I still could not tell you much about it. It was here that I heard for the first time that the SU does not only consist of the 6 full time officers, that every UCC student is considered to be a member of the union. I did not know that any student can speak at council, or that council and senate even existed. Many of the terms are come across as political jargon.  

In previous elections only around 25 per cent of the student body actually voted. This number is devastatingly low, considering that the population of UCC is around 21,000 students. For lack of accessibility, I can blame the union and its structure, but for the lack of engagement, I can only blame myself. Turns out UCC Student’s Union does have a good website with minutes being posted after every meeting. The information is out there, the problem is that students do not know where to find it. It almost feels that the information is lowkey being gate kept both by the university (lack of knowledge is how they can control us) and partly the SU themselves, the atmosphere around election season and once the officers are chosen, kind of feel like this elite group, like the popular high school kids. Who you know and who your friends are play a huge role in elections. Those who have connections within that SU tend to have much better insight into how things work and campaigns, since they have access to the inside scoop.

The next time a candidate comes up asking for your signature, please ask what their goal is and how they plan to achieve it.

Promises are not necessarily kept. For example, lecture recordings have been on multiple candidates’ agendas over the years, but still we are told that they will not be recorded even though lecture recording is standard practice in many universities Internationally, and even pre covid. There’s even an ongoing push for hybrid models to be used in initial secondary teacher education.

In order for the union to do what it set out to do, which is to represent the students of UCC, transparency must be a priority. Every student should know how their union runs, not just class reps. Students should know about the services that hold SU accountable and how mandating works. If students know who their SU officers are, they should also know what each of them does and how things actually function, after all at the end of the day we pay fees and we have elected them to represent us in front of the university. The average student also needs to engage with the information that the union provide, this is a two-way street. I suggest making sure that SU information including meetings that any student can attend are made known since the beginning of first year.

The next time a candidate comes up asking for your signature, please ask what their goal is and how they plan to achieve it. This may be your only connection to the SU, for another year.