Calling All Professional and Graduate Students: It’s Time for a New Union

We can have a leaner, more relevant, more accountable organization that puts the unique needs and concerns of professional and graduate students first. We need greater investment in library resources, laboratory equipment, research tools and greater pressure on the university’s administration to make such investments. We need greater institutional support for professional accreditation and career planning.

In April of 2014, student representatives from the Faculties of Law, Medicine, Dentistry, Engineering, Architecture and the Dalhousie Association of Graduate Students met to discuss alternatives to DSU membership. After much work and collaborative thinking, we recognized the need for further consultation, and gave the DSU the opportunity to be more accountable over the 2014-2015 year. Despite some well-intentioned executive members, the DSU has failed us yet again.

In its relentless and obsessive agenda to rid itself of membership in external advocacy organizations, the DSU has rendered itself unable to represent us. The disconnect between what DSU insiders have come to recognize as their rallying cause and the actual needs of students has precluded the organization from garnering more than 10 per cent of the student vote in its yearly elections. The nepotism that has accrued has provided a minuscule fraction of the student population with immense decision-making authority, rewarding abuse of procedure, checks and balances, and created an incentive to ensure that neither you nor I are paying too close attention.

Folks, our hard work and fees deserve more respect than this. If the DSU cannot take our interests to heart and pursue them effectively, it should perish. Let’s put a stop to our money being used to fund meritless and illusory campaigns stitched together by armchair politicians and reckless polemics. Our raison d’être should be one of practicality and the realization of outcomes rather than a recital of empty principle. Let’s take control of our fair share of the $2.3 million dollars that the DSU oversees in its budget and put it to bettering the lives of students.

I hope you will share your thoughts with me at the Annual General Meeting.

Anthony Rosborough is the President of the Dalhousie Law Students’ Society, and will be motioning for a discussion on Professional and Graduate Student secession at the DSU’s Annual General Meeting.