This year will see GUSA continuing with the Chancellor’s Fund for Sport. The Chancellor’s Fund for Sport is a fund given by the University to assist students in partaking in projects that they wouldn’t normally be able to do.

Just last year the Chancellor’s Fund funded some exciting projects that would normally be out of reach for most. These projects included mountaineering trips to the Alps, a road cycle from Paris to Berlin and Glasgow University’s Men’s Basketball Club travelling to Canada.

Chris Millar is one such person who has benefited greatly from the excellent opportunities that the Chancellor’s Fund can provide. I spoke to Chris about his experiences with the Chancellor’s Fund. “Last summer three friends and I took on the challenge of a lifetime – cycling from Glasgow University to the Sahara Desert in order to raise money and awareness for a children’s charity.”

When asked how the Chancellor’s Fund helped his journey, he discussed how the trip was “a once in a lifetime opportunity never would have been possible had it not been for The Chancellor’s Fund which allowed us to purchase essential equipment required for the expedition including bicycle maintenance, camping gear and our return travel home. Being four students, each with a minimal income, the Fund supported us in being able to get out there and tackle the project of our dreams!”

Stuart Law, GUSA’s finance convenor describes it as” a great way for the University to assist students to undergo a project in which they wouldn’t be able to in normal circumstances”.

Does the Chancellor’s Fund sound like something you would be interested in?  GUSA will be taking applications for grants when university resumes in January. So if you have any queries about the Chancellor’s Fund then do not hesitate to contact Stuart at gusa-finance@gla.ac.uk.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) lockout could potentially signal a sea of change in the world of sport. The owners of the NBA teams have had enough of entrenching themselves in debt in order to build a winning side and have decided to take a stance. Although a draft resolution was being voted on at the time of print, regardless the implications  remain the same. The NBA as a whole has been losing $300 million dollars per year over the past several years and 70% of teams are running at a loss each year. If they are successful in readdressing the balance of power, they could potentially start a revolution in terms of how sports stars are paid and perhaps even reduce the influence of player power when it comes to financial matters.

The lockout which had looked set to force the cancelation of the NBA season stemmed from a breakdown in negotiations between players and owners. The teams are struggling to cope with spiraling debt, caused mainly by the vast sums paid in player’s wages and in order to address this issue and to try and alleviate their financial worries, the owners have called for a salary cap of $45 million per team. The one stumbling block they have come up against is the rather tall brick wall of superstar players they have on their teams. They are the ones who hold all the cards when it comes to negotiating the multimillion dollar contracts that are crippling their franchises. The result of this stalemate is that there is no Basketball and the people who really matter, the fans, are being deprived.

What has this got to do with other sports? Well change the playing surface and it could easily sound like the description of any British football team; multimillionaire players earning vast sums of money, which in many cases forces clubs into administration. The extortionate wages being paid in the British game has brought many a footballing giant to its knees, such as Leeds United and Portsmouth in the English premier league. They are both examples of clubs that were spending way beyond their means in terms of player salaries and transfers and ultimately it cost them their place at the top table of English football.

Closer to home we have previously seen examples of teams like Gretna FC trying to buy their way to the top, it eventually got them there, but the time spent in the rarefied upper echelons of the top flight was fleeting. The bubble soon burst and they dropped out of the top flight, plighted with debt from players’ salaries. The solution was to offload the high earners who simply moved on to other teams willing to pay the going rates and the club was soon back down in the lower divisions.

If the same principles of the NBA lockout were applied to football in the UK, it could have as profound an effect as the 1995 Bosman ruling. Except it would now shift the balance of power from players back to the clubs. It could lead to a salary cap, a reduction in clubs operating debts and perhaps even make it a more level playing field, as with a salary cap enforced, teams would not be able to simply buy their way to glory. Instead they would be forced to nurture young talent and build teams consisting of maybe one or two superstars playing alongside local homegrown players.

The reckless spending has come home to roost for many teams, including Glasgow Rangers, who now find themselves in a precarious financial situation, most of which can be traced back to trying to spend their way to the Champions league. A few years of not earning the big money from UEFA and TV deals soon has an impact and they are now paying for years of living beyond their means. But this story can be associated with the majority of clubs in Britain. Perhaps chairmen up and down the country are watching events unfold across the pond and considering implementing some changes of their own in order to protect and preserve clubs for future generations rather than succumb to the demands of the current crop of multimillionaire players who bleed their clubs dry.

Situated on Woodlands Terrace is a gallery known as the Common Guild, a handsome building that boasts a magnificent view of Kelvingrove Park. Recently, I met the communications manager Kitty Anderson, who told us about the gallery. I started by asking her how the Common first got started.

Firstly, how did the Common Guild first start up? Can you tell us about its history?

The Common Guild was established in 2006, with the first project taking place in 2007. The organisation was established by Katrina Brown, former deputy director and curator of DCA, Dundee. It began as an independent initiative, originating from the development of The Modern Institute. The Common Guild is a charitable, not-for-profit organisation supported by Creative Scotland and Glasgow City Council.

The Common Guild presents a dynamic, international programme of contemporary visual art projects, exhibitions, and events. These include gallery-based exhibitions at our current premises as well non-gallery, one-off projects, talks and collaborations. We are committed to presenting artists’ work in interesting and engaging ways and aim to offer access to world-class contemporary art experiences and discussions.

Since 2008 we have been working in partnership with Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art on the Art Fund International scheme, building a new collection of international, contemporary work for the city. To date we have acquired works by Emily Jacir, Matthew Buckingham and Lothar Baumgarten, amongst others, many of which are regularly on display at GoMA. In addition to our own programme, The Common Guild is responsible for the artistic direction of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2010 and 2012.

During a talk you gave, you mentioned the significance of the name, as representing the best being made available to all. What would you describe as the Common Guild’s vision?

The Common Guild is dedicated to the delivery of high quality contemporary visual arts projects, events and exhibitions working with artists and others both Scottish-based and international. It seeks to offer widespread access to high quality programmes that engage with our visual culture, and introduce voices form elsewhere.

Our commitment is currently to programme over premises – to undertaking and realising projects that will define our identity and broad awareness and understanding of what the Common Guild is.
Through working in collaboration with various existent bodies, as well as developing our own independent programmes, we intend to become a dynamic and wholly positive force in contemporary cultural provision in Scotland. The Common Guild seeks to pursue an ethos of artist-centred practice in the realisation of projects of scale, quality and ambition as well as national or international significance.

I have described the Glasgow art scene as extensive; how would you describe the Common Guild’s relationship to and place within Glaswegian art, and its venues?

In its public focus and international programming, the Common Guild compliments the work of other Glasgow-based visual arts organisations, especially those more accurately geared towards artists support, studio provision and production facilities, and aims to extend awareness and debate. In a city with an widely acknowledged, international reputation as a viable centre for visual artists, the Common Guild seeks to establish a new model of working with artists and audiences that avoids exclusive focus on either gallery or non-gallery based practice. The Guild aims to truly reflect, and therefore support more appropriately, the current nature of artists’ practice, with a more integrated approach to work across different types of spaces and places. Artists increasingly pursue gallery-based practise in parallel with, and complementary to, project working and/or public commissions, events and productions. We believe that the ultimate location of an artwork need not be the premise on which the institution is founded.

What have been the Common Guild’s inspirations, and what are its ambitions?

Inspiration has been taken from a number of models across the world, and the ongoing ‘Detours’ talks series has been crucial to developing our ideas and ambitions. ‘Detours’ aims to introduce views from elsewhere by leaders in the visual arts, and explores the relationship between practice and context: how institutions and professional practice develop in response to specific situations, both geographic and cultural.

The aims of the organisation are:
• To develop awareness of contemporary visual culture through the work of artists on a long-term, sustainable basis.
• To increase public access to contemporary art through the ongoing presentation of exhibitions and projects.
• To support the work of artists, local and international, through exhibition, commission, publication and discussion.
• To promote a strong, confident image of contemporary art and artists in Scotland.
• To foster long-term approaches to education around contemporary art and culture, and an environment in which it can occur.
• To work with the relevant partners on the development of contemporary collecting.
• To establish a sound financial basis and relevant business plan.
• To work closely with relevant partners and potential partners locally, nationally and internationally.
• To ensure dynamic internationalism as a key part of the visual arts provision in Glasgow and Scotland.

John should be sitting where you are now: reading the Glasgow Guardian, in the library perhaps, maybe over a coffee, taking a break from writing his honours dissertation. Instead, the Glasgow student is in Lagos, Nigeria, with no home, no medication and no money. “The others came back to families” he says, “but I came back to graves.”

John Oguchuckwu fled his native Nigeria ten years ago, after he was tortured and his mother, father and two sisters were killed in the sectarian violence which plagues the country. He has since claimed asylum in the UK based on a fear of persecution and torture. However, John was ‘forcibly removed’ from the UK on 20th July after his appeal in the Scottish high court failed. Friends and family are now very worried about John’s wellbeing as he has a history of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. The student’s belongings were seized before his deportation and he was left with just a two-week supply of his anti-depressants. He has no money and lives between hostels in Lagos.

Speaking on Skype, John was tearful and it is evident that this recent trauma has taken its toll:

I feel like I have been thrown away, passed away … My life has been torn apart, I don’t know how to explain it … when I feel low, I cannot do anything.

Shortly after arriving in Lagos, John was found crying in the airport by Johseph Chukwu, who took him to a hostel and paid for him to stay the night. Chuckwu told the Herald that John would not eat or leave the hostel, and that he was crying so much he was violently sick. The kind stranger has since had to leave to return to his family, leaving John alone in Lagos.

John’s ‘Scottish mum’ Elizabeth Jenkins said: “This country has blood on its hands for sending John back.” Jenkins and her family ‘unofficially adopted’ John after hearing about his plight through their church:

I myself being his Scottish mum, plus my daughters and grandchildren, accept him as a member of our family. He is a devoted son showing love to myself plus members of my family. He has proven to be an asset in my family’s life.

John was an active member of his local community and was an extraordinary minister at St. Michael’s Church in the east end of Glasgow. The archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti, has spoken strongly in defense of the Glasgow student: “He would be an asset to our country, our community, the parish in which he serves.”

It was thanks to the support of his church and local community, who paid his fees, that John was able to study for a business degree at Glasgow University. At the time of his removal from the UK, John was beginning his honours dissertation and putting together a proposal for a PhD, on migrant entrepreneurs in Glasgow. During his time at university, John was involved with the SRC and was recently shortlisted by the principal’s office for a bursary from the Thomas and Margaret Roddan Trust.

Pauline Donald, head of the ‘Our John’ campaign said that he held his place at Glasgow very dearly: “At university, John was protected from the stigma of being an asylum seeker. He wasn’t John the asylum seeker; he was John the student.”
Prior to studying at Glasgow, John completed an HND at the Central College of Commerce. His former course leader, Arlene Brown, said: “I have no hesitation in recommending him as an asset to this country.”

Under article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, “right to respect of private and family life” and demonstration of having established roots in the UK can be grounds to remain in the country. Whilst the court recognized that John had a well-established private and family life, the judge decreed that he could establish a new life in Nigeria through the church, as he had done in Scotland. Not for the first time in his life, John now finds himself torn from his family, penniless, and forced to try and rebuild his life in a country which is now alien to him.

Students and staff from Glasgow University rallied to assist John, and petitioned the home secretary Theresa May on his behalf, seeking a stay of execution. A number of John’s lecturers wrote letters in support of the student and both the principal and Graham Caie, the clerk of senate, took a personal interest in his case:

The principal, Anne Anderson, and myself wrote a letter to the home secretary before he was deported, asking for his return to Glasgow, but to no avail,” says Graham Caie. “The SRC, students, lecturers, and many more have done all in their power to help him.

Caie is now looking at the the possibility of transferring John’s credits to a Nigerian university to allow him to finish his studies, but he also said that should John be allowed to return to the UK, the university would do everything they could to help him reintegrate.

The SRC contacted students over the summer, urging them to write to Theresa May, and have since been working with Student Action for Refugees (STAR) to raise money to send to John.

Amy Johnson, vice president for student support said:

As part of GUSRC health week, we worked with STAR to organize a ceilidh, to raise money to send to John in order for him to purchase medical supplies. We managed to raise over £300 which was wired to him last week. I intend to keep raising funds at every opportunity.

Speaking on Skype on Thursday night, John expressed his thanks to everyone for all their help and support, saying that it was invaluable to him. The Our John campaign is currently lobbying the Immigration Minister to ask him to use his discretion to bring John home to continue his undergraduate and postgraduate career. In the meantime, they are also desperately fundraising so as to help secure John a safe place to stay and his necessary medications. Donations can be made via Paypal, to oorjohncampaign@gmail.com

There is very little functionality in this system, I’m amazed that it was chosen as the “best” system that was on offer. The promise of a streamlined system with functionality, visibility and automation seems like a fairy tale when absolutely none of this has materialised. Reporting is impossible. Nothing is automatic. A student record has to be opened in several different places for (still limited) visibility. Documents have to be uploaded in different screens. Certain searches can’t be made with name/date of birth. It can take 15 clicks and several server connection problems to perform a simple task. Surely all of this is unacceptable?

The Student Services queue had a 2 hour wait at registration time, with the answer of “I’m sorry, it’s not working properly” being given to increasingly frustrated students after this lengthy wait. Our reputation must have taken quite a hit during this time alone. The system is just not set up in a way that is useful for staff or students, the very people it was supposedly bought to help.

The answer “I don’t know” is a common one when questions are raised at so-called “training sessions”, with “I would need to check that” being a close second. It really doesn’t offer much in the way of comfort that anyone knows what they are doing after two years of building/enhancing/whatever was supposed to be happening with the new system. Testing seems to have been non existant.

One poorly set up system is not a valid replacement for several useful ones. It just doesn’t deliver. How has this been allowed to happen?

Adviser
Medicine, Veterinary and Life Sciences

Far too time consuming. All other work now behind as a result, as student enrolment had to be priorotised.

Not user friendly; in fact, user-unfriendly. This is a retrograde step.

Typeface tiny and difficult to read; far too many lines/words/tables on each screen. View can be expanded; however it would then take several stages of scrolling around to see the entire page. This is not a moblie phone!

WebSurf had a “Dyslexia View”. Even without this it was easy to read; clearly set out; not too much info on the one page. MyCampus may disproportionately disadvantage staff and students with visual impairment, which is an Equality issue. In these respects it is a distinct backwards step.

Further disability/equality issues: Lack of Disability information on the system; lack of Absence information; length of time taken to complete taskes; increased screen time; increased stress levels.

Far too much training is required. I have been to five 3-hour workshops and still am not much further forward. This is more than just unfamiliarity or “teething trouble”; I attended one session for WebSurf, learned on the job, and it did not impact significantly on my other work, in fact I learned a lot of useful information about the tasks of Advisers, terminology, etc. MyCampus has significantly added to my workload and removed my attention from elsewhere.

As an Adviser and Course Co-ordinator, the main problem for me is probably communication problems on an extreme scale. Changes in terminology, class codes/lists/email. It has been extremely difficult to communicate with student classes/groups. Very messy, urgently needs resolving. Likely to impact on student feedback and satisfaction.

Terminology virtually unrecognisable, and largely inappropriate. Does not match with any other university systems, student information, etc. Problems with class lists (“rosters”? is this an assumption?), class email addresses, timetables. Significantly impacted on smooth start to term.

Course codes have changed, without teaching staff being informed.

Does not seem to link to other University systems, which I understood was one of the main reasons for bringing it in. Usually enrolled students would be automatically enrolled on the appropriate Moodle but this did not happen, even when course codes on Moodle were changed to the new ones. Made class communication very difficult, particularly as no working class email addresses available then.

Job “Aids” at the training sessions were out of date. Different screens were shown from those on the sheets, even when all instructions followed.

For changing students to a repeat year, this has to be done on several places in the system. After attempting this, then going through with a trainer step by step, trying again, getting stuck, sitting with another trainer, the “Year/Level” info still does not match on all the screens (eg Student Details/Student Summary). Not at all clear what still needs doing to resolve this, or how this will affect “Roster”, exam enrolment, etc, which is a major concern.

“Eligible to Enrol” was particularly problematic and quite random. One student was listed as “Eligible to Enrol: No” but had no “Holds” on his record. I then checked the record of another student with a similar course/route to check the settings and compare with the “problem” student so I could see what needed changing. On returning to the “problem” studen’t record it now said “Eligible to Enrol: Yes”, without me actually changing any settings/info at all.

Several problems with fees. Students cannot be classed as “debtors” just because we have changed systems. Makes us appear like a dodgy catalogue company who have set the debt collectors on folk. Not fair to our students and possibly a legal issue; this needs resolving immediately and must not be repeated next year/ever.

The second item on the student homepage is how to enter their debit card details!! Not a good advert for GU!

“Shopping Cart” may be readily understood by students, but as one has written, they thought they were choosing Honours courses, not shopping online at Asda… This is “dumbing down” and completely inappropriate, has been raised in several meetings/forums, with the standard response “the students understand it/no-one else has complained/you are telling the wrong person”. This is not good terminology to use if Glasgow wants to be world-leading and professional.

I am not resistant to change, far from it, but firmly believe that the systems should exist to support us, not vice versa. Unless this balance can be changed I do not see how Management can contuinue to justify MyCampus.

Range of contributors
Social Sciences

No need to reiterate the many comments regarding advising with which I concur.

My additional concern has been related to disability information. We have PG students who began their programme (plan?!) in August and registered with the Disability Service then, but I only received the official ‘alerts’ last week (ie end of October) by which time they had been in classes and on placement for nine weeks. During the first attempt to send these out (mid October) the system failed and it took nearly a fortnight to resend the information. The idea of holding onto all of the records until the end of the drop-off/add-on period was not helpful for staff and students here, particularly when the sending then failed.

I don’t have time to run a query every week to find out if any additional students have had their needs recorded; at the moment alerts seem to be going to the student’s advisers and not to me as disability co-ordinator.

My main concern is that I may miss important information which needs to be passed on to colleagues at the earliest possible opportunity.

I contacted the DS in August asking if there would be any specific training available for disability co-ordinators in relation to MyCampus, who relayed my request to SLP, but nothing has come of that, as far as I am aware.

I have to say that the individual staff involved with the disability issues at SLP have been very helpful, but again we are talking about countless work hours, both of tutors and of the SLP team, which have to be added to the overall cost of the project.

Other
Social Sciences

The SLP Board had a good representation of academics, advisers, SRC etc. which all sounds like the right way to oversee this kind of complex IT implementation. If we are to learn how to do things better in future how did this board not avert the problems or see the problems coming earlier? Were they not given the right information? Did they not do their oversight role appropriately??

Administrator
Medicine, Veterinary and Life Sciences

1. One of the biggest problems (and it is still ongoing ) has been staff having the appropriate access levels to make appropriate changes. I assume this may be because we have a professional degree which does not fit into the normal advising role. It is a fixed curriculum. Therefore, all “advising” tasks are carried out by administrators.

Can someone please tell us who can give access? We just seem to go round in circles on this.

2. A related problem, verification of graduation does not show date of birth. I cannot provide the necessary verification to international medical councils without date of birth. I need to be able to see this (all I see in field where there is DOB is **/**/**. At the moment I am jumping between WebSurf and MyCampus. What happens when Websurf is switched off?

Administrator
Medicine, Veterinary and Life Sciences

I am a new university teacher and have been at the University of Glasgow since 1st September 2011. Despite the fact that I am teaching and administrating on several courses I still do not have any access to My Campus. This is despite the fact that I have logged a helpdesk call on 13th Oct. I chased this call up a week later to be told not sure who deals with this but that they would escalate the call to urgent!! It is now 30th Oct and the call has not yet been acknowledged never mind dealt with and I still have no access to My Campus and instead have to rely on admin support to give me class lists etc that I should be able to get from My Campus.

Course Director
Social Sciences

The detailed comments cover a lot of points. I may be repeating some here but it is surely useful to know the scale of this disaster.

The course I manage is complex – there are several routes through it with students choosing from a wide range of options that are also taught with other courses. The course alos runs FT, PT and modular. We used to have intelligent staff bringing their intelligence to bear on the administrative problems this complexity inevitably throws up. So we made them all redundant and replaced them with a binary system which cannot cope with complexity. We also introduced this syetm at a time when none of the new administrative staff are familiar with the programmes. This seems to be the same across all administrative services. We were “encouraged” to switch applications admin to RIO earlier this year and since April I am now on my 4th dedicated administrator (promised a 5th next month) – nothing wrong with the staff but where is the familiarity that gives anyone confidence things will work? So we have a broken system and the people trying to fix it don’t know what a working system looks like (it takes determinedly cavalier, bloody minded and obtuse management to bring all these factors together at the same time across a large and complex institution).

Several of our students still cannot enrol (one reason for this seems to be that courses to run next semester don’t have rooms allocated to them; without timetabled rooms MyCampus will not let them in). This means they cannot access the library or other web based student services like Moodle so I have to e-mail course materials. But why some can and some can’t remains a mystery.

Students part way through programmes have been credited with completing courses they never took but are not credited with the courses they took and passed.

Most of our students are getting the wrong fees invoiced. Some of our students who have finished have been invoiced.
Even with the 50 students I am responsible for this has led to a huge volume of individual queries and admin problemswhich are, inevitably very time consuming.

Everyone involved must have spent many many more hours than usual involved in picking up the mess and trying to repair the PR damage. The £13.2 million takes no account of staff time including all the unpaid overtime we are working to keep the ship afloat, to convince students it will get resolved before June 2012 etc.

There is humour in this too though. One day I started early in the morning with a problem that needed to be resolved and watched the e-mails move round the campus as various people passed it on. Towards the end of the day someone who hadn’t read the whole trail asked me to resolve it for them so they could report back.

If this was a bank of course the management would be getting high salaries and bonuses ……. no lets not go there.

Adviser
Arts

System architecture is not user-focused; it is counter-intuitive, difficult to parse and uses lots of special terms which often appear synonymous but actually refer to totally different concepts or processes. There is a lack of helpful links, forcing one instead to use the search function more often than in any system I have ever had to use. The search function is extremely cumbersome; it often proves impossible to find, for instance, a specific course (even if one knows exactly which course one is looking for). That the system operates mostly with numbers (of both students and courses) doesn’t help.

Prefer not to say
Prefer not to say

Ditch a system (Websurf) which worked, spend £14m replacing it with a system (MyCampus) which doesn’t work and, in the process, make Glasgow University a laughing stock. You really couldn’t make it up!

Class Head
Science and Engineering

Absence Reporting in MyCampus

I ran the “Absence Report by Course” Query for my class; there are a number of problems:

(1) Some students are listed twice in this list but once in the “class roster” lists.
(2) Some of the students have different “level” information in this list compared with other places in MyCampus. e.g.: some students are listed as being in “First Year” in this list but in “Third Year” in the class roster list (and other combinations of wrongness).
(3) I clicked on the “view” bit for the absence reports but there is NO information in most of them bar start and stop times. And some of those periods of absence are listed as being ~6 weeks long, even though I have eyeballed said students as being present in my class during these periods. There is no list of which classes a student has missed during the absence. So, since I can’t access it as I am not a student, is the interface for students as non-intuitive and non-functional as the one for staff?

Also, and most importantly, I am not being emailed when absence reports are uploaded by students in my class so I have no means to check whether a report has been filed other than to go in manually at regular intervals and check myself. This is VERY inefficient and a retrograde step since Websurf.

(Incidentally, I am also not emailed in my capacity as an Adviser and there is no query that I can find to find out which (if any) of my advisees have submitted an absence report.)

Secretary and member SLP Support
Medicine, Veterinary and Life Sciences

Access levels were a huge issue but after months this now hopefully seems to be sorted.

SLP support calls – not enough members of staff seem to be involved – more would be useful.

SLP support calls received. Even although students state whether they are UG or PG it would be useful for course to be picked up Automatically. This would save time with support members having to go off and look up details on my campus (although was still relying slightly on websurf).

Class e-mails proved difficult if students hadn’t registered. Hopefully this will be a one off for continuing students but not new students. A lot of communications with post master who in the end suggested using Programme Plans to e-mail students instead of course e-mails. Course e-mails would only pick up registered students, which at the start of term is not very useful.

My Campus Interface with other applications. – Would be useful to have a way of down loading a programme plan – year specific student photographs.

Administrator
Social Sciences

- Students having ‘holds’ due to outstanding August Diet marks. These students were at a disadvantage when
choosing tutorial slots.
- There seemed to be ‘holds’ on 3rd years going into 4th year.
- Timetable clashes.

Administrator
Medicine, Veterinary and Life Sciences

We had to undergo a lot of training in a short period of time. Returning students had a very difficult time and the feedback I received from them was not good. They were frustrated. It meant a lot more work for me. I found the SLP team to be very helpful and the MVLS Graduate School replied to emails very quickly.

Prefer not to say
Prefer not to say

When the three organisations put forward for this contract made their initial presentations, it was crystal clear at that time that Oracle was far and away the worst. Why this product was chosen over the other two, which were well established within other UK institutions, and which appeared to provide a user-friendly, intuitive experience, I will never know.

I am in the fortunate postition (at the moment) of not having to use MyCampus very much. However, when I’ve tried to use it for something very simple – trying to find out whether a student is registered – I get different results. First time, the student will appear and be shown as not registered. Second time, the system can’t find any student with that name. What’s going on??

Adviser
Social Sciences

This is simply the most appalling software application I have ever had the misfortune to use.

It is clearly not fit for purpose in so many areas and was not properly adapted to the needs of Glasgow University. Despite an extraordinarily long preparation phase by the SLP team, the system has been “made- live” in haste and was clearly not ready.
As an advisor I was asked at very short notice to a “plan” check but was never actually given the correct access to do this!

I hope the review team will consider the real cost including staff time that has been and still is being lost through this process.

Co-incidentally, since the start of the MyCampus system I have been receiving marketing emails from Oracle! Does this mean that the University has give out staff emails for this purpose?

Adviser
Science and Engineering

A really dreadful system that has caused me and my students so much grief, wasted hours of time and still seems unfit for use.

Prefer not to say
Prefer not to say

Overarching comment: no one listens to academics, so why amI even bothering to write this?

Sub-Overarching comment: having wasted much of my, andothers’, time on this ill-advised and ill-fated project, you now plan to wastemore valuable time on an autopsy. which will probably end up concluding thatthe main authors of this fiasco are blameless. Last month I attended a meetingwith Pat Furze and other SLP people – all of 2 hours which I could have spentfar more profitably. The result: absolutely nothing has happened to ease ourload or to solve the problems.

I concur with the previous comments, so I won’t add my ownin similar vein.

I have just come from a meeting where we were asked to spendeven more of our time adding bits and pieces to the existing plans, where wewere shown how to stop the system from counting 3rd year courses in the 4thyear, and how to modify course lists to accommodate changing courses. So thenightmare continues.

The unpalatable truth is that no one really cares about whatMyCampus does to academics, administrators & students. All that isimportant is for the SMG to get the numbers they want out of the system and forus somehow to learn to live with MeinKampfus.

There is only one lesson to be “learnt”. TheUniversity was sold a dud, something which is unfit for purpose, and theycompounded this by ignoring everything advisers and academics said to themduring the SLP’s implementation. It really is that simple. The smart thingwould be to acknowledge that and try to find a better way forward. Teaching andresearch is being damaged – if you care, then do something about it.

Administrator
Social Sciences

• Training was given on the use of MyCampus too late for staff to be familiar with it before the students started, we were therefore learning alongside the students which looked wholly unprofessional and made us feel stupid in the process.
• The whole system is clunky and non user friendly.
• There is no easy way to locate who our students are within our subjects and even harder to find out the joint honours students
• There is no easy way to locate our disability students.
• Websurf was easier to use and much quicker at finding information.
• The system is slow
• The rosters system does nt automatically update
• We don’t not know what permissions we require as we are not fully aware of what the system can do and what we will need to do until it arises.
• Students are not comfortable using the system and some are not aware of whether they have the appropriate modules or credits on their record which means that administrators are having to double check this and email each individual student.
• The whole system is time consuming as each part does not necessarily “talk to” other parts which means certain things have to be done twice.
• To be honest have nothing good to say about MyCampus.

Adviser
Arts

My first concern visceral reaction to this system was when it was showcased to the College of Arts and the words Add to Cart came to view. It is true that it’s clunky and over-elaborate front-end was causing me alarm, but on first reading the words ‘Add to Cart’ and noticing that none of the Senior Management or implementation folk winced, I knew they had no realistic conception of how our students would perceive this, and how staff would feel their work in teaching and research devalued and debased. So, I wrote to the Clerk of Court saying:

I understand that the ‘add to cart’ function seems on the face of it to be a rather trivial thing to be so angry about, and I understand that it might even be defended on the grounds that the users, who I will always think of as students, would be familiar with this interface element, but this runs more deeply than that.

Metaphors are important, and the metaphor of the shopping cart (we don’t even call them ‘carts’ in this country!) obtrudes the idea of the commercial relationship at the very front of the students’ relationship with the university. They won’t think of themselves as joining a community, or starting an engagement with an intellectual life, or even simply starting a new phased of their education; they will just be buying stuff, like they’d buy music, or another 100 texts for their phone.

This changes at a very fundamental level the relationship between the students and their tutors, the students and the university, and between the university and its management. It immediately twists and devalues our relationship with our students.

As far as I see it

* The university’s first goal is to create new knowledge, preserve what’s known, and to pass that on to another generation.

* A second goal is to deploy that knowledge into society, by creating an intellectually sophisticated population

* It’s only a third goal to educate any individual in particular. Getting money from the students may cover the costs of this, but it’s got to be wrong for all the reasons I’ve just given, to put the funding of a third-level activity right at the front of the students’ initial experience.

————-

I wrote this on the 22nd April this year and, only after prompting him for a reply on the 16th May, did I receive the following response on the 17th May:

I said to you that I’d discuss the metaphor issue with the SLP Board, which I did. I understand and respect your concerns about the Add to Cart feature, but they don’t appear to be widely felt. That said, we will seek feedback from users of the system as we implement it. The Add to Cart feature is not something we can change without a lot of expense, but if there is a general aversion to it, then we will consider whether the expense would be justified.

————–

There are many ways in which the Oracle system in Queen’s, Belfast is not comparable to our own, the complexity of our broad degree structure in Arts and Social Science is one example, but it is comparable in having an Add to Cart function. Queen’s have now managed to have this removed; I do not know at what expense, but that expense is justifiable if we don’t want our students to be so disappointed with us that they create an open Facebook forum “The awkward moment when MyCampus fails us and we want WebSurf back” or an online petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/glasgowmycampus/

So, that was my initial concern in April. I tried to raise the issue and many others at the ‘training sessions’ but the SLP team were clearly exhausted and in many ways just as irritated as we, the trainees, were by the system. Our only difference was that their lives were now almost fully-invested in making this system a success, for how else could they justify what they had been doing since 2008. I have used inverted commas around ‘training sessions’ because, and I add, through no fault of their own, these sessions taught me very little that I would actually need when I came to use the system with my new and continuing students. There would have been too much to learn because of the overwhelming complexity and unintuitive nature of the system, that we skimmed lightly over the surface and came away having wasted another three hours of our time.

Let me move ahead to August, and here I will copy from a message I sent to the Clerk of Senate. [I should add that this was a misdirection; I ought to have sent this directly to the Course Team and the V-P Learning and Teaching. So be it.] From 8th August onwards I have spent hour upon hour fighting with a user-hostile, inefficient, and counter-intiuitive computer system for which I have had to, far to frequently, apologise to our incoming students and my continuing students. So much time and so much stress, yet this is meant to reduce administrative workloads. So, let me give you an example of the mendacity of this claim.

I had to explain to a student yesterday that, if she wanted to switch from History to Sociology and there was a one hour clash with a Sociology lecture and a Psychology Lab., she would need to change her Psychology Lab time first. However, to do this successfully she would have to withdraw from Psychology 1B, then Psychology 1A, and then re-enroll in Psychology 1A (making sure not to book a clashing Lab time) and then 1B. This entails enrolling from all classes: tutorials, lans and lectures, and it must be done in that order. But she would not then be sure that she would get back into the class because Psychology will, by now have closed enrolment. Only if she manages to do all of this successfully, can she then enrol in Sociology 1A and 1B, and only then remove History 1B and then 1A. And the process must be done in this order: Psych 1B, 1A, Psych 1A, 1B, Sociology 1A, 1B, and then History 1B, 1A, all because of a one hour clash with a Psychology Lab. To do this will easily take a couple of hours and she runs the risk of losing a her first choice class.

This is utterly preposterous, wasteful of everyone’s time, energy and good-will, and it is not a ‘teething’ or ‘unfamiliarity’ problem.

One of my Senior Honours advisees wrote to me saying “It’s quite sad seeing how much things have changed at the university since my first year back in 2008, many services being changed or withdrawn. Not sure what all the new freshers will make of Glasgow Uni and this My Campus business, first impressions and all that…”

I can only assume that the people who have foisted this on us, disregarding at every turn the legitimate and persistent concerns of staff and students, are strangers to shame and, it seems, from the amount of money that is thrown after this sinking-fund, blithely unaware that there is a financial crisis. I believe, through an FOI request, that the Student Lifecycle Support and Development Team is being established with effect from 1/10/11, with an expected cost for the financial year 2011/12 of £418,000. That sounds like the projected savings of the implemented ‘MyCampus’ for this year will be eaten up immediately.

Dr Ronald Knox, previously Assistant Chief Adviser in Arts but currently a student with a life-time’s experience as a member of the University and a Senior Adviser is on record as saying:

On nearly every point of comparison available to me, Mycampus compares very badly with Websurf, and it has wasted days of time for students and advisers. I am above all concerned about students who have not enrolled on their preferred courses because the obscurity of the system has misled them into thinking that their preferred courses were full (when in fact there are available tutorials hidden on a further screen); and I am also concerned that students and advisers have been so beset with mechanical problems that they have not had time to discuss the major academic issues which need to govern choice.

—-

I know of no adviser in Arts or any other College who is content with this system, yet no-one listens to us, and when there’s a chance for a vigorous and informed debate, the agenda is rigged and maundering begins. By the time the item is reached, some folk have had to leave the meeting, bitterly disappointed as you will see, and others are frustrated. If this is what was intended by the SMG, they succeeded.

I am passionate about my work and about my students experience and their futures, I have a happy and optimistic spirit, but I have been working all hours God sends to get on top of work because of MyCampus which is both cumbersome and inaccurate. Cumbersome doesn’t even come close. I used to approve a student’s curriculum and experience a certain joy in having done my advising well and sent the student, well-informed and contented, on their way. Now, well now, I “Remove” their “Service Indicators”, which means nothing and takes between seven and thirteen clicks if I get it right, otherwise I can end up heaven knows where. None of us improved by this and it’s bringing the University in to disrepute as a Public Sector IT disaster.

Writing this now is taking yet more time that should not have had to be devoted to trying to put right something which should never have come into existence. The emphasis now must be on sorting the whole thing out, but we are told that we cannot migrate the data; that may be true of all of the data, but it is not true of some of the data, the necessary data, and the taught postgraduate student data exists, I believe, in Websurf and MyCampus. So, migrate the information we need, continue with Websurf and, if you must, because there will be too much egg on too many faces*, pare down MyCampus, lose the Add to Cart function, introduce British English, and try again but more carefully and listening to the people in-house, like Computing Science, who know about these things.

Finally, I do think it is interesting that both the Chief Adviser in Arts, Dr Heather Lloyd, and the Chief Adviser in Science, Dr Iain Allison, both resigned before this system was finally implemented and unleashed upon us. How wise they were.

* “because there will be too much egg on too many faces” is never a good reason to spend more money on a sinking fund.

For comments and discussion on this article, see the page for our MyCampus December feature.

The issues which made the implementation of MyCampus almost farcical when it launched in September should be resolved by the beginning of the next academic year, according to the university’s vice principal of learning and teaching, Frank Coton.

Coton, who was speaking at the principal’s ‘question time’, said that next year MyCampus would return but “not as we know it”. He claimed that MyCampus would feature an updated user interface which would solve many of the more egregious issues that caused chaos at the start of the year, as staff scrambled to ensure students would be registered on the correct courses and tutorials.

However, despite Coton’s positive outlook, this does not appear to be a viewpoint shared by most university staff. The results of a feedback survey conducted by the Student Lifecycle Project – the internal group responsible for overseeing the project – reveal anger from staff towards the project and those responsible for overseeing it.

Most advisors and administrative staff who responded appear to share the opinion that despite attending various training sessions aimed at making the system more clear, little has been achieved. One advisor has said: “I have been to five three-hour workshops and still am not much further forward”, whilst another staff member explains that “the answer ‘I don’t know’ is a common one when questions are raised at so-called ‘training sessions’.”

Another grievance has been the limited access that staff have to the system, which they view as preventing them from fixing problems students are having. An administrator from the medicine, veterinary and life sciences department has described it as being “one of the biggest problems” with staff not having the “appropriate access levels to make appropriate changes”.

A number of basic operational problems have also been brought to light by despondent members of staff. There are numerous complaints on the way the system runs, with advisors raising issues on the various complications encountered with students trying to enrol. One inconvenience raised by an arts administrator was that of students having ‘holds’, which meant that “students were at a disadvantage when choosing tutorial slots”.

Much of the staff criticism casts doubts on Coton’s assessment that the current issues with MyCampus usability is one of user interface, with one advisor in the social sciences department claiming it is an issue with the “system architecture [which isn’t] user-focused; it is counter-intuitive”. Technical complaints aren’t a new addition to staff criticism of MyCampus. Dr Paul Cockshott circulated an email which contained a range of issues raised by members of the department of computer science. The email revealed that staff members in computer science had predicted many of the failures and described them as “being covered by the first classes of our undergraduate software engineering courses”.

Staff feedback is also highly critical of the university’s Senior Management Group (SMG) with Dr Cockshott’s email describing it as part of “the SMG’s need to command and control us more effectively”, a view which appears to be shared by many of academics who have filled in feedback forms – with one member of staff who wished to remain completely anonymous saying: “No one really cares about what MyCampus does to academics, administrators and students. All that is important for the SMG is to get the numbers they want out of the system … teaching and research is being damaged – if you care, do something about it.”

The problems with this software package, produced by Oracle under the name of Campus Solutions, aren’t just limited to Glasgow. The Glasgow Guardian has been in contact with sabbatical officers at Queens University Belfast, Liverpool John Hopkins University, and the University Of Manchester, all of whom have experienced similar difficulties with the package which continued to plague the system in years that followed its initial implementation. Queens University’s vice president of welfare, Adam McGibbon, told the paper: “We’ve had issues for the last three years and only now are we starting to see some improvement.”

One of major complaints levelled at WebSurf, the predecessor to MyCampus, was its inability to handle the increased traffic produced when exam results were published, resulting in the entire system being inaccessible. With January exam results fast approaching it remains to be seen if MyCampus will outperform WebSurf and ensure the system is usable when traffic increases substantially as students attempt to get their results for the first semester.

For comments and discussion on this article, see the page for our MyCampus December feature.

And so an email landed in my inbox; “would you like to earn some money over Freshers Week as MyCampus support? ‘No’, was the initial answer in my head, until I remembered my place as a postgraduate student at a university which meets every request and every outcry with “we’ve got nae money!”. “Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to enquire…” soon followed thereafter.

The training day, more like ‘training afternoon’ and indeed ‘three hours training’ was, of course unthorough and in in the main unhelpful for the task that we were about to undertake. The university would not have been pleased, no doubt, that far less than the required number of students had taken them up on their generous offer of £6.50 and hour to be recipients of the ire and abuse which almost every student understandably has vented at the entire process. Still, it is an even worse sign when MyCampus Golden Boy, a besuited Gavin Lee has troubles working his way around the old system, and points us to videos hidden in remote parts of the gla.ac.uk website for any more information if it was needed. Training days usually exist, in my experience, as a hands-on troubleshooting and run-through of every problem and how to handle it; not to be sat down for an hour in front of a presentation. However, each of us were duly handed six or so sheets of advice about how the process worked and how to remedy the situation. Most answers turned out to be ‘log a support call’, in other words to send an SOS to MyCampus engineers to fix badly broken and ineffective parts of the process.

“It was not uncommon to have a queue that went round the entire Reading Room” (photo: Jani Helle)

I felt sorry for some of those put in charge of the operation. Several university workers were heading up the team, and at times were helpless to sort out the situation made by the MyCampus department. Perhaps there is the need to put a positive spin and a bit of PR on this, but I do not think more than 5,000 support calls in a week constitutes teething trouble in a system already condemned for being overpriced and under-thought. There is no doubt in my mind that the current Direct Debit problem facing many students who pay tuition fees is a direct result of university systems not working in the way that it should. Perhaps a cynical view, but the way in which MyCampus and Student Services is currently being organised lends itself to that of a paper-trail, with nobody being held accountable and none of the important questions being answered. If any lessons are to be learned from this, it is not to trial a programme to thousands of students before ensuring that it actually works, and to have a technical support team that is capable of handling the large volume of error support needed rather than to collapse entirely, leaving student assistants completely stranded. Perhaps this is common sense, but the MyCampus team on £3.75 million in salaries knew that already, right?

Of course when it came to my own registration I was entirely unsurprised that I couldn’t do it either. “Dear MyCampus support…”

For comments and discussion on this article, see the page for our MyCampus December feature.

Hello, and welcome to the 2011/12 edition of Bureaucracy and You, your one-stop shop for maximising inefficiency, alienation and teeth-grinding rage among your consumers. In this simple and easy-to-follow guide, we use real-life examples to take you through methods guaranteed to double or even treble the number of consumers who want to rip your head off and shit down your neck, and all at no extra cost to you!

Disclaimer: BaY makes no guarantees.
Actual cost may be up to £14 million.

Case Study – Glasgow University: How To Make the Worst of Software Changeovers

1. A lot of groundwork is involved in making what should be a utilitarian and practical exercise fraught with anger and bad feeling – even something as apparently minor as giving responsibility for overseeing the “upgrade” to an ex-student president can work wonders for engendering distrust amongst your consumer body. Be creative, but don’t be afraid of classics like “jobs for the boys” and “pointless, baffling expenditure”.

2. On no account should you listen to overwhelming anecdotal and professional evidence that the company engaged to provide, say, “MyCampus”, has a track record of fouling up and providing little-to-nil customer support. What, after all, do mere IT geeks know about software? Similarly, bear in mind that student-consumers are notoriously fickle types who’ll moan about anything from £9k fees to misogynistic, lying “representatives”; if you really want to succeed as an alienating bureaucracy, you’ve got to get the staff-consumers good and irate as well.

3. The mark of a good bureaucracy is its ability to spend money like it’s going out of style. Throw good money after bad, bad money after good, and your hands in the air like you just don’t care.

3.1. Advanced Bureaucratic Combat (the “Muscatelli Corollary”): For best effect, spend millions rearranging deckchairs on the MyCampus Titanic whilst at the same time announcing swingeing course and job cuts. Profess not to see anything contradictory about this: the measure of a Russell Group university is not the number and quality of the courses it offers, after all, but the indecipherability of its administrative software.

4. You should now have a non-functioning system, an overwhelmed (or determinedly unsupportive) support team, and thousands upon thousands of student-consumers whose emotional states range from “really quite unhappy” to “foetal with distress” (advanced variation: the system is so obtuse and badly-laid out that those whose first language is not English, or who have limited vision, literally cannot use it). Express the feeling that the problem lies not with the software, but with the consumers. Many bureaucrats would consider their work to be done by this point; but at BaY, excellence is our watchword.

Disclaimer: BaY may or may not actually have a watchword. Any and all requests for clarification should be directed somewhere else.

5. After several months of non-functionality, calls for explanation and resolution may become too loud to simply ignore any longer. Other, lesser guides would recommend that you take their needs and suggestions on board; but BaY says fuck those guides, they’re probably written by embittered consumers or something, and if you gave a damn about accountability or responsiveness, you’d have listened to the students and staff in the first place. The absolute utmost you should do is to make token patronising noises about “lessons learned”, but only if it is made patently obvious that you have in fact learned nothing.

5.1. Adding Insult to Injury (the “Lowther Corollary”): If you feel like your bureaucratic voyage doesn’t have quite enough anus-inverting absurdity yet, send your consumers an email acknowledging (without taking any shadow of responsibility) that the system has failed to do what it was supposed to; suggest that they should alleviate their petty and childish “budgeting concerns” by giving you more money. The smarmier the tone, the more effective the email.

6. If all else fails, and your position can simply no longer be tenned, you may want to consider the “Ritchie Manoeuvre”: quit, take the money, and blame it all on those pesky hippies.

Disclaimer: At time of going to print, the above procedure may be better known as the “Muscatelli Manoeuvre”. … well, shit, you can’t blame a guy for hoping.

For comments and discussion on this article, see the page for our MyCampus December feature.

Mr Ritchie’s main problem has not been his sub-Machiavellian backdoor dealings, but his incompetence. While we have come to expect SRC presidents to be either inconsequential or complicit, we hope that, at the very least, they can be subtle about furthering their own interests. As GUU president Chris Sibbald noted recently, three Sabbaticals from the last five years have taken or been offered jobs within the University. It is not the capitulation or corruption itself but the cravenness shown in the tranche of emails that did for Ritchie’s term as president.

Ritchie was not an especially corrupt SRC president, because the SRC is an institution designed to invite corruption. Its relationship to the University seems to be to make ‘representations’ rather than represent in any traditional or meaningful way. It has no political power, no desire to make demands, and no decision making status except a single full seat on the Court (there are five seats for unelected ‘co-opted members’). The result of this powerlessness is that polishing the unpalatable leavings of management is the nearest student politicians can come to making a difference. His resignation is a wake up call, a demand that we look at the state of our institutions.

We are at the end of a process of democratic shutdown that has been going on for 30 years. Before a slow liberalisation of access took place during the middle of the last century, universities were dominated by the interests of the government, industry, state and church; a stable group which self-confidently described itself as “the Establishment”. The postwar social democratic trend and the student movements of the 60s and 70s led to a brief opening up of educational institutions. That window has now closed – and has been closed for some time – and the concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands has returned. The universities, as the places where our leaders, bureaucrats and professionals are trained and reconciled to the world they are entering is still today the same world of hierarchy and inequality in issues of class, gender and race. While the popular imagination is that universities are filled with dissenters and revolutionaries, anyone who has engaged with them will realise that within their systems of governance remain some of the most opaque relationships between power and patronage that have ever existed. It seems to suggest that a lack of democracy or accountability is fine, as long as different social groups are allowed.

Warwick University, founded in 1965, was the model for what all universities in this country have become. Dubbed ‘Warwick University Limited’ by E P Thompson in his 1970 essay, it showed the way forward for partnership between academia and business. This partnership has turned, as predicted, into a subservient relationship. Just as the financial industry was pulled out of its chummy, paternal, safe, conservative role by the liberalisations of the seventies and eighties – and in particular, the ‘Big Bang’ of deregulation in 1986 – universities have been ‘put to work’. They had to change; the universities of the past were undemocratic, elitist and inaccessible. However that elitism hasn’t ended, and where it had the opportunity to align itself to the needs of society the academy has instead chosen to align itself to the needs of commerce and wealth. The focus on patents, ‘transmission’, higher and higher demands for researchers to publish, increasing class sizes, corporate firms designing courses, PhDs sold to dubious sons of tyrants: all of this adds up to an education system that increasingly looks like a con. Allister Heath’s supposedly “truly radical, revolutionary and subversive system” of free market economics has finally found its way into the carpetbags of university academics, and especially administrators, across the world. Ritchie’s view, outlined in one email, that people judge value based on cost (and therefore the more we charge the better the education!), would be laughable if it wasn’t so prevalent.

What has this to do with student politics? Simply this: our generation has the opportunity to fight back. At the University of Glasgow we have a tripartite system, the Court run by administrators, the Senate run by academics, and the SRC run by students. In any democratic system there are checks and balances, and the structure of our university allows for this. However the Senate, despite repeated attempts to claw back power, has been systematically eviscerated. The switch from a Faculty to a Collegiate system did away with the ability of staff to call their Heads to account. Elections by staff of their departmental heads ended years ago, and today staff are judged not on the merit of their research, but on the funding they can draw to the university. Staff meetings have been transformed from opportunities to discuss and debate the future of the institution (and even vote!) into briefings where policy is handed out from above and expected to be implemented. A small group of managers within the Court have filled it with business people who are considered responsible enough to make decisions and who have shut out the Senate. From the recent debacle at the SRC, the botched ‘consultation exercise’ around course closures last year, the violence meted out to the occupiers of the ‘Free Hetherington’, and this year’s MyCampus fiasco we have learned that in the end those who control the purse are unaccountable.

What we need is a debate at this university. We need a public debate about the control we wish to have over the institution. The four years of our lives we students spend here are some of the most formative of our lives, and for staff how the institution is run can affect their careers for decades. Our principal, Anton Muscatelli, was appointed in 2009 and it is now common knowledge that recently, barely two years later, he applied for the top job at the London School of Economics. This man has spent half as much time at the University of Glasgow as your average undergraduate student, yet he is seemingly in complete control of its budget and, if a court challenge goes in his favour concerning the closure of Slavonic studies, he is also in control of decisions on academic matters. He is part of a well-paid cabal of technocratic administrators who turn up, increase ‘efficiency’, and leave before they have to deal with the consequences.

When those making decisions on our behalf are not accountable to us; when as in Mr. Ritchie’s case they choose to act in ‘in our best interest’ rather than defending us on the mandate for which they were elected, something has gone seriously wrong. This is not just a problem of our democracy here at Glasgow, it is a failure repeated at all levels, from Holyrood, to Westminster, to the European Union. Everywhere the interests of ‘efficiency’, ‘responsible governance’ and always ‘the markets’ are being placed above that unfashionable concept, democracy. Just this week we see how the spectre of popular democracy in Greece has been branded ‘irresponsible’ as indexes across the world wretched at the idea of a referrendum. The leaderships of beleaguered Greece and now, Italy, are to be placed quite openly in the safe hands of economists. All pretence at trying to represent those at the ground-level of our society has been abandoned in the name of crisis. Concurrently and against this, there is a debate opening, growing, and a movement to push back. If the 30s taught us anything it is that this will result, for better or worse, in a complete reconfiguration of our society.

Hannah Arendt said in 1969: “In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” (Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (NY: Harcourt, 1969) p.81)
Principal Muscatelli and others will say that democracy is unstable and inefficient. The only answer we can give is this: we must have it. If we cannot come to a collective decision about how we are to learn, the processes by which we become useful to our society, then how are we to make a decision on anything, especially that most important question – how are we to live our lives? The SRC must be reformed, we should have a by-election if that is the way to give some person a mandate to begin this process of reformation, and most of all we have to bring politics back to our campus. The Executive and Council have a stark choice to make. They must choose whether they want to:
1. Run a caretaker SRC that will ineffectually see out the year, or
2. Start the debate. Move towards a reform of the the decision making processes at the University of Glasgow in such a manner that there is real representation of the interests of those who are involved in its key function: education.

The shady world of consensus, consultation and capitulation has to be over, we don’t want a pallid ‘choice’ within a market. We don’t want rigged power structures. We must have the ambition to look to the value of our degrees and how they are provided, not just the cost. We must demand a democracy in our education institutions. Compared to the great problems of the Western world this might not seem much, but it is something we can start to do, right here, right now.

For a response by Amy Johnson of the SRC, see here.