For well over a quarter of a century now, I’ve been listening to student leaders as they convey miserable experiences of being on university boards, committees and working groups.
Over the years the catalogue of complaints – unsuitable rooms, poor chairing, late and incomprehensible papers, endless acronyms and unintelligible presentations have led me devise all sorts of tricks and tips framed as survival – for the fittest.
In many ways, that’s why I suspect I’m still reading reports here in 2023 that have a tendency to bemoan that student reps change every year. It’s only towards May that they get the hang of it, goes the folklore – and then we (and they) start all over again.
The problem is that the approach I’ve been adopting only gets those students so far. And the more diverse the student body and therefore the more diverse their representatives get, the more that the focus ought to be on making those meetings more accessible.
