Recently, however, I got involved in quite a heated discussion on the role of student societies. A number of the (NUS affiliated) officers were apparently of the belief that associations should operate as some kind of communist regime, funding societies primarily because of their ability to promote all sorts of woolly 'shared values' belonging to the association itself. I, on the other hand, said that people should view societies as we do in St Andrews - as arms of the Association capable of providing a micro-managed service to their student members - and fund them purely (though within obvious constraints) on the basis of their ability to provide services that students actually want to enjoy. A number of people emailed me and said, yeah, right on, we're sick of all this ridiculous Stalinist bureaucracy too.
So what happened? The bastards kicked us off the list! Not even a word of warning - just zip, that's it, no thanks for coming. So I emailed the administrator to enquire politely as to why we'd been dumped, and can you guess what they said? We were expelled because St Andrews isn't in the NUS!
I mean, come off it - it's a mailing list, for goodness sake. We'd been contributing quite happily, giving them their two cents; I'd even contacted some of the members privately to help them with some queries they had. But nope, the fact that we're not in the NUS means we're apparently not worthy to bask in the glow of their majestic presence. Whatever happened to the free and fair exchange of ideas?
The kicker is, they appended to their response something along the lines of, "If you would like to contact us regarding affiliation, we should be pleased to discuss it". Yeah, because my first thought in being kicked off was "Oh, I'd really love to spend £20,000 of the students' money to stay on your crappy mailing list"!
[hr]
I'm your Guardian Angel.
