Dialogue: What has become of student unions?

A few moons ago, I blazed out into the realm, notebook dangling from my classy, painted talons, to find out about the state of the collective spirit in student unions.

The time of which I speak was, if my fast-dissolving memory serves, late April. It was almost a year to the day since student unions had held their first vote on compulsory membership.

The results of this vote were, of course, fairly disastrous - at least for those of us who fondly remembered student unions as bastions of autonomy, stroppiness and innocent socialist ideologies. The student body at the University of Auckland (the humble proportion that bothered to vote at all) opted for voluntary membership.

Even those student unions that managed to hang on to compulsory membership ended up kissing a lot of power and financial autonomy goodbye. Quite a few (Canterbury and AUT are the most famous examples) made crucial changes to the modus operandi.

They decided the best ways to remain attractive to students, and to make sure association services survived, were to cut their own levies to tiny, token amounts and to set up contracts with universities where universities bought any services they needed associations to provide.

These unions entered what we might describe as pacts with the Devil. Instead of collecting their own levy and thus keeping their autonomy, they relied on universities to keep a lot of union services afloat.

I don't exactly blame student unions for going down this dire line. I just wish they had chosen death first. Alas, what struck me most was the degree to which they'd accepted the current formation.

Certainly, I did not see a great grasp of what it means to be a representative collective in the purest sense. What I saw was a rather fascinating political naivety combined with an eye to the main chance.

The president of the AUT association, for instance, told me he saw nothing wrong with the union cutting its levy and relying on the university to pay for whatever association services it deemed essential.

This lad considered the association's close relationship with the university a welcome sign of the times, and, indeed, of maturity. He spoke a lot of mutual trust. He felt that the association's small levy (this was about $10 a full-time student, I think) easily financed the union's autonomous political activities.

This boy did not feel that his union's independence was compromised, even in theory, by the fact that it relied on the university to keep many of its services going.

He neither saw potential conflict of interest nor understood why an old slapper such as myself wanted to. He had more faith in the university's good intentions than the dying have in God. Such innocence.

Up at the Auckland University Students Association, the administrative vice-president agreed that relying on the university to buy a union's services did impinge upon the union's autonomy. Where we differed was on the point of the best ways to recoup that money.

I assumed he'd want a return to compulsory union membership and the collection of the accompanying compulsory, full levy. I was wrong. This young man said the association's aim was to make itself commercially viable through its catering services (an aim that more than one wag on campus has described to me in the past year as pie in the sky).

The vice-president seemed to feel that setting up in catering was a more realistic goal for a union than returning the campus to compulsory union membership. So much for wanting a mandate.

It all rather suggested to me that youthful unions these days don't see themselves as representative bodies. This may be a point to keep in mind.

It was certainly a point in the mind of the president of Massey's Albany Campus Students Association. This woman was the only person I talked to who felt that student unions and university management might be in conflict by definition and that a union could continue as an independent representative of students only if it had a mandate and its own levy.

I suspect that she represents a dying breed, though. Her administrative vice-president - a young man of 21 - said that he didn't think student unions should be political - that on the topic of student loans and the like, unions should leave students to make up their own minds. The union's job was merely to provide information to anyone who cared to have it.

I tell these stories simply to raise a question on the cusp of a new employment era. Do you think anyone under 25 has any idea what a union is?