## Metadata - Author: Wonkhe - Full Title: Whose SU Is It Anyway? - URL: https://wonkhe.com/blogs-sus/whose-su-is-it-anyway/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Wonkhe%20SUs%20Weekly%20Briefing%20-%20Friday%206%20September&utm_content=Wonkhe%20SUs%20Weekly%20Briefing%20-%20Friday%206%20September+CID_bc885206c9db2211046adb141146fbf2&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=James%20Coe%20explains%20the%20promise%20and%20challenge%20of%20dispersed%20democracy%20models - Date: 2024-10-08 ## Summary Students often have very little free time due to their busy schedules. This makes it hard for student unions, which are usually centralized, to effectively represent diverse student voices and needs. Instead of concentrating power, unions should focus on distributing it to better reflect students' actual experiences and identities. >[!Summary]+ >- Need to engage students who don't have time to engage >- Power within SUs is about those who can get proximity to the SU. So therefore more likely to be privilaged >- Cultural power is also a factor when different groups have more cultural sway, e.g. sports teams in a sports union >- Power should therefore be decentralised. Like in Europe >- In centralised systems, like uni senior management teams or in SUs, both the SU execs and ULT can be frustrated in their inability to affect change. >- We can make change by devolving efforts to subgroups, schools etc. Organise around departments, officers supporting hyper specific campaigns in cognate local areas >- We need to take the union to students, not the other way around. ## Highlights - The model of the students’ union as we know it today fundamentally assumes two things. The first is that students have time that is not contractually committed to work or obligated to their programme of study. The hardest to engage student, irrespective of their programme, is the student that has no time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p93v00zfzdx5g0t4w0n21v)) - And it means that power, at a student level, is expressed through the ability of organised groups to get proximity to the union. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p94c3kx5ejyn35hj2nv61j)) - Cultural power can be even more powerful than structural power as once a union becomes known as being “this kind of union,” ==sport led, activities, led, this kind of democracy, very political, not very political, and so on, this becomes not what the union does but its identity==. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p94syw41kxk9b04nezsdvp)) - To my mind, the great democratic struggle is not just who is heard, as everyone agrees a variety of voices, experiences, and backgrounds is a good thing. More fundamentally, it is a question of whether power and influence is best expressed through centralised structures, systems, and cultures or through more dispersed organising methods. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p9592ymvj480wxhhdv5dem)) - The former is generally how unions have operated in the UK while the latter, is more like [work going on in Europe](https://wonkhe.com/blogs-sus/an-opportunity-to-engage-learn-and-develop-our-european-study-tours-in-2024/) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p959n9nftwdwnncqbw371f)) - This is a problem for unions in that their major organising model being aimed toward universities is therefore at odds with the ways in which the student experience is felt. ==In fact, the issues that are often raised to the most senior staff at the university are often shared frustrations or issues with the union but neither side has the direct executive power in which to make change==. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p979bcnmj0m3s9wv59zvn0)) - For students’ unions then, ==the centralisation of power could become an active barrier to change not an enabler of it.== This means considering not how to accumulate power but how to distribute it to the places where students can most readily organise in the places that most immediately reflects their reality. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p99mz9h34e4vpjfrzban5r)) - Focussing all central policy efforts on university policy development while devolving campaign work to existing groups, representatives, and other sub-union level bodies. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p99pgc4c0b9wszbwspvbrd)) - Devoting more time to faculty, school, and department level campaigns, above developing university campaigns. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p99y4sa25ew108bvfhta7c)) - Mobilising union resources outside of central management structures toward departmental organising. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p99z5k6dzh0xxkt1n3yqpr)) - Shifting officer priorities from general sense of injustices to hyper specific campaigns with departments, schools, and faculties. This would include empowering representatives with the skills and knowledge to carry out this work ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p9a06zgvd3xt597vfmj4xx)) - All of this is of course dependent on the availability of resources – and each students’ union needs a different model – but democracy is also a choice about resources. The choice, and it is a clear choice, is to choose between spending more bringing students to the union or taking the union to the students – and giving it to them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j9p9p1kc46xfzh7zprnnj0ak))