Student politics at UCL has a major crisis of engagement. In last year’s Leadership Race, the Union celebrated a ‘record-breaking’ turnout of… 23.7%. While mildly impressive for a student election, the reality is far worse: on average, only 2,679 students – a mere 5.2% of the student body – voted in each of the six sabbatical positions.
Seth Harris Puzzlemaster
Because turnout is so low, the optimal campaign strategy is not to persuade a broad church of students to vote for you but to source your votes from one massive block of people from a particular group or society, in the hopes of diluting the handful of students who actually care about Union policy – or alternatively shove a QR code in the face of enough people in the Student Centre in the hopes that they will vote for you on the spot just to get you to go away (CG 84).
Nowhere was this more evident than ex-Activities Officer Aria Shi – a sabb who had the work ethic of a nepo baby interning at their dad’s consulting firm – who was able to spend an entire year sitting on her phone in meetings and wasting Union money on unusable sleeping pods (CG 87) and still easily get re-elected for a second term, which she didn’t even want!
While there are mechanisms to remove an unpopular officer outside of elections, they are also rendered useless in the face of student disengagement. If you can’t get people to spend 30 seconds voting during the Leadership Race, it’s a pipe dream to get 1% of the student body to sign a no-confidence petition between their term-time assignments. This makes our elected officers invulnerable for their entire terms regardless of their poor decisions, be they motivated by malice or incompetence. While Aria did choose to resign in the end, if she was as stubborn as she was lazy, we would probably still be stuck with her to this day.
So, who’s responsible for this apathy epidemic? While I delight in blaming the Union for most things, it would be disingenuous to do so, this once. Compared to other unis, UCL Union’s democratic structures are honestly not too bad, but completely underutilised. Did you know you can just turn up to any policy zone meeting and quiz the sabbatical officers who run this place? You can even propose a policy beforehand and they have to consider it. The social media team also does a surprisingly good job at advertising the Leadership Race, going so far as to splurge on hiring a campus Ferris wheel (of questionable safety) to promote the election. I think it’s fair to say they do really try on this front.
Nonetheless, a functioning democracy requires consistent scrutiny of its leaders to deter them from making bad decisions by sparking outrage at their failings, which in turn motivates people to vote. This responsibility falls to the press in normal circumstances. The problem is that our student media is pathetically bad at doing this.
Now, while I expect no better from the centrist propaganda machine that is the Pi Media editorial team, The Cheese Grater proclaims to be the anti-establishment, left-leaning publication on campus, standing up for the people against those in charge. And yet, we have become in recent years an outdated and elitist publication, more concerned with acting as a springboard for aspiring middle-class journalists than pushing for change and accountability on campus. Indeed, where was The Cheese Grater when the Education Zone voted down the Fossil Free Careers policy? Where was The Cheese Grater when the Welfare Zone regularly failed to meet quorum? Where was The Cheese Grater when the Sports Officer tried to argue that men were a marginalised group on campus? These are open, public meetings where reps are consistently failing the students they represent. We should have been naming and shaming every last rep who has the audacity to stand for election, only to fail to show up to vote at meetings. We should have been shouting from the rooftops that one of our part-time officers was a closet misogynist! Sure, we ran quite a few pieces on Aria (and still then could have done more), but the outgoing officer was merely a symptom, not the cause of the eroding accountability of student leaders on campus.
We also do a terrible job of educating and informing students in an easily digestible format. Most investigations & voices articles take the form of long analytical pieces and while I am sure they are all of award-winning quality, they would also bore the average TikTok-addicted UCL student to death.
In writing this article, I went back to read a few pieces and had to use a dictionary to decipher what they were on about an embarrassing number of times. While this may just be a symptom of being a physics grad with the reading age of a toddler, I do worry that articles are often pitched at a high level of prior understanding of an issue. Intellectual superiority and having the moral high ground are worthless if it leads to no real actual change, other than bragging rights on your LinkedIn to a bunch of privately educated pseudo-progressives about how woke you are being in a magazine that no one outside the society ever bothers to read. Building a wider audience is far more beneficial when it comes to raising awareness rather than preaching to the same sect of people who already understand and agree.
Not always having to produce such long pieces also has the benefit of not having to spend ages writing it – as that by the time it’s published no one cares about it anymore. People want to hear about stories as they happen, not having to wait months for a synopsis in an end of term publication. While it might be fun to cosplay as a broadsheet journalist in the 1900s, it is in no way compatible with the fast-paced media scene we now see. I understand that some may fear that such a departure from the magazine’s Private Eye-esque style would go against the magazine’s tradition, or even risk accusations of tabloidisation. But the Private Eye does not have the same social responsibility as one of the two main student publications on campus. Simply put, if we don’t do it, no one else will.
The editors of The Cheese Grater now face an existential choice: adapt to the 21st century like mainstream journalism or face inevitable irrelevance with the ranks of Pi.
This article appeared in CG 88