From: elizabeth.raikes@ [mailto:elizabeth.raikes@]
How about something like this:
Dear Union Type,
Good letter, apart from:
SU from voting. We have looked at the legislation, and it
appears to us that
the only major union offices seem to be covered by this legislation:
Should be "only the".
Meanwhile - my opinion.
Actually, I'm not entirely opposed to allowing only students to vote. It's a
STUDENT society, and if ex-students wish to hang around it, that's their
affair. If they want something different, they should go away and do it.
(Note that it would be legal to form an outside society, and then affiliate
to it, you just wouldn't have a
library.)
(i) the procedure for allocating resources to groups or clubs
should be fair and
should be set down in writing and freely accessible to all students;
I like that one.
You want to hold them to that.
I suspect they'd be forced to say "we deliberately give
IFIS a lousy theoric
because they'd only go buying books with it that we'd then have to find the
space to store."
Incidentally, just because the act was passed 6 years ago, doesn't
necessarily mean it came into force 6 years ago. There's often a delay in
these things.
This used to be the difference between the "exec" (what you've called
"compulsory positions" and "non-exec" ("optional"). Apparently even THAT
is no longer correct, and all committee positions, exec or non-exec,
must be current students.
IFIS has "got around this" by voting in core
committee, and having a number of non-voted co-opted "honourary
positions" which aren't committee positions at all, just a silly title
within the society or whatever.
There's an interesting parallel here with the University of London Union
life membership, and the ULU clubs/societies. I'm in the ULU scuba diving
club, which has something like 8 committee posts - 4 of which are student
posts, because it's a student club, and it has to follow ULU rules on
student chairman, etc. The other 4 are usually non-student posts, because
the British Sub Aqua Club regulations (the national diving organisation)
insists that the people running the club (Diving Officer, Training Officer,
etc.) be people with the experience and qualifications to do so. Strangely,
this generally means ex-students. So if this rule was applied there, the
club would collapse completely.
I think most of us paid for our SU life membership so we were allowed to
continue joining societies (no longer needed - "local community" and
that),
That's the one. I'm stunned that they removed the requirement. It meant you
could join societies, take part in their events, and meet friends INSIDE the
union building, rather than having to arrive with them and get signed in.
Hmmmm - so you can nominate someone even if they can't take the post up ?
For a (short) while we had rules allowing you to nominate dead members, as
long as you could prove they were still capable of fulfilling the
expectations of the post.
Also note that ex-members aren't, and never have, tried to "take
control" of the society in any way, but we do like to feel like we have
a say! :-)
Actually, I think lobbying is enough.
If the current crop of students wanted abandon film evenings, start drinking
in the Monkey's Forehead, and use the books to build a wendy house, we could
stand back and shout at them, we could accuse them of being bloody stupid,
and short-sighted, and ruining the society for all the future students who
would probably rather have a
library than a wendy house, but we couldn't
actually stop them. And that's the way it should be.
Dominic
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