It is only in recent years that the election of
a new president of the National Union of Students has occasioned much public comment. The NUS is in many ways an odd body, based in part upon the notion that students a a group have interests which can be advanced in the way that trade unions advance the interests of their members. It may be regrettable, but vice-chancellors and other university officials, as well as the Ministry of Education and local education authorities, recognise for certain purposes the NUS and its elected officials. The NUS also has a travel agency and an insurance scheme, and there is no doubt that in these, as in other directions, it does useful work. If it did little more than seek to advance the interests of students as students, concerning itself' with student grants, accommodation, vacation jobs and so forth, then the NUS would be treated with respect.
However, students being students, and not, that is to say, vitally interested in the business of running a union, it has been extremely easy for extremists to seize control of the NUS. For several years now a succession of communists and their friends have provided the main elected officers of the union. This week, at the annual conference of the NUS, the " official " communist and Labour caucus candidate was defeated and instead Mr John Randall was elected president. There seems to have been a good deal of political activity surrounding the various elections; but all the activity was among left-wing extremists of one sort or another. In a different political climate the NUS could be captured by extreme right-wingers in much the same way as the extreme left has done. The obvious fact that the elected representatives of the students are not representative but are, instead, fringe extremists does not seem to bother the representatives and trustees of the public who deal with them. Thus the Under-Secretary of State for Education blandly declares, "The NUS Executive are the elected representatives of the student unions; the membership of the Executive, like that of an other elected body, is similarly in the hands of the electorate." This kind of attitude is naive.
Students do themselves much disservice by allowing themselves to be represented by extremists, whose illiberal political views and proclivity towards violence have in the past frequently offended the public. The NUS needs to be reformed, if not from within then from without. One reform would be to insist that the election of students or ex-students to represent student views to the appropriate authorities be done by postal ballot. Another would be to insist that students should decide to join (or not join) the National Union of Students as individual members; and that the income of the NUS should be derived entirely from the individual subscriptions of its individual members. If the NUS continues unreformed, then its claim to speak on behalf of the students will inevitably wither away.
