Why Cardiff Student Media is on strike

Or, to clarify, why “#SaveCSM” is a thing, no matter who tells you otherwise

It’s been a long couple of weeks on Park Place. My good friend Tom Eden left his position at Gair Rhydd after about a year and a half; we’d just completed a rebranding project together, and I’d worked as his Deputy Editor for only a little while (having previously worked alongside him as the Editor of its sister publication, Quench, last year).

As Deputy Editors often are, I was asked to step up in Tom’s place, and as Deputy Editors often do, that’s what I did. And so it’s been a fairly enjoyable time; I’ve been working as the first student (as opposed to full-time) Editor of Gair Rhydd in 34 years. Take that, Meirion Jones. (He was the first paid Editor, and now he oversees BBC’s Newsnight.)

I must clarify that this was not a predictable series of events. I’d been offered a job managing a franchise of a national student publication (The University Paper, a bit like a less informal print version of The Tab), and one of the caveats of me accepting a position as Tom’s deputy was that it shouldn’t get in the way of my paid work. But neither of us had seen his departure coming, really, and I felt I had a responsibility to the wider Gair Rhydd team. I did then, and I do now.

Fast forward about six weeks. The dust is starting to settle, and I get an email at ten or so in the evening. “It’s not looking good,” it says. It’s from Steve Wilford, the Director of Membership Services at Cardiff Students’ Union. He’s referring to a senate motion to keep Tom’s position empty. The student senate is a group of elected students who set policy at the Students’ Union.

When Tom resigned, he did so on the assurance that media would be fine and would persist under the structures he set up. Had he known that we’d all be deposed in a by-election, I doubt he would have left, for the same reason that I stepped up to the editorship: he had a responsibility to his colleagues.

The senate motion was struck down, and, now, we’re faced with a by-election that nobody really wants, including the officer team. That’s no secret, by the way — I don’t think they want somebody rolling in and interfering with their various passion projects. I know for a fact that union staff don’t want it either, although they might admit that less willingly than I make it sound.

In response, Cardiff Student Media at large has resolved to go on strike. While much has been made of this whole affair on social media in recent days, I feel like nobody has actually bothered writing an opinion on what this means from the heart of darkness (or the eye of the storm, or whatever analogy you might find appropriate).

I spoke to Oli Dugmore yesterday. He’s the Editor of the Cardiff Tab, and the kind of guy I’d like to be able to call a friend one day. “I’m not covering the strike,” he said, plainly. And I can’t really blame him. Student politics are typically very petty — vested interests pitted against vested interests — and I’m sure I speak for many people who are reading this when I say that it’s just not that interesting unless you’re knee deep.

But I am knee deep, so I’ll cover the strike.

The basic thought is this: 15 or so senators (give or take a part time officer or two, too) voted to have a by-election, against nine or so people who wanted to leave the position open. Those nine people included the SU president, who was elected earlier this year with a few thousand votes; the senator elected with the highest number of votes had only 58. And they were on the losing side.

I don’t really value the democratic mandate of senators, and I never really have, because so few people vote them in. I mean, christ, the Student Senate used to be called the Ministry of Change. How much more of a parody of something already ridiculous could it be? But I’m willing to set aside my feelings if you are too, and they don’t seem to regard me or my position particularly highly either, so let’s approach this with some logic.

People want a democratically elected head of media, and I can understand that. This by-election isn’t necessarily an ideologically dumb thing to do. It’s democracy, right? And democracy is good, as a general rule. But the trouble is, democracy can be appropriated in negative ways. “Whoa,” I hear you say. “Now you sound like one of those South American dictators.”

But let’s be real. You can append the word “democracy” to anything, but that doesn’t make it democratic; to suggest otherwise is an Orwellian farce. Let me remind you that North Korea (AKA the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) is technically a democracy — but only one person can run in their elections, the Supreme Leader.

The problem with full time officer by-elections is that they require somebody to drop out of their studies; on these grounds alone, many Students’ Unions actually prohibit them. Now, I’ve read some communications about this whole affair from Cardiff University’s registry, and they’ve said that dropping out of this year would be complicated. Certain degrees would allow you to do so, no problem — a JOMEC student with no dissertation, for example — but others would pose problems.

The complication arises where students studying degrees with modules that span both the Autumn and Spring semesters, which is, er, most degrees. The Senate has dismissed this is a problem, but I’ve been informed that the Education Act that set out the law for sabbatical officers requires elections to be free and fair.

The senate — or, at least, the few actually personable ones I’ve spoken to — says that it’s up to students to shoulder the burden of running in this election, and for them to make their minds up. But I don’t know if that’s a meaningful thing to say. You see, any student studying a degree with dual semester modules would forfeit their tution fees for the first semester.

Let’s say they’re lucky, and they only lose about £3300. They’d be doing so for a paycheck that wasn’t all that much larger, on top of their living costs and everything else. They’d also forfeit the ability to retake a year (Student Finance only fund how many years you should be studying, plus another year in case you fail one). Students with single semester modules aren’t off the hook — they’d stop studying in January, and start studying in January next year, but the job ends in June. You’d have half a year to just… Well, I don’t know. What do you do with half a year when you’re supposed to be studying? Maybe the Costa next door will be hiring?

When the playing field is imbalanced like this, it’s hard to consider the elections free and fair. I guess you’re right, anybody can fuck up their degree if that’s what they want to do, but the extent to which you fuck it up is literally the difference between thousands and thousands of pounds. Let’s say it cost Pharmacy students and people from the business school £3000 to run in the elections at the end of the year, and for everybody else it was free. Would you consider that a fair election? I guess they could make their own decision to pay that cash out, and I guess that would make it fine, right? (NB: You would need permission from your Head of School, who might just deny you outright even if you won an election, so the notion that this is a decision to be made by students is a bit of a hash anyway.)

Flippancy aside, it’s a bit of an odd decision to anybody outside of the union bubble. More than that, though, it doesn’t reflect the reality of life in student media. Some people in the senate, they say they’re experts. One of the people who voted the motion down had written an article for Gair Rhydd; whether or not you’d consider that expertise is one thing, but I remember this person vividly because they sent one of my Editors a complaint that their article didn’t run when it should’ve done because they had picked up the wrong newspaper. That guy has spoken openly about running for the position which, er, involves editing the newspaper. ZOINKS!

That’s what we’re dealing with here. I won’t debunk too many of their misconceptions because they don’t stand up to any serious scrutiny, but what I will say is this: we weren’t consulted on whether or not this would represent a positive change for student media at large. A motion was tabled at the senate to maybe reconvene once they had full information and some testimony to consider, and this was voted down. And they haven’t bothered asking any of us what the role would actually involve, either.

See, VP Media is kind of different. Maybe you think you could just walk in and do it, and if you had the kind of support staff that VP Societies or whatever did, then maybe you could (sorry, Barney). But VP Media doesn’t have that kind of support staff. Your volunteers are your support staff, and they’ve vowed to walk out if anybody else comes in and tells them what to do.

You think you could hire a new set? Probably. I hear another one of the senators has already taken to Facebook, dividing up our jobs and saying he quite fancies being Politics Editor. But how would you train them?

You’d need to train everybody on Gair Rhydd (we have a team of 20-odd people who make the pages of the paper) how to use Adobe InDesign. I was offered the opportunity to do so by the Students’ Union, but I won’t endure the humiliation of training my replacement, and it sounds like my staff won’t either, so you’ll have to do that yourself. If you don’t know how to use InDesign, you can take a course, but that’ll cost you a few hundred pounds. And that’s just Gair Rhydd, so potential applicants had better hope that they’re some sort of all-singing all-dancing multimedia wunderkind.

Maybe you could try and sway the current Gair Rhydd team and get them to stay on, and maybe you can. One fella, on Twitter, was gracious enough to say that if he won, he’d let us keep our positions. Man, that’s tight, bro. Thanks for that. (Given that we’ve worked perfectly fine without you, though, I wonder what you’d actually be doing to make you worth your pay packet if you didn’t make any changes.)

Get real. Nobody wants to work for somebody who wants to just sweep in and lord over them. We’re volunteers, for christ’s sake; this isn’t our livelihood, it’s our fun. We spend (and have spent) egregious amounts of time and money on this. Why would we do it if we didn’t want to?

Another one of that senate group has suggested that we wouldn’t go through with it and leave — that we wouldn’t cut off our noses to spite our faces. So we’ll use me as an example.

I’m the current Editor of Gair Rhydd (an appointment made by somebody with thousands of votes to their name, by the way, a decision ratified by the senior management of the Students’ Union). If you elect a new VP, then you depose me. No big problem, in and of itself — why would you care about any of us if you were going to run against our will?

What am I going to do? Stay on? Nah, probably not. Gair Rhydd is fun, but I’ve written for Vice and the Indy. There’s a long standing commission for the Guardian I’ve had on my todo list since August. And hell, I could probably do with the time off. I’ve won plenty of student media awards, so maybe I’ve mined this vein dry, and there’s no peak higher than Gair Rhydd Editor for me at this stage anyway.

The only reason I haven’t quit yet is because I have a responsibility to my team — to Meryon and Shanna, to Lauren and Carwyn, to all the rest of them. They’re all living, breathing people who’ve put hundreds of hours into Gair Rhydd already this semester. I’ve made them a promise, and I’m honour-bound to keep it: I’m going to remain their Editor for as long as they remain my team. If somebody else is elected, then they’re not my team, and my obligation will be fulfilled. My obligation to Tom Eden will be filled, too; he wouldn’t have appointed me if he thought I was a quitter.

Maybe some people would follow me. I won’t speak for them (although an internal ballot revealed that every single Gair Rhydd Editor on the team who was present would resign if somebody was parachuted into the Editor-in-Chief role, so lol), because while I have the authority to edit their words in print, I don’t have the ability to edit their intentions. But I’d be alright, and I don’t doubt that a good portion of my team would be, too. Rhys, one of the Sabbs, said to me that Gair Rhydd this year has been better than it’s ever been. We’ll always have that to our names, no matter what idiot ends up editing it next semester.

We’re on strike because we don’t recognise the legitimacy of this election, and we don’t want some rando coming in and changing the way we’ve been doing things and then collecting a cheque for it. It’s a stupid series of events, and I’m not going to lord it over all of my peers for six months because a room full of people who don’t know what they’re talking about — who think they’re above knowing what they’re talking about, who think they’re better than asking the current Editors what editing Gair Rhydd actually involves, who think that Gair Rhydd is student media rather than just one part of it — want me to do so. That’s not democracy. That’s putting a gun to my head.

We’ve been operating just fine, and, in the name of democracy, the union is being forced to fix something that isn’t broken. Hey, I can live with that, because the Students’ Union isn’t the be all and end all. But it’s my right to free speech — my very own ‘free word’ — to protest and say what I like, so that’s what I’m doing, and that’s what we’re doing.

It’s been an entertaining series of events, and maybe it’s already over. Maybe it’s not. But it’s given me plenty to talk about, like that dude from Labour Students who seriously volunteered to break a strike (just like the Labour Party we all know and love #redtories). And it’ll give me plenty to talk about in future when I see MS Paint Gair Rhydd float around campus next calendar year.

There have been five or six people who have been particularly vocal on Twitter over the last few hours (that we’re “throwing our toys out of the pram,” and other such bile). But over the past 36 hours or so, over 400 people have signed a petition decrying the senate’s decision to re-elect the role against our will, including at least one ex-union president and multiple heads of student media / VP Media and Marketing-s. But hey, Senators. You know better, right? This is a good time to bring up the fact that the senator with the most votes was Olivier van den Bent-Kelly, and he only had 58. Compare that to our 400 signatures. Don’t worry guys, you made the right decision, because you think you did, and you’re only accountable to yourselves anyway!

I might sound like I’m being flippant, but really, the senate’s decision was pretty flippant, swayed by little more than rhetoric and the mood of the room (to be fair, some senators have been extremely sympathetic, so the few good ones should know this isn’t directed at them).

So I won’t pull punches: I have no respect for that decision and no respect for the people who made it. Jesus, guys, you were elected by your friends, the chair of the senate was elected without a manifesto, and now you’re holding a bunch of volunteers to ransom on principle? You couldn’t write this shit.

Student Media was just fine without a VP, but it literally doesn’t exist without its volunteers, and the senate thought they were better than asking the people that kept the lights on. Sure, take to Twitter, call us desperate idiots, or whatever. I really don’t care, because I don’t have to resort to name calling to prove my point; you’re doing that for me. See, you’re the bad guys here. You just don’t realise it.