For a limited time only

How campus could look come midweek...

I moan, but I’ll be honest: I quite like this time of year. For one week (and a bit), more people than ever will be interested in campus politics. They’re forced to be – how could you avoid it, when people will be standing on every campus corner with flyers and possibly loud-speakers? For this limited time only, us campus hacks will have far too much to do, but it’s worth it, because, for once, it’s guaranteed that people will read our stories avidly, right?

Yeah, probably not so much.

What’s most annoying about YUSU election time, is that if you’re involved; if you’re really into what’s going on, it’s the most frustrating thing ever when you see that the majority of students don’t actually seem to care.

One of the accusations most often levelled at campus politics is that, at the end of the day, it doesn’t actually matter. After all, each person elected is going to ‘fight for the best deal for students’ and ‘represent YOU’. If they didn’t plan to do this, they’d be a bit of a rubbish sabb. In addition, there are only a certain number of policies that the majority of students care about/that will be viable. As this is the case, it doesn’t matter what different people promise, if there are only a few things they can actually DO, then those are the things that’ll get done, regardless of who’s in the office.

Right?

Actually, I happen to think campus politics matters a lot more than people think it does. Of course, I can’t argue with some of the charges levelled at it, but ultimately, encouraging an interest in democracy, even on such a small and potentially meaningless scale, has to be a good thing. By holding these elections so prolifically every year, it forces students to form opinions and to think for themselves. It offers a good platform for debate – and, of course, from a purely practical view it gives us would-be journalists the chance to take our role-playing to a further level and practice our skills under more pressure than usual.

But do some of the people who run for YUSU actually recognise this? I’ve heard students accuse candidates of not caring about the role they profess to admire – simply running to ‘improve their CVs’. Or running to ensure they get a job next year, rather than graduating to face the uncertainty of the real-world job market.

But this can’t be the case. Anyone who runs for YUSU, in a practical sense, is risking a lot. The potential for messing up one’s degree is clearly there. Maybe even the possibility of messing up relationships or friendships in the single-minded pursuit of such a goal. That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on yourself simply to improve a CV. Of course, that’s obviously part of it for a lot of candidates (they wouldn’t be human if it weren’t); but on the whole, I’m prepared to bet that if someone runs for YUSU, they’re doing it for a the right reasons. And using any belief to the contrary as an excuse not to vote is just a foolish way of missing out.

With campus expanding year on year, it’s getting increasingly difficult for candidates to campaign and reach the whole of the student body.

But doesn’t that make the whole thing just that bit more important?

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