At most Canadian universities, student election season is about to start.  So, today, a quick note for anyone out there thinking about joining the ranks of student representatives. 

First, if you’re in Ontario, you need to know there’s no guarantee at all about what kind of organization you might be heading.  No one knows how the fee opt-out (opt-in?) system will work and what effects it will have on union finances.  Few student unions have reserves for more than a couple of months.  Most of your year is going to be spent working out what to cut inside the organization and what kinds of new business models are possible to keep key services going.  If you’re running for an executive position, I would imagine that in the event of your election there will be a lot of clamour for you to take a pay cut – possibly quite a substantial one – at some point in the year.  Basically, you’re in for a tough year.   But run anyway: now more than ever student unions are going to need smart and talented people.

If you’re not in Ontario, then your first job is to make sure that what’s happening in Ontario doesn’t happen anywhere else.  And, to be blunt, that means acknowledging that although the Ford government is being petty and vindictive in its fee policies, its policies do draw on a base of disaffection with student government that unions have systematically ignored over the years.  And that needs to change, quickly.

Student unions have a terrible reputation for governance.  In many respects, that’s simply a function of who participates in student union governance: that is, young people with very little training in governance.  In other types of organizations, accountability is an outgrowth of incumbency: long-time board members come to understand the inner workings of an organization and can act as a check on excess, and executives who want to win re-election have to act in a way that will not alienate the membership.  Neither of those two conditions is typically met in student unions.

We’ve certainly seen a couple of big examples this year in terms of how that can play out in terms of financial accountability. At both the University of Ottawa and Ryerson University, lack of financial controls have caused serious reputational damage to student unions; put bluntly, people who want to loot student governments often have ample opportunity to do so.  At other times, we have seen student unions blatantly manipulate electoral processes to achieve “intended” results (usually, it’s about an insider clique ensuring the “correct” successors get elected, though the long history of shenanigans regarding membership votes in the Canadian Federation of Students shouldn’t be forgotten either).

But it goes deeper than that.  Without re-election, the emphasis is always on achieving things which are short-term and flashy.  It means there is very little consideration given to the long-term health of the organization and in particular to the boring, but very necessary, work of continual improvement in service delivery, of asking constituents what they want and how they want it (very few student unions, for instance, have formal ways of seeking input from membership on satisfaction with service quality and delivery.)   Alienation leads to low levels of participation in governance exercises like referenda.  This is widely known, which is why one of the main defenses currently being offered by student unions for all their various fees is that they are imposed “democratically” by means of referenda seems weak. 

It seems there are some obvious things student unions can do to fix this.  Where fees are concerned, they can agree to stop imposing them by referenda unless a minimum vote threshold is achieved.  Mandatory fees can be put up for a re-vote periodically, so that “democratic decisions” taken by students 20 years ago don’t bind the current student body.  They can commit to a code of conduct which includes much greater transparency and efforts to solicit membership feedback.  That code of conduct could be backed by a system of accreditation, where an outside party (preferably one with no links to student groups – the Institute on Governance, say) would examine each organization once a year and pronounce on adherence to the code.  Ideally, you’d tie final compensation for executives to a clean bill of health.  And in practice, for a system of accreditation to be workable you’d probably need a lot of student unions to do this in concert (provincial student associations, take note).

These are merely examples of course; there are probably lots of other ways to improve democratic legitimacy.  But make no mistake: what has happened in Ontario could happen anywhere else in the country.  Student unions are vulnerable because they are more flawed than they like to admit.  Fixing that is going to take a lot of time and energy over the next year or two; but the future of student unions, and to some degree the future of student life in post-secondary education as a whole, depends on them getting it right.