The three of us are ex-student leaders. And we’ve been thinking a bit lately about how student leaders can meet the present moment in higher education.
One of us vividly remembers the meeting which formalized the creation of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) thirty years ago this week in Fredericton, New Brunswick (you can easily guess which of us it was because the other two weren’t born yet). To a significant extent, CASA defined itself in opposition to the then-hegemonic Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) because the two organizations represented two approaches to dealing with the austerity of the mid-1990s as it was playing out in higher education. Without boring you with the details, one side rejected working with decision-makers and remained “pure”, while the other was prepared to talk to governments (not always successfully, it needs to be said) in an attempt to avert the worst outcomes.
(This worked out OK for student representation writ large as the two sides ended up as a bon cop/bad cop act, though that was never either side’s intention but that was a happy accident rather than design.)
It seems to us that today, on the eve of a wave of student elections across the country, students’ unions are now facing a very similar dilemma. The difference is that the fault line runs not at the level of provincial or national associations, but through every single campus. Cutbacks are coming—mainly due to the loss of international student fee revenues rather than government cutbacks—and students need to decide: are they simply going to say “no” to all changes, or are they going to try to actively shape the changes that are coming?
There are challenges for students’ unions who wish to be effective on these issues. Mainly, they boil down to expertise and politics. Even at the best of times, university decision-making is hard to follow, let alone influence. It requires a relatively deep understanding of institutional dynamics and—in the current context—institutional finances as well. Not all students’ unions have this understanding, however (size and institutional memory matter here). And even where they do, they do not always spend a lot of time actually trying to work the levers of power in a productive way.
This is where politics comes in. Students’ unions have competing priorities. Some place more weight on dealing with social/international issues (e.g. climate, Gaza) than on higher ed specific issues. Others, especially post-COVID, have focused on rebuilding a sense of student community and so have focussed narrowly on what are known as “internal affairs:” basically clubs and events and such. There’s nothing wrong with either of these things, of course. But these next 18 months especially are going to be crucial to the fate of many institutions. If there was ever a time for students’ unions to drop whatever else they are doing and focus on academic affairs and student services, to make sure that whatever decisions are made about the business model, student interests are front and centre, it’s now.
(OK, we can hear the eyerolls of some in positions of academic decision-making: oh great, just what we need, more student involvement. If that’s you, we appeal to your self-interest: students’ unions can make your lives easier or drastically more difficult in the coming cuts. Collaboration in decision making from the start will likely save problems later. So bring them into your decision-making now!)
In any event, if you are one of the students who wants to get inside the tent and shape institutional responses, we offer the following tips:
1) Get students to discuss the possible effects of cuts. Ask them what they care about most on campus, what the students’ unions redlines should be.
2) Develop a solid understanding of your institution’s finances. Work out where the money is (or is not) coming from, and what various things cost.
3) Spend as much time as you can with your Provost/VP Academic or VP Students. Talk to them about what matters to students. Provided you are not too in-your-face about it, they will appreciate this.
4) Build internal coalitions with other groups that have similar interests to defend (e.g. if the goal is to maintain service offering in mental health, sit down with the student services leadership to discuss strategy).
5) Don’t fall prey to zero-sum thinking. Sometimes cuts are opportunities to re-think how certain things are run or delivered. Be imaginative.
6) Students’ unions need to think strategically about the services that they might offer instead of the university. In other countries, student associations manage a variety of services which in North America are run by universities themselves (if you want more on this, we recommend following the great Jim Dickinson at UK’s Wonkhe). There might be financial costs involved, but it’s better than seeing services fall by the wayside.
And finally, one last piece of advice. Students’ unions in Canada have (again unlike student unions in other parts of the world) traditionally spent very little time collectively thinking about academic issues. Sure, they have organizations that collectively deal with government affairs on things like tuition policy and student aid, but things like academic quality, innovative teaching, etc., have never really been the subject of collective action (with the exception of a very brief period in the mid-90s when there was something called the Canadian Academic Round Table, or CART, which was sort of tied to the then-embryonic CASA). Students’ unions acting together to promote student-centred definitions of educational quality would make a big difference, not least in eliminating widespread duplication of effort.
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Isn’t the legitimacy or mandate of student government a factor here? I would think that the extreme disengagement of most student bodies from their student governments would undermine anything serious that the latter attempt to do. It is hard to claim one represents the students when only 5-15% of the student electorate bothers to vote.
The best data we have for aggregated student union election turnout in Canada is that the undergraduate ones averaged 21% from 2016-2018: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387352481_Voter_Turnout_Analysis_of_Canadian_Undergraduate_Student_Unions_2016-2018. However, this study has obvious limitations when accounting for the amount of turnout data that was not accessible. It also does not cover graduate student unions, student unions in 2-year colleges, and student unions in the small number of Canada’s private universities.
As a point of comparison, municipal election turnout in Ontario averaged 32.9% in 2022: https://www.amo.on.ca/policy/municipal-governance-indigenous-relations/analysis-2022-municipal-post-election-data
This post is a good start. The national student unions in Canada also differ in their approach to governance and the practice of democracy. For about thirty years, they have been engaged in the student government equivalent of a civil war in which they compete for the allegiance of campus student unions in Canada alongside a handful of standalone provincial student unions. This division has been detrimental for the Canadian student movement. The achievements of what student unions in Africa, Europe, and Latin America have been able to do are testaments to these missed opportunities.
In my experience, a big problem with many student unions at the campus level in Canada is that they are isolationist when it comes to the global student movement. While there have been some attempts at activism surrounding international issues, these are largely in the context of very local extensions of these issues, such as which companies Canadian education institutions are investing in, or involve shouting at the sky with symbolic statements that carry no tangible impact or commitment. From my time as President of the Global Student Government and other student government roles at the international level, I recall that when talking to campus student leaders in Canada about the importance of working with students and student governments from other countries on joint advocacy and activism initiatives, their eyes would glaze over and they would mutter excuses about why their comparatively immense wealth should rather be spent on the minutiae of lackluster social events instead of on aid to help students in conflict zones, and how they are just too hard pressed in Canada with their multi-million dollar annual budgets. There are student leaders in other countries who do a lot more for students with a lot less money.
This isolationism carries an inherent bigotry. Canadian student unions are some of the wealthiest and most powerful student governments in the world, but in my experience many of them only look inward and keep their heads down no matter how hot the world burns. Student democracy is under threat around the world. It has collapsed in many countries in Asia, has been severely weakened in Oceania, and the United States Student Association has also fallen. The severity of cuts to education are serious issues, but it is also good to be aware of the larger picture, help others outside Canada who need it, and develop networks of allied student governments around the world who can help students in Canada in their times of need. If this isolationism can be overcome, it would likely make an environment more conducive for students “collectively thinking about academic issues”.
One student union in Canada that has made notable attempts toward international cooperation is the CFS. Regardless of whether or not one aligns more with the CFS or CASA, the CFS made active efforts to help keep the International Union of Students (the largest student government to ever exist that for the most part represented students globally from the mid-1940s until its collapse in the early 2000s) going for as long as possible, even when many countries had given up on it. The CFS is also part of the most recent iteration of student government at the global level, the Global Student Forum, and thus has many student government allies around the world who could potentially collaborate with it to achieve advocacy, activism, and/or strategic goals. CASA does not seem to have such international alliances and seems to be more isolationist, which may be a disadvantage in its competition against the CFS for members.
Regarding your post’s recommendations, these are good ideas for student governments under pretty much all circumstances. However, they are easier said than done. It would help to provide more specific tips on how to accomplish these things. Even though student unions in Canada are some of the wealthiest and most powerful in the world, they are still vastly out-resourced by education institution administrations and provincial and national governments. Multiple student unions in Canada alleged governance issues (see for example: https://theconversation.com/student-unions-warnings-of-toxic-problems-fuelling-disillusionment-need-to-be-dealt-with-241643.On) this point, I refer to the dearth of academic literature and other research on student unions in Canada. We need research that assesses the capacities of student unions on an annual basis, such as tracking election turnouts and annual revenue, from which specific areas of need can be identified and recommendations for improvement can be developed. I have been trying to do this with what little resources I have through existing solo-authored publications and ongoing research projects alone and with others. If you would be interested in co-writing such research, I would be happy to chat. Evidence for the points I raise can be found in my publications listed on my LinkedIn account.
In 2024, Aytaj Pashayeva did an e-introduction between Alex Usher and I, but I understand Alex is pretty busy and the email may have been buried.