What's the point of students' unions?

Three years ago, as I sat on a foldable chair in large room within the University of Bristol Students’ Union building, a student walked up to address its annual members’ meeting. Oil-stained paper plates were scattered by the feet of the students sitting around me. Some of the plates had remnants of the pizza we had been given at the beginning of the meeting.

The student was speaking in favour of a motion to oblige the students’ union to support campaigns against immigration detention and — at the time — in favour of the forthcoming protest outside the Yarl’s Wood detention centre. The student spoke confidently and persuasively about the racist nature of the immigration system and of the evidence of poor treatment of detainees. The motion was passed and, given the apparent good intentions of its proposer along with the embarrassment that could result from being seen to be voting against, it’s difficult to see how the vote could have gone another way.

Across the country, the scene described is replicated at other students’ union meetings where, instead of immigration detention, students deliberate and vote on banning the sale of beef in students’ union spaces (LSE in 2020) and banning clapping, cheering, and whooping, replacing it with jazz hands (Manchester in 2018, and latterly Oxford in 2019). These are examples of one kind of unproductive political activity that can be found in students’ unions. These meetings are used by small groups of radical students to gain support for their causes through mandating their students’ union to provide funding for campaign materials, transport to attend protests, and to adopt political positions on behalf of all students.

Students’ union trustee boards occasionally strike down the most egregious examples (such as the immigration detention policy previously described) but this is not the case for most of the policies voted for in students’ union meetings. These meetings are poorly attended, often with a turnout of below 2 per cent of students at most students’ unions. They function as a forum to discuss issues such as boycotting companies with operations in Israel, which are outside the remit of a students’ union and as such have a negligible impact on the student experience.

This activity has a cost: it diverts resources away from more productive activity (like the provision of services for students), and it puts off other students from participating in the function of the students’ union, the vast majority of whom are not radicals.

The primary function of students’ unions is to provide academic representation for its members. A significant proportion of students’ unions have strayed away from that function and as a result achieve very poor rates of student satisfaction. According to data from the National Students Survey, on average, universities achieve 86 per cent satisfaction, while students’ unions achieve 56 per cent, with many performing much worse than that.

A report published by the Adam Smith Institute on students’ union reform, and which I co-authored, recommends constraining political activity. This will help to ensure that that the worst-performing students’ unions allocate their resources towards activity that will improve their student satisfaction scores. Students’ union funding from their partner university should be restricted to support its core functions: academic representation, recreation, sports, and supporting student societies. Student-led political activity ought to be self-financed and, if a student representative body is to be recognised by the university, it should achieve election turnouts of over 50 per cent (at present the average turnout in students’ union elections is 11 per cent).

Political activity in students’ unions is damaging. It shifts the focus of unions away from providing student services towards providing a platform for issues of limited relevance and of no consequence to students or to university life. This activity happens at the expense of non-political students, who should not have their experience at university diminished by a few radicals, whose voices are amplified by their students’ union, but whose views belong only to a radical minority.