Happenings at Uni SA
This semester my wallet is heavier than it might otherwise be. To the tune of 160 Australian Pesos.
For this splendid occurance I have to thank John W. Howard. In an exceptional case of good policy, he and his posse have made it illegal for a Student Association to extort cash from students.
The association can still exist by all means, and can still charge fees for service and for voluntary membership. This is as it should be.
My student association was not confident that anybody would consider its services worthy of gigantic wads of mad cash, so it has scrapped fees altogether- even for people who become voluntary members.
One of the consequences is that a cash strapped student Association has 'no choice' but to shut down an enterprise that brings in money. I'm talking about the Uni Bar. To encourage us to spend money in this establishment, we were told that the profits would support the Students Association.
In other words, the enterprise could have stood on its own two feet. When the VSU bill became more and more likely to succeed, the story was reversed. Without the Amenities fee, we wouldn't have the bar- or at least we wouldn't have the discount prices.
This makes sense on a superficial level. The fee supposedly subsidised cheap drink prices.
There are a couple of problems with this. First, not too many people knew what the drink prices were. Most students chose the obscene, big bad private enterprise run Worldsend over the happy, warm and cuddly communal Uni Bar in any case.
Second, I suspect that discounts were possible because Uni SA didn't charge the Student Association market rent to occupy the bar. Less overheads = lower prices. I doubt the amenities fee had a damned thing to do with it.
Nevertheless, I will be generous and say that VSU threatened the bar's existence. A challenge was presented by the external environment.
This sounds like a job for a management consultant, or better still, a university full of them.
Reversing the fortunes of the Uni bar could have been broken up into assignments for about half a dozen subjects. Hey presto, about 200 opinions on how to fix the place, 20 of which would have been outstanding.
I have a few observations.
- The bar didn't sell tobacco on a campus full of foreigners who smoke like trains. This doesn't have to be stretched very far to be considered culturally insensitive.
- The bar shut at 6pm. In other words, the bar shut when you were thirsty.
- The bar was never promoted as a place to get tore up.
If this was worth 20% of my grade I think I'd come up with a few more.
The coffee facilities have been replaced by a new ground floor coffee emporium that displays a distinct lack of the requisite skills to produce coffee. The stuff tastes like warm milk that doesn't have coffee in it.
This situation was entirely avoidable, not by the mafia style protection racket we had before, but by the good business sense we were never short of.
If Student Associations run all their affairs with this kind of incompetence, they deserve to be ground into the dirt.
For this splendid occurance I have to thank John W. Howard. In an exceptional case of good policy, he and his posse have made it illegal for a Student Association to extort cash from students.
The association can still exist by all means, and can still charge fees for service and for voluntary membership. This is as it should be.
My student association was not confident that anybody would consider its services worthy of gigantic wads of mad cash, so it has scrapped fees altogether- even for people who become voluntary members.
One of the consequences is that a cash strapped student Association has 'no choice' but to shut down an enterprise that brings in money. I'm talking about the Uni Bar. To encourage us to spend money in this establishment, we were told that the profits would support the Students Association.
In other words, the enterprise could have stood on its own two feet. When the VSU bill became more and more likely to succeed, the story was reversed. Without the Amenities fee, we wouldn't have the bar- or at least we wouldn't have the discount prices.
This makes sense on a superficial level. The fee supposedly subsidised cheap drink prices.
There are a couple of problems with this. First, not too many people knew what the drink prices were. Most students chose the obscene, big bad private enterprise run Worldsend over the happy, warm and cuddly communal Uni Bar in any case.
Second, I suspect that discounts were possible because Uni SA didn't charge the Student Association market rent to occupy the bar. Less overheads = lower prices. I doubt the amenities fee had a damned thing to do with it.
Nevertheless, I will be generous and say that VSU threatened the bar's existence. A challenge was presented by the external environment.
This sounds like a job for a management consultant, or better still, a university full of them.
Reversing the fortunes of the Uni bar could have been broken up into assignments for about half a dozen subjects. Hey presto, about 200 opinions on how to fix the place, 20 of which would have been outstanding.
I have a few observations.
- The bar didn't sell tobacco on a campus full of foreigners who smoke like trains. This doesn't have to be stretched very far to be considered culturally insensitive.
- The bar shut at 6pm. In other words, the bar shut when you were thirsty.
- The bar was never promoted as a place to get tore up.
If this was worth 20% of my grade I think I'd come up with a few more.
The coffee facilities have been replaced by a new ground floor coffee emporium that displays a distinct lack of the requisite skills to produce coffee. The stuff tastes like warm milk that doesn't have coffee in it.
This situation was entirely avoidable, not by the mafia style protection racket we had before, but by the good business sense we were never short of.
If Student Associations run all their affairs with this kind of incompetence, they deserve to be ground into the dirt.
posted by Mr Schrempp @ 2:22 pm
1 Comments:
At 4:31 pm,
Gilganixon said…
I was always of the opinion that the introduction of VSU wouldn't have been a problem for the student unions if they were capable of showing any real, tangible benefit for the money they get given. Instead, they launched a campaign based on the idea that unless students were forced to hand over their money at the start of the year, they would be too stupid to see the benefits of doing so. Swing and a miss, pollies.
While the student politicians moan and gnash their teeth at the death of student democracy, it is worth remembering that no law bans the creation of new unions or the continuation of the existing ones. This would be quite possible if the union politicians could show any real benefit to giving them any money at all. Alas, they seem incapable of this, and it is no big surprise that very few students came to their aid after spending years watching them almost literally pissing the money away on sustaining their own existences.
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