Do you want to know what your union is up to?
If the leaders of the Dalhousie Student Union are staying true to the union’s vision statement and striving to be “the primary destination for Dal students to engage in involvement within the University”, could they start by letting us know what they’re up to?
Thousands of students follow the DSU’s presence on Twitter and Facebook, but what their most powerful means of mass communications are mostly used to promote student life events on campus.
When the DSU’s constitution was amended last month at a general meeting, they didn’t share any information about that for four days – but before sharing that information, they did use their social media channels to promote a fish and chips special at the Grawood.
It’s not that they’re playing to the strengths of different mediums and leaving the serious discussion of policy to other forums.
If you go to DSU.ca hoping for more information on the Student Union Building renovations project – the multi-million dollar project to completely restructure the way students, societies and businesses within the SUB operate – there’s a blurb on the only page about the project that says, “the architects are working through the concept design phase.” In reality, the plans have been ready for a while and the only impediment to the project is that it has gone over budget, apparently due to surprise fees from the university.
Unless you watch the videos of council meetings on YouTube or read the Gazette and follow our online presence, there’s no public information online about the ongoing amendments to their elections policy.
And the elections committee, the group of students tasked with ensuring efficient and fair DSU elections this spring, was assembled last week. That there were open positions on this council was only advertised online through the “volunteering” page of DSU.ca. You would have only known about this opportunity through hearing by word-of-mouth, or if you independently decided you wanted to volunteer with the DSU, went to DSU.ca and carefully considered the list of opportunities available.
The ad for the elections committee (that says they’re aiming to “double voter turnout” in this spring’s elections, which would increase turnout to approximately 22 per cent) is still posted, too.
And let’s say you’re a first-year student who checks out TigerSociety, the DSU’s website for student societies. Browsing the list of clubs, you would come across dozens of groups that are completely inactive. Even clubs that still meet up often have outdated communications contacts – including the DSU itself.
Under the DSU’s page on TigerSociety, Gavin Jardine is listed as the Vice President (Student Life). Jardine hasn’t been around for two years.
To a student looking for a community to become involved in, the information that’s currently avalable makes it seem little is happening within the union. What is ostensibly the portal for initiating student engagement on campus is totally dead – the “events and news” page of TigerSociety which the DSU once reliably posted to has now been empty for a long time.
I’ll confess I’m guilty in contributing to this culture of incomplete projects. I started a society last year for a research project and it has since been unattended. It was called the Dalhousie Comedy Society, and I’m still registered as president, but the joke is that it doesn’t exist. About five people have joined it, and this summer a couple of them sent me messages asking when the first meeting is. I’m not able to leave the society until I give over the title of president to someone else, and that’s not something I want to spring on someone – I simply haven’t gone through the work of seeing who may actually want to run that society.
Now that I’ve written this, I’ll have to email everyone who expressed interest – a benefit of operating that society is that you’ll already have free advertising in Dalhousie’s viewbooks, of which 60,000 were printed – they list the Dalhousie Comedy Society as a society to join on campus if you want to “try something totally new”. These are the same viewbooks that say Dal offers over 4,000 courses, a claim the Gazette disputed earlier this semester.
Fact-checking and constantly keeping information updated can be tiring, unrewarding work. But when the DSU doesn’t have public lists of members on its various committees, or what these committees have been up to, students cannot effectively gauge the performance of council.
And if you had a problem with lists of committee members not being posted, the Comedy Society not existing, the DSU’s silence on its huge initiatives, the sketchy viewbooks or any of the issues a student union should hear from t support students, you could not even rely on the DSU’s listing of councillors to see who represents you on council. The list of councillors on DSU.ca shows certain vacant positions as occupied and certain occupied positions as vacant. This was addressed by some students and members of council at last month’s general meeting, but no action has occurred.
To be fair, the DSU does employ one unprecedented method for maintaining transparency. Very few student unions livestream videos of every council meeting, but the DSU does. Having a public video record of every council meeting is invaluable for historical posterity.
But the minutes for meetings, even after being approved, often take months to get online. Some from this summer are still not posted. Students should not be expected to sit through three-hour videos of procedure so they can know where their $135 council membership is going.
For now, to assist in bringing light to some of the issues already faced by the DSU this year, this issue of the Gazette features 2,000 words on the most recent council meeting and an update on their internal democratic governance review. To further meet our mandate of reporting on issues of importance to Dalhousie students, the Gazette will be providing an intense level of coverage and analysis of DSU affairs as upcoming weeks progress.
Feedback on recent stories and the analytics of dalgazette.com show us students really do want to know what the DSU is up to.
It’s currently difficult to find out what council is actually working on, and it shouldn’t be. Let’s change that.
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