What inspired you to run for SU President?
I’ve always been fairly out-spoken in politics. I’ve been in student politics for about a decade and I’ve been in party politics for nearly as long. I’ve never been shy about standing up and speaking and saying what needs to be said, so running for president seems like a natural extension of that. It plays to my skill set and to my passions so the ideal job really.
What would your main priorities be if you won?
My first job the moment I got into office would be to address the university’s abuse/ignoring of students over this academic year. For people that are finishing their degrees this year it will be really important for the next president to hit the ground running and act on that very quickly. So as far as addressing tuition goes, I will be pressing the university to commit to an actual policy of no-fault resits for this year and allow degree re-weighting for those students graduating this year. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that people graduating this year rather than have this year count for 2/3rds of their degree, to have the option should it be beneficial to their grade to have it as a 50-50 split instead. I think it is one of the bare minimums the university could offer.
I also want to take the university to task for how they have financially taken advantage of students this year. They have delivered a quality of teaching that wasn’t what was promised and don’t blame the university for that but I do think they need to be accountable for that and make themselves accountable for that. Which means I think the university needs to take very real steps to address students who have had to rent this year, even if they didn’t want to, and students who are effectively losing out financially because of the effects of this year – such as doing re-sits or even retaking the year.
Aside from that I will be looking to change the nature of the presidency to make sure that we have a flat power structure and that all officers are equally empowered. And to actually make sure that we are putting people in the rooms they need to be in to be heard, rather than just sending me as President. I’ll be using the whole year to prepare the university for a post-Presidency existence. There will also presumably be a referendum on the presidency some point in that year which I hope would go in favour of abolishing the presidency. That would be a year long project rather than the first thing I’m doing.
You ran previously for the President role on the idea of abolishing it. How does your manifesto differ this year?
I’ve explored this and when I ran previously I said I would look to abolish the role over the summer and just go into my next year of education and not pick up a paycheck for it. But realistically speaking I think it would be extremely difficult – nigh on impossible – especially coming out of this Covid year when there is so much restructuring and rebuilding to do. I don’t think it would be possible to abolish the role in such a short timeframe. You need at the very least a referendum with students engaged in and a council to pass a vote on, which are only things you can do during term time.
However, I do think I could make good use of that year to prep the SU for post-presidency life. So that means I will be putting the relevant officers into meetings about the areas of their expertise. And where they are not representative of that particular issue I will not be shy about bringing students in from outside the officer team to make sure their voices are heard. I want to create this culture where we are putting somebody who is qualified to talk about that problem in the room. I think the university has historically gotten away with quite a lot by sticking the President in a room and talking over them or ignoring them, or wearing them down by putting them in so many meetings they don’t know which building they’re in.
Where have you taken inspiration from for your proposed remodeling of the officer positions?
It’s a radical change and I think the reason it is so radical is because of the marketisation of Higher Education over the last 20-30 year. I think universities have become corporations and SU’s have become very corporate in nature, and I think this pyramid power structure is very common in the corporate world but it doesn’t work very well for unions. And the thing I draw inspiration from is actual unions because that’s what we are. I think we lose track of that and people think of SU’s as being different to unions but they’re not. They’re a representative body designed to empower students.
What do you think of the recent reforms to the SU officer positions, such as the replacement of Woman’s Officer with Liberation Officer?
I was absolutely in favour of the reforms. I’ve been saying for years that it is absurd that effectively the top representative of liberation groups is the Women’s Officer because it meant that we had situations where we had so many liberation groups that you could represent a lot of them but ineligible to run for the officer role that actually handles them.
The other changes I feel less strongly about but I did vote in favour of them all. I think it is a positive move. I think enshrining part-time officers as well as full-time officers brings us in line with a lot of other SUs and how they operate. I used to be a part-time officer at Lancaster University so I know it’s a model that works really well and I’m glad we’ve adopted it.
How do you plan to help the SU’s societies and committees recover after the pandemic?
There isn’t unfortunately a magic cure to this problem except to recognise that the challenges this year, fingers crossed, shouldn’t exist next year. The missing membership from first years – and some other years – still exists so what I think we should be prepared to do is to have a really big Freshers Fair and we need to adapt to that. I think the Freshers Fair should be spread out over a number of days, even a couple of weeks as needs be, because the problem we’ve got is if we run a Freshers Fair as it normally runs it’s already incredibly crowded which makes it quite inaccessible for a lot of people at the best of times, but next year it would be worst because you’re going to have a huge crowd of both first and second years coming in so it’s going to be over double the normal capacity. If we can get the Freshers Fair right and keep it accessible to everyone, everything else should fall into place as that backlog of membership floods into societies.
What are your thoughts on the government’s recently proposed reforms regarding freedom of speech at universities?
I think it’s definitely the case that we’ve got the most authoritarian government that we’ve seen since Margaret Thatcher. I think that’s come as a surprise to a lot of people who pegged Boris Johnson as being relatively Libertarian as a Conservative but that’s definitely not been the case in practice. In terms of the Government’s rumblings about the way free speech works on campuses, it won’t work. It’s hot air. First of all, you can’t silent student bodies. We will say whatever we want to say and we will say it loudly and proudly. Second of all, the European Court of Human Rights will have a few things to say if freedom of speech started getting encroached upon in this country. I don’t think that anything substantial will happen there and if it does I’m sure we will all be rallying on the campus against it, whether it is legal or not, I certainly will be.
In terms of getting national attention, this isn’t something that is unfamiliar to me. I was at the NUS conference that talked about no platforming for the first time that got a lot of negative national press attention. I was also part of the LGBT+ committee when we talked about instituting LGBT+ specific accommodation on this campus which attracted some media attention but we effectively told those people to jog on. We did it anyway and it was a huge, resounding success which we knew because we listened to the people who actually wanted it.
How have you found campaigning during a pandemic and how have you adapted to an all-digital campaign?
It’s certainly been weird, especially as someone who has stood for president before. I kind of like it in a way. I think it’s felt more intimate like I feel I know the other candidates and people engaged with the process a lot better. I think there is this idea that we built up in our heads when we have physical campaigning that you have to talk to the people in front of the SU building. But this year I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me instead. I’ve had a lot of really great conversations and spoken to a lot of the other candidates. Dom [Fairbrass] and I had something like a three hour long phone call the other night from about 1am to 4am. It’s little things like that. I think there has been a bit of a culture shift and I hope that we keep that in future elections.
All President candidates were offered an equal opportunity to participate in an interview with Forge Press. To find out more about the elections and the candidates, please visit: https://su.sheffield.ac.uk/student-leadership/officer-elections
Image credit: Ash Routh
