Ensure that student councils are not merely clubs to enhance your CV
In his article on the student council elections, Nikola Edelsztejn outlines a number of ideas for improving the student council elections, but Stef Talboo argues that a little window dressing will not suffice.
The ideas Nikola Edelsztejn puts forward in his opinion piece of 19 January are great. But you can’t seriously believe that voting on location will suddenly convince the student body at the University of Amsterdam to get involved in student representation at the UvA: window dressing alone won’t do the trick. I am active in the student council of the Faculty of Humanities and therefore question the picture Edelsztejn paints.
Sad
Edelszstejn addresses a harsh reality: students are hardly involved in student participation and its election. Despite considerable efforts by the UvA and student parties, little progress has been made in this area. A turnout of 21% last May was seen as a positive milestone. In fact, it is rather sad when you think about it. Something needs to be done about this, as the low turnout cannot be good for the quality of student participation, because it is difficult to get students involved.
But for someone who wants to “overhaul” the elections, Edelsztejn’s demands are very limited. He believes that the solutions lie in allowing students to vote on location and giving them a day off from lectures so that they have time to do so. This would increase student turnout and give the councils a better mandate. On paper, these seem like good solutions, which would not even cost the UvA that much time and money. In a vacuum, these solutions are not so crazy, but in reality, they are unfortunately too good to be true.
Overhaul
The solutions to low turnout and participation do not lie in dressing up a poorly functioning process. That process, democracy at the UvA, needs to be overhauled, not its presentation. If you want to involve students in the UvA, you need to thoroughly democratise the university and give the representative councils of both the students and the staff of the UvA much more power and responsibility. Then there will actually be something to vote on. Democracy is not something to decorate your university with; a democratic university should be a living organism in which all members of the university community can come up with solutions together. If, instead, you have a cold Executive Board regime, you cannot expect high-quality participation from students.
Garlands
Instead of hanging garlands in the voting booths and hoping that people will come out to vote, perhaps we should ask ourselves why students are generally not inclined to engage in student participation and why many students often do not even know what student participation is. This lack of interest is ultimately the cause of the low turnout, because voting is not that difficult: students already have a whole week to vote for the student councils, and they can also do so online. So voting is already quite easy. Could the UvA do more to facilitate this? Certainly, but that is not the nature of the problem. The real problem is that most students consider student participation to be irrelevant.
So it should come as no surprise that not many people vote. They don’t know what student participation can do for them, because the student and enterprise councils certainly don’t have much authority or influence. They can advise on issues, but that’s about it. So what exactly do you need a mandate for if you have virtually only advisory rights?
Club
The reality is that student councils lead a superficial existence in which they are unable to represent their constituents. Democracy at the UvA can therefore hardly be called democracy. The elections will ultimately change nothing. Greater student participation in representative bodies will only be possible if these bodies actually have some influence and are not just important for the CVs of their members. Only then can we expect more from representative bodies and student participation at the UvA.
But this has to come from both sides: if you want more student participation, make sure that students can actually do something with that participation, that the student council is not just a club to pad your CV and occasionally send advice to the faculty board. In other words: democratise the UvA!
Stef Talboo is a history student at the UvA. He is a member of the Faculty of Humanities student council on behalf of the Activist Party.
