EDUCATION
Student cash
Anthony Flew
The militants of the NUS call it, in their studious non-party way, milksnatcher Mrs Thatcher's threat to bash our unions. It actually is a Consultative Document issued by the Department of Education and Science, entitled The Finances of Student Union,' and what follows is terse. It starts with two pages on Present Arrangements.' It then lists four defects in what rather flatteringly it labels 'The Present System.' The remaining three or four pages outline four proposals.
The first two objections to the established order, or disorder, are that LEA's are required to pay union subscriptions for full-time students from their areas without having any of the usual controls over the amounts or the spending of them, and that this lack of normal control makes for poor allocation of resources. The third and most notorious is that some unions have been spending some of the money thus compulsory provided on behalf of their compulsory membership "on purposes which would more appropriately be supported from the voluntary contribution of individual students." The fourth and least noticed is that part-time students "do not have their union subscriptions statutorily paid" by their LEA's, and are at an unfair disadvantage. What is proposed is: first, that union subscriptions as such should be abolished; second, that all students, both full-time and part-time, should automatically be accounted members of their unions; third, that universities and colleges should finance unions from their general funds; and fourth, that there should be a modest increase in students grants to allow the individual student to choose what, if any, clubs he himself wishes to join and to finance.
So why all the fantastic fuss, lobbying the House of Commons, mass demonstrations, and now — Heaven preserve us! — a national one day student strike? Why so extraordinary a hullabaloo about the rectification of an anomaly in public finance? How can a National Union of Students object •to modest increase in student grants on any ground except that it would be modest? Why such frenzied opposition to applying to club subscriptions the same voluntary principle already applied to book buying? (The NUS has, understandably, always been uncharacteristically reticent in denouncing the system under which, in completing student grants, an allowance is made for book purchases, without there being any effort made to ensure this money actually is spent on books). Why, finally, should there be no welcome for Mrs Thatcher's concern that part-timers too should in future enjoy social facilities already available to fulltimers?
We need to distinguish, as unfortunately the Consultative Document does not, three possible functions of students unions. The first and most traditional is to be social clubs. Fine. We then ask why membership should be either compulsory or in any way publicly funded. The only relevant, but good, answer is that being a member of such a Junior Common Room or of a social Students Union is an essential part of the educational experience.
The second possible function of such a student body is that of a trades union — to represent and to defend the interests of its members. This again is a very proper thing in itself, however wrong it is to be trying to generate eternal class war in the class rooms. But it is, surely, not at all obvious that this proper function ought to be fulfilled by compulsory bodies publicly financed. In so far as the potential members do feel a continuing and urgent need for such representation, then they should surely be capable of forming and maintaining a voluntary trades union, as is and will remain their right. Paradoxically, in so far as students rarely do support such trades union activities, voluntary organisations, could, surely, be equally effective; while so far as the compulsion upon which the present leaders insist is truly necessary, then they cannot 'in fact have that almost universal support which they claim. (One straw 'in the gale: the strike leaders at Keele were so unconfident of mass support that they found it necessary to circulate a false announcement that our first year lectures would not be held on the day of the strike).
The third possible function is to engage in general political activity not directly connected with the trade union interests of students as such. Increasingly it seems that those now running students unions wish to do just this. Indeed that union of unions, the National Union of Students, now gives " to change society" as one of its aims. Recently, for one instance out of many, the President at York explained his policy "to integrate more with the town on the level of radical politics." Now, certainly it is fundamental to a free society that students, like everybody else, should have the right to form and to join bodies dedicated to such, or to quite opposite political purposes. Like Mrs Thatcher but, presumably, unlike Mr Digby Jacks, the Communist President of the NUS, I am dedicated to the principles of a free society. That is precisely why we have to challenge the proposition that political bodies of either our or Mr Jack's choice should be either financed directly from public funds or recruited compulsorily.
In the same article in New Society (November 11, 1971) from which I took the vogue words of the York President, Miss Anne Corbett declared herself happy that the Government has not put forward the worst of all suggestion; that membership should be voluntary and unions funded by the contributions of those who join. Yet if and in so far as these unions wish to be generally political then this is not the worst but the only acceptable solution. If we believe that the prime social function of unions is vital educationally, then it is sensible to insist both that all students join and that the facilities are paid for from the public purse. But to maintain these principles we have by one means or another to depoliticise these unions.
The only argument should, therefore, be about means. Is this scheme best? Or would it be better to establish a special registrar as proposed by the Federation of Conservative Students? Such a Registrar would be enforcing a framework of law, and would be remote from student and other pressure. Under Mrs Thatcher's scheme the first decision would be made by university and College authorities; immediately exposed to all the pressures of student power politics. Nothing we have seen in universities in these last years can inspire confidence that in such a situation our academics will all stand firm, and will reject the easy options of trendocratic appeasement — least of all those in precisely the 'institutions in which union politicalisation has gone furthest. Far too many wish only — like the Vicar of Bray — to move comfortably with the times.
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