Dialogue: Apathy? Give me ideology any day

I vaguely recall having a gentle prod at some union or other last week. Student unions, it was.

I brought you the story of a trip that I took round the university-union traps a few months ago.

The purpose of this trip was mainly to look busy but it ended up yielding another, quite unexpected, bonus - the chance to find out how student unions were faring a year after the first campus-wide votes on voluntary union membership.

They seemed to be faring very well. Too well, as far as I was concerned. Even the unions on campuses that had essentially voted student unions into oblivion seemed to be enjoying themselves.

They had set up service-delivery contracts with universities, where universities agreed to finance those services they needed the student associations to continue providing.

Certain unions observed that they didn't feel it was important to return the campus to compulsory union membership.

They seemed concerned neither with autonomy from universities nor with a mandate from the student body.

I presented these staggering findings to you last week.

That was a mistake. Since then, I've been assailed by people who have insisted that everything has changed and that it's probably time that I got with the programme. Which it probably is. Still, there is naivety inherent in this pragmatism.

Kane Stanford, the president of the Auckland University Students Association, observed in these pages that he and the team found it eminently possible to on the one hand rely on the university to support association services, and on the other to retain complete political independence from the university.

Heaven knows how you square that one off in your mind. Maybe the trick is to walk around with your eyes shut tight under your blinkers. No doubt I'll soon be told.

Plenty more have sung this tune, of course, confirming my suspicions that student unions today see themselves more as service providers than as political entities.

A number of student politicians - I'm thinking of the Massey-Albany campus - have told me that they don't think that students associations should have political views. That would certainly seem to have been the view of the student masses.

A number of the students I spoke to there weren't particularly aware that they belonged to an association. Meanwhile, the ones who were didn't seem to feel their association had any obvious political role to play. That may sound an odd claim to make in view of supposed widespread concerns about student loans, but it's quite true.

The majority of those I met said they didn't mind paying for their studies. In fact, they wondered how people motivated themselves in the old days (that is, my first year at varsity) when nobody paid fees.

This being the case, no two students required the same thing from an association at any one time. This would certainly seem to work in with another of Mr Stanford's points - that a political chameleon probably has the best shot.

"Now that the association is voluntary, we have to provide our members with what they want, in a way that they want it," he observed. He may be right, of course. He probably is.

It's just a little hard not to look back on the good old days (please bear with me here - I'm ageing so fast that I'm already getting boring) when pragmatism and reality had no place in the student union movement; when ideology was the only concern.

Mr Stanford observes that associations of the past often acted in "a highly undemocratic and unrepresentative manner" and (reading between the lines) generally achieved very little.

To my mind, though, the old, hopelessly ineffectual associations served a notable function. They united the rest of us against them. You might say that they gave the collective a certain imperative - which isn't much but it beats today's collective apathy.

They also gave the collective something to look at. I'll never forget the day that poor Nigel Mander stood barefoot in another howling Wellington gale, clad only in his famous bum-freezer anorak, and offered free chocolate fish to anyone who agreed to come to executive meetings.

This was an inspired use of association funds (needless to say, everyone from the student press turned up). It was all permissible, of course. Back then, you see, nobody was allowed to take themselves terribly seriously, especially when their job wasn't particularly serious.

People had perspective then. Life - thank goodness - was a game.