Debate: Should we stay or should we go?
Is NUS affiliation really all it’s cracked up to be? And can it possibly be worth £32,000 a year? Nicky Woolf and Francis Boorman debate what we ought to do…
Nicky Woolf
Yes, it is a lot of money. We pay 32,000 pounds sterling for the privilege of NUS membership, a membership which, on the face of it, doesn’t mean much more than an expensive, fairly pointless ID card and a lot of dull press-releases on purple-headed letter-paper.
But those are not the real things that the NUS does for students. Think about what the letters NUS stand for. National Union of Students. This is not a country club membership, or a discount card company, this is a union, an organisation whereby a large number of people can be empowered by their unity. United we stand, and all that.
When the chips are down, the NUS will be fighting our corner, with amounts of legal and financial clout that YUSU could only dream of, and we pay not only that we should get that when we need it, but that other students at other universities can get it too.
They have long experience of fighting for student causes in the courts and in Parliament, and without them we in York would be a very lonely and fairly small group of students striking out on our own against a University which prioritises our needs and demands very low and always has one beady eye on the bottom line.
I will grant you, the NUS did not exactly emerge victorious in the Tuition Fees debate. But they did their best, and they fought the student cause with vigour and with admirable dedication. Even if they didn’t succeed in the end, they still whipped up one hell of a storm in the process, and catapulted the issue into the public arena.
The NUS is also an invaluable way to share experience and information. They train all our YUSU officers in how they might execute their positions, and while you might scoff at the necessity for such training, it has proved invaluable in extending York’s LGBT, Environment and Ethics and Racial Equality movements.
Such movements are able, through the NUS, to campaign on issues on a national scale rather than being limited to the local. Their legal team will also be invaluable if any student society, or YUSU itself, is ever sued. Couldn’t happen? Try last year at Exeter University, where the students’ union was sued by the Exeter Christian Union over a disagreement about the CU’s evangelical policy. When your student union stands to lose thousands, professional legal experience comes in handy.
It’s about being able to affect issues on a national as well as a local scale. A manufacturing union fights for the rights of its members as and when it is required, and that is exactly what the NUS does for students, and it does it well.
It is our link to government, our lifeline to the corridors of power that we have no real need of… until we do. Sure, we could go it alone for a while, perhaps for a long while. But, sooner or later, a time would come when we would need the NUS to back us up.
It’s best to think of them as you would an insurance policy. You don’t need it in the short term, and you feel like it’s a waste of money, but when something unexpected happens you’re glad of that safety-net.
Yes, it is a lot of money. But it’s worth it.
Francis Boorman
The University of York pays upwards of £35,000 each year for affiliation with the NUS. Just by going to the NUS website, it is immediately obvious what is most important in attracting their student members: large, colourful pictures of the new NUS Extra cards grab your attention.
Yet these cost the individual £10 and offer some pretty unimpressive discounts (a “stunning” 10% off Matalan anyone?) which are generally available anyway, if you can prove you’re a student. My York card has worked fine so far. Money from the NUS Extra cards goes in part to funding our student union, but surely this would be better done at a local level, providing greater accountability.
Given the number of people who manage to get out and vote for YUSU motions, it isn’t surprising that, even as members of the NUS, York students are not a particularly active bunch. Why pay for membership if nobody is particularly interested in the work being done in their name? This is not just a cynical sigh about student apathy. I would be interested to know if most students have any idea what the NUS spends its time and their money doing. And if they did, would they necessarily agree?
To give one example, the NUS LGBT officers have organised a campaign against bullying in HE and FE institutions, entitled ‘Bullying Sucks’. They provide materials to encourage awareness of the issue, including ‘Bullying Sucks’ sweets. This Blue Peter style campaigning is not something with which I particularly want to be affiliated.
The most high profile campaign that the NUS has recently been involved in was against top-up fees. This is a situation in which students came together nationally and protested with one voice. But that voice need not be mediated by the NUS, who simply can’t justify themselves as leaders of a single issue campaign that most students were passionate about anyway. Failure to prevent the introduction of top-up fees shows that the NUS lacks political leverage, particularly seeing as six of their former Presidents supported the introduction of fees in the parliamentary bill.
The NUS might be great as a springboard for launching a career in politics, but for the average student it simply isn’t working. Leaving the NUS - as several universities around the country have recently done - would not prevent involvement with national student issues, just those issues which are actually important to us.
There is a slight hitch in the plan. It might be that the money paid to the NUS for affiliation would not be made available for other purposes, this removing the financial incentive for leaving. If this is the case it’s a real shame. Jealous holders of budgets so often stand in the way of change for the better.
Looking through the very glossy NUS impact report for the last year, I just wasn’t convinced that they make a real difference to students at The University of York. It’s time we set our own agenda and leave the NUS to theirs.
