Why universities need to take back control from the NUS

Buried amidst the noise of the sluggish soap drama of the ironically named Labour leadership “race”, is the upcoming presidential election for the National Union of Students (NUS).

In 2017, during my final year at university, I co-led a campaign to withdraw Bangor University in North Wales from the NUS. In 2016, Fran Cowling, the NUS’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) representative, wrote that she would not appear on stage with prominent gay rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, whom she regarded as racist and “transphobic”. His crime? Signing an open letter in the Observer in 2015 supporting free speech and against the mushrooming trend of universities “no-platforming” people with whom they disagree.

The then-NUS President Malia Bouattia had faced allegations of anti-Semitism following her reference to Birmingham University as a “Zionist outpost” and her criticism of “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets,” — comments she made before taking up her post. This, coupled with the organisation’s political campaigning and resolutions to replace applause with jazz-hands, convinced me this was not an institution I wanted my university to be part of.

Our pitch to the students of Bangor  was simple: rejecting membership would save our university more than £30,000 per annum. The student discounts available on the NUS had almost all migrated to the free platform UNiDAYS, and it had no measurable impact on the wellbeing of the students (apart from the delegates who got a free trip to conference, not covered by the membership fee). That year the NUS voted to mandate every university to provide free sanitary-towel dispensers — a vote roundly ignored by most student unions, due to the cost of implementation.

A leading light in the fight for independence, as we would try to spin it, was Tom Harwood, the now Guido Fawkes reporter and Sky News regular, who increased the voter turnout in his own election at Durham University by eight per cent. A “pathetically” low figure, he told me.

Tom adds “It’s remarkable how little most ordinary students care,” about what the NUS does. Student politics is a curious business — Tom (an ardent Brexiteer), garnered support from registered Liberal Democrats during his election. I, on the other hand (now a recovering europhile), acquired the backing of the constituency Ukip candidate, who was studying at Bangor, during my student union election, as I was the most right-wing candidate on the ballot paper.

On the day of our in/out referendum, the NUS sent various representatives from the South of England up to North Wales to campaign for staying in the union. A lot of students we canvassed informed us that they had voted to remain in the EU in 2016, so why would they vote to leave the NUS?

In the end, it was, if memory serves, a 60/40 result to stay — but it exposed not just a chronic level of student disengagement, but an implied intolerance towards students of a centrist or centre-right persuasion.

I finished my bachelor’s degree three years ago, and in that time the NUS has attracted fewer headlines. However, monthly culture-war stories still make for easy, emotive headlines in tabloids, and fiery phone-ins. “Should the curriculum be decolonised?” always results in a talk-show feeding frenzy.

But culture wars won’t empower students — they undermine the potential of what a union of some of the best and brightest people in the country could achieve.

By no means is the teaching of Britain’s deeply shameful colonial past at universities and schools a bad thing — quite the opposite. But two sides taking turns to shout at each other, steadfast in their positions, rather than listening and understanding, doesn’t educate anyone. The vast majority of people switch off, rendering the whole exercise pointless.

These wars of ideological attrition are perfectly exemplified by the Brexit debate, which ended only after the electorate voted to “get Brexit done”, hardly an inspiring rallying cry to a supposedly pro-Brexit nation. The British people just wanted it over with — and the same will inevitably happen with the race, climate-change, and trans debates.

If you examine the manifestos of each of the candidates running to be NUS president this year, almost all of them mention a commitment to “de-colonise” the curriculum and to fight racism — pledges I wholeheartedly endorse. But internal votes on resolutions, applauded by a sea of jazz hands, which have no legal or political bearing on any of the member universities, will not realistically achieve those aims.