Right. Who's next?

I can’t quite believe that it's this time of year already. But as this year’s crop of full time student leaders leave office (some have already gone, some over the next few weeks) some thoughts about elected SU officers and reps over the years.

I've worked with a lot of them. I still do. It's the best bit of the job.

To get there, they put themselves up on a big pedestal to be shot at. There’s a real bravery in it that is becoming harder to find, and justify, in massive universities. But they step up to serve - and make things better.

Many - too many in our daft system - don’t make it through that process, a real waste of talent. But I digress.

As well as the projects, the meetings, the working groups and the initiatives that fizzle out, I just want to note some of the things I’ve seen them do that I still find extraordinarily impressive.

There are people who weren’t prepared to put up with their members being groped in nightclubs anymore – and had the temerity to launch social norming campaigns and behaviour codes amongst students long before universities were shamed into joining in.

There are the people who, when running their own shop, didn’t want to profit from selling The Sun, or Nuts, or Zoo back when they were things.

NOTE not wanting to profit from the sales – not banning them, or geoblocking the URL on Eduroam, or confiscating copies from the local Tesco. They just got together and decided through open debate what they wanted to sell to each other.

There are people who wanted us to ask other students not to “black up” at social events, or to parade around at fancy dress events mocking people of colour or people that are poor.

There’s the student who wanted to know what to do about her “handsy” lecturer for whom women had developed avoidance techniques over 20 years who stood for election and won.

There are the reps campaigning to have some reading from talented people and thinkers that aren’t white.

There are the LGBT+ officers who weren’t happy that the hockey team thought it was just “bants” to play Gay Chicken on their way to fixtures.

There are the students who wanted to get through a night out without a DJ playing “Blurred Lines”, slurring down the mic that it was time for the “lads” to go “blur the lines with the ladies”, with obvious consequences.

There are those that just wanted their feedback on time so their members could learn from it, or wanted a mental health strategy to be implemented rather than sit on a sharepoint drive gathering electronic dust.

There are those that - against all the odds - found ways to build community and secure safety nets in the middle of a lockdown when we were all confined to our homes.

There are those who’ve spent hours this year talking to international students - often in the middle of the night - who don’t have anywhere for them and their family to live.

They always spot things before their universities do. Always.

There are those who’ve patiently explained what it’s like to be a student in 2023, and told their stories - only to be told that they need data. And there’s those that have provided data, and been told there’s not enough, or the sample was wrong, or they’re in the wrong meeting.

Yet they plough on.

There are those who can see the climate crisis coming, and those who know the pandemic is still having impacts, and those who get cornered in the club about a mouldy house - who know that those issues will be passed around by all the people and agencies and bodies seemingly paid to point at others - but yet they persist.

There are those who were told that adjustments would be made to allow students to access learning and were then told they were in fact being unreasonable, or that they had to wait. And decided to do something about it.

There are those who lend students a fiver for a meal in the refectory, and they know they’re never getting that giver back.

There are those who – not studying politics or philosophy or religion – who just wanted their members to get through the day without having to justify their own identity or existence.

There are people who just wanted their members to get a heads up if their class was about to discuss something they’ll find traumatic, which without warning would prevent their active participation.

Assertive, passionate, advocates. They challenge authority. They point out elephants in the room and raise uncomfortable things at uncomfortable times in uncomfortable ways.

They do appear in prospectus photos, and they do go on protests, but they also present evidence and make arguments and provoke the powerful. They tackle each other’s behaviour. And they’re genuinely brave.

I sometimes come across those who think we can do away with them. That a decent focus group or survey, along with benign actors, is the "real" student voice.

I'm certainly of the view that the role as it's ended up is often overwhelming and too complex. But what we miss is the way that leaders in a community can give others agency and hope.

We are very good in this country at moaning about those in charge.

We're less good at getting off our backsides and making the world we want. That's what student leaders do - and if it was to me there'd be more them, not less.

We also forget that however benign universities think they are, when the shit comes to shove they defend themselves.

Students knowing they have one of their own in there batting for them is incredibly powerful.

Often I read it in qual bits of surveys - how silently proud they are of one of their own in the room with all the big cheeses.

They don't always get it right. Sometimes they miss the subtleties or downsides or complexities. But that should always be a cue to find a way.

We miss, I think, the way in which they can be lightning rods for disclosure and often harrowing experiences - many of which they know they’ll never prevent, or address in their time.

They carry around all sorts of burdens, and secrets, as they frame their contributions in ways that are just spiky enough to some action, and never quite spiky enough to bring the house down.

Of course, they can use baffling and exclusionary language, creating rarified environments that seem hard to access. But how do you think they feel in university committees? Or watching Parliament?

And from time to time they can be dogmatic, and difficult, and occasionally just daft. But so can VCs.

The thing I think a lot about the free speech stuff is that contrary to the caricature, they get it.

When you listen as well as lecture, you learn that they worry deeply about where you draw the line between a natural, social and emancipatory process of collective evaluation of ideas on the one hand, and bullying, harm and harassment on the other.

They draw the line in a different place, often. But you would too if you were them.

I also often think that one generation worries that it’s lost control of the ability to dictate to another who or what is popular, and who or what is acceptable.

It’s the sadness and anger in the eyes of Simon Cowell during the last miserable episode of the last series of the X Factor, turned into an entire political and moral philosophy.

But as Matthew d’Ancona once said, they’re unlikely to want to be lectured on how to handle that tension between freedom and safety by a generation whose “free speech” meant “Havel, Rushdie and Mandela when for them it means holocaust denial, torture porn and 8chan.”

They’re even less likely to take it from a generation that had housing ladders and social security and free education while they scrape together the rent on their mouldy box room by delivering takeaways, waiting for an NHS appointment for their mental health that never comes.

Whether we give it to them willingly or not, students and their leaders will claim their freedom to work all of this out and draw the lines for themselves.

That leaves the rest of us with a choice.

Add it all up, and the words and the deeds of the powerful send a pretty clear message to students and young people – that they don’t matter, aren’t worthy of help or assistance, matter only for their money and are either “snowflakes” or enemies of freedom (of speech).

But we're an ageing population. We will need them one day. Sooner than we think, probably.

I’ll never stop saying this, but I just wish the sector would pick a side, and send a clear signal both to them and their students.

It’s time we made it socially normal not to agree with everything they say, but to believe in them.

To believe that despite their economic precarity, students and their leaders are valuable to the country, communities and society, and that we need them more than ever to tell us what to do next.

There’s never a year where there isn’t more we can learn from them and this has been a year where I’ve learned a lot. I feel enormously lucky to get paid to spend some of my time with them.

Best of luck to all of them.?

We should be immensely proud of and grateful to them.?

Now go change the world.