| Description | Interview with Alexander or Alex Cole-Hamilton recorded on the 11 July 2000 by Jennifer Carter.
Transcript of Interview:
C Let's start if we may with a little bit about your personal background, I believe you were mainly brought up in St Andrews and attended Madras College?
C-H Yes, that's right.
C So what drew you to Aberdeen?
C-H I'm actually a child of various backgrounds. I was born in Hertfordshire in 1977 and I moved to Lancashire when I was one year old and lived there for seven years. My mother is Canadian. We moved to St Andrews when I was eight and my family have lived there ever since. I think I sort of ended up in Aberdeen rather than saw it as my end result. It wasn't my first choice on my UCAS form, I think I applied to go to Edinburgh but an unfortunate economics exam saw me coming here, but I've no regrets, I've loved every minute of my time in Aberdeen.
C So Aberdeen was you second choice?
C-H It was my second choice, I have to confess that, but since that time I've known people who've gone to Edinburgh and I've known that they've not had quite such good a time as I've had here, so I have no regrets really.
C And the course you followed, the MA degree was mainly politics and international relations?
C-H That's right. I dabbled in philosophy in my first year but I found that the course matter was somewhat dry and politics and international relations have always interested me. From my schooldays I found myself to be politically conscientious and as such that very much directed my choice of subject and indeed my later interest in student politics.
C When you say you were a sort of political animal even from school did you indulge in political type activities at school? Can I ask you if you are a member of any particular political party or is it a more general interest?
C-H Not as such. I find that my political view change as often as the weather, and really there isn't a party that it built to catch up, but yes at school I was very active with Amnesty International, I was a member of various organisations at the time like Amnesty, Green Peace and so forth. I'm a very sporadic voter, I vote very much with issue rather than party allegiance. I've always taken an interest in representation and that I suppose led me to join the Student Representative Council in my second year at the university.
C This is very interesting for a historian to hear this, of course, because it does seem to me that among people of your generation there is this move away from what you might call traditional political party allegiances towards issue politics, just as you've described Amnesty, Greenpeace or whatever, and in your case other issues we'll be coming to I know of student politics.
C-H I think that's very much the case. I think that's mirrored by a change in party attitudes that there's this move towards the centre of all the parties to try and capture all voters within society.
C So, you were interested in politics right from a wee thing, as it were, and you came up to university, you've studied politics. How did you actually get drawn into the student politics scene, because that's not always considered as a sort of very serious political scene?
C-H Oh, it's very serious. Again, I found the SRC through a friend of mine who was on my course in politics, he was a member of the SRC and I'd been a class rep for my first year for politics and he seemed to think it was like a natural progression that I get into the SRC. I remember getting my nomination form in just in the nick of time and I didn't have to stand for election in my first … because there wasn't enough candidates for the position so we walked on the Council.
C That's fairly characteristic isn't it that unless there is any particularly exciting people, most of you do get elected without much contest.
C-H Unfortunately that's the case, yes. Certainly in my time on the SRC I've noticed a stigma attached to it which we've worked very hard to dispel and I think to some extent successfully. There is a sort of 'I'm alright Jack' mentality among the students and unless something is very, very wrong, they're happy just to sit back and not worry about things.
C Leave it to what I've heard called the SRC hacks. Is that term still current?
C-H I think that term is still very much valid. I've noticed a change in the people coming towards the SRC, we're actually finding a lot more highly motivated people joining the SRC and that's a really good thing. We certainly obviously have the die hards who will never leave the SRC and they'll find ways to continue on at university long past their degree due date but yes, there is certainly a change in the people that the SRC now attracts although we do have problems getting people to stand.
C Of course it is a career path which is quite helpful in the future isn't for those of you who rise to the top like you've done and probably to one or two others on any given council, it can be quite a recommendation for your career future?
C-H Certainly, yes.
C We'll come back to that at the end maybe. Just step back for a second to being a class rep, this is the kind of lowest form of representative life isn't it?
C-H Yes, right at the bottom of the pot.
C How did you find that? Did any issues arise that you felt you were able to mediate successfully or was it just really going through the motions?
C-H Again, I'm ashamed to say I sort of came into that by the seat of my pants as it were because there was the teacher in front of the class asked for people to stand for election to it. There was this rather embarrassed hushed silence and the next thing I knew my hand was in the air and that was me. The class representative system then wasn't very effective but we didn't have many issues to deal with. There were certain issues about continuous assessed essays and things like that that we saw fit to bring to the attention of the Faculty but in those days I was still finding my feet at University and not really giving that much thought, or as much thought as I should have been to issues such as that.
C OK, so you got on to the SRC Council and that was what, in your second year?
C-H Yes.
C And then you soldiered on for two more years on the Council until you graduated and then stood for President, is that right?
C-H That's right, yes.
C So tell me about how you got interested in being President and how you got to win the election.
C-H When I joined the SRC in 1996 the year following that I decided to stand for an executive position and I was Junior Vice-President that year and Treasurer the following year and it seemed like a natural progression. I had a number of friends on the SRC and off the SRC who encouraged me to stand for it. I stood against two other people and it was a very hard fought campaign.
C Who were the other two?
C-H The other two, I don't know if I should name them, but Rami Okasha…
C Oh yes I know him slightly, he was the debater wasn't he?
C-H Yes, he was very interested in debating and he is still very much involved in the SRC. And then there was an old course friend of mine called Gavin Cryden, he stood as well and that was somewhat strange going up against a friend of mine. There was a poster war on campus for about three weeks. I must have knocked on every door in every Hall of Residence at the time and then on the day of the election itself we had rather an exciting gimmick where all of my campaign team were dressed in sunglasses and suits as sort of bodyguards and everywhere I went I was escorted they all had earphones and they sort of hustled me around. I was lucky enough to have a friend that drove a black jaguar and they drove me round campus at 4 miles an hour with a sort of entourage of bodyguards as a presidential candidate. That got a real buzz going and I like to think that that added to the victory.
C So what was the turnout for that election, because it's often fairly low isn't it, but perhaps this one was a bit more exciting?
C-H I think because people were so aware of the election we actually had a massive turnout in fact the biggest turnout than any time in the last ten years. We had I think 24% of the student body which is phenomenal. I know it doesn't sound much but it is 13 or something as a rule, but I got 1,300 votes of that turnout which was …
C 10% of the whole University.
C-H Exactly, so I knew I was very lucky and counted my blessings that day.
C Did you run on a ticket, a mandate, what were you selling to the voters?
C-H I try to be very realistic about promises that I made. I didn't have a party affiliation. I looked around the University for a long time beforehand to see what I thought needed changing, what I had a realistic chance of having a go at, and there were basic things on campus, about bus fares and safety and things like that. Obviously there were the more wide-ranging issues such as tuition fees which came in the year before I was elected and at that time we had no idea how close we would get or how victorious we would be this year so I half heartedly put down yes I'll try to end tuition fees not knowing that success that would follow.
C And you were fairly active I understand in the campaign against tuition fees nationally, is that right?
C-H Very much so. Since I joined the SRC tuition fees had been a sort of spectre on the horizon. We worked with the National Union of Students, and the non-affiliated universities, and fostered a sense of unity which we had been without for a number of years, that was quite an achievement in itself. We made representations to the public, to the Independent Committee enquiring into student finance
C That's the Cubie Committee.
C-H That's right and who in fact my predecessor, David Walsh, had been appointed to.
C Of course he was the student member, wasn't he?
C-H That's right. So it was good having him as a direct feed into the committee. I am very happy to say that the Cubie Committee recommendations very much mirrored our submission of evidence in our representations to them. We supplemented that with a very intensive lobbying campaign. We organised the first ever lobby of the Scottish Parliament to which 70% of all of the MSPs attended which is I think a record. Obviously it's a record because of the first lobby, but the first lobby of that kind and I don't think it's been repeated since. So very much we capitalised on media interest, it was never out of the press and in the end of the day public opinion and the recommendations of the Cubie Committee forced the executive to U-turn on the issue of tuition fees, and more importantly bring back some form of maintenance grant, which was I think a very much bigger issue, and the tuition fees were a paper tiger only really effected kids of middle class backgrounds, whereas the abolition of the maintenance grant was causing more problems day to day for those students from poorish backgrounds.
C Yes, that's what the academic view always was I know. That it was the grant that was the real thing not fees which were small anyway though of course they are in a sense a wedge.
C-H Oh yes, and it represented a very significant victory for us but I think the thing that we took most joy from was the fact that the students that we had actually helped were the ones that would now get a grant that didn't do previously. We did a survey during the campaign which was of school leavers and out of 790 responses that we got to this survey, 10% said that they wouldn't be going to further education college or university because of either tuition fees, the abolition of the maintenance grant, or the fear of having debt. It was immensely rewarding to think that through our labours this year and through the successes that we achieved that we may have redressed that balance and hopefully that 10% might now have a more colourful future as a result.
C It sound as if you were running a very professional campaign. Did you chaps do it on your own or did you have professional advice, did you have advice from any PR or lobbyist firms or anything like that, or was this all you chaps bicycling along on your own.
C-H Not as such. I think the learning curve in this job for things like that is almost vertical and I was thrown in at the deep end but I had a very intensive and very helpful handover from my predecessor - David Welsh - and at the time we'd been working on the strategy for a number of years and refining it and so forth. The National Union of Students has professional staff which are professional lobbyists and they assisted us to a certain degree but we took it on ourselves.
C And this of course was in a sense a quite separate Scottish campaign, wasn't it, because that must have helped that you had, as it were, a new assembly, you had the new Scottish Parliament, you had the Scottish Executive, it was a small enough theatre, whereas campaigning UK-wide might have been more difficult I suppose?
C-H Totally. It was for a number of reasons. The Scottish Parliament was obviously a godsend in opportunity stakes. It was very malleable and we found that the MSPs were all looking to sort of find their feet and as such we were having quiet little words in their ears and finding that they actually responded. Whereas Westminster is very much more set in its ways and harder to influence. Also there's problems with student representation south of the border. It was only this year that the National Union of Students south of the border actually adopted a policy advocating the return of the maintenance grant and that's indicative of the near twenty year rule of the Labour students who really sought to toe the party line and didn't want to make waves about the maintenance grant, which really represented a gross, a very heinous misrepresentation of student interest South of the Border. We managed to do it in Scotland but it's going to be a real uphill struggle if they are going to do it in England.
C And the Scottish campaign was entirely cross party in the traditional party sense?
C-H Yes.
C Did any MSPs offer you particular support or help? Which were the ones who most interested themselves in these issues.
C-H Very much so. We were very lucky in Aberdeen because Nicol Stephen who is Aberdeen South MSP was the Deputy Minister for Enterprise and Life-Long Learning
C That was a good thing.
C-H Very much, he was very much at the centre of the debate and he was always willing to meet with us. On the day the Cubie [Report] was published I was summoned to Holyrood by William Rennie who's the Local Democrat chief of staff and Nicol Stephen for several days of negotiation and consultation about the Cubie recommendations and what the student attitude was to it. So we were very much involved in the actual hands-on process from the start.
C Was Lewis MacDonald any help to you, because he of course is an Aberdeen graduate as well as a local representative.
C-H Yes, Lewis was always very keen to meet with us. Obviously the Labour machine is very much tighter than the Liberal Democrat one and they have to toe the line of the whips so whilst he was very friendly and very encouraging I think his hands were certainly tied in a number of areas and he wasn't giving anything away that's for sure.
C So that was really a big triumph and I suppose it took up how much of the year, I mean I can't remember the exact chronology of when Cubie finally reported and when you knew you'd won, as it were.
C-H We put our first submission of evidence to the committee in August last year, and we put another submission of evidence to them, which we always partially published and everything in November. Cubie finally reported mid to late December, it was just before Christmas. The executive prepared a response to Cubie in the third week of January which unfortunately wasn't as forward thinking as the original Cubie report but represented significant victory for us anyway. That happened January/February then they embarked on a period of consultation just last month actually, well it was May that they issued documents and myself and my successors have already embarked on preparing a response to that. And the fight continues. There are areas where the executive position on Cubie is lacking and we seem to improve the lot of the students.
C That issue while it must have dominated your first term, in the sense of the university term, then remained on the boil but not quite to hecticly I suppose and you began to think more of local things perhaps, like what came next, the Rectorial?
C-H I think, no, I think probably the biggest issue on a local level was the formation of the Students Association.
C What about the beginnings of that, because it came as a complete surprise to me, of course I'm retired now, but I hadn't heard any lead up to this at all?
C-H I think it came as a surprise to a lot of people. It was very much the brainchild of last year's sabbaticals. They found that they got on very well which is not something that happens often, that all four sabbaticals get on very well.
C The four sabbaticals being the President, the Vice-President of the SRC, the President of the Athletics Association, President of the Union?
C-H That's right, yes. They found that they got on very well, decided that there was no real mileage in going on the way that we'd going on for over a hundred years in that three separate organisations are pulling in different directions when we could probably make more advances, more significant advances, as a cohesive unit. They conducted a referendum last year, in March 1999, of the student body in which we hand delivered 11,000 letters asking people to vote and that secured a turnout even bigger than my own election I'm sorry to say, which returned a staggering "yes" vote. The campaign was very, very intensive and we secured a massive mandate. The University was very pleased and the University have given us a great deal of help I must say in the legalities of the whole process and writing it constitutionally, kept us on the straight and narrow. They've not been overly paternal but they've obviously shown us what we can legally do and what we can't.
C Who would be your contacts within the Administration? Is it straight to the Secretary of the University?
C-H Yes, very much so. We met with Steve Cannon quite a lot. John Powell who's the Regent, we worked with him and David Yule who retires this year, he was very much the lynch-pin of the university support for the Association. We actually gave David Yule honorary life membership of the Union.
C I'm sure he'd appreciated that.
C-H He was rapt.
C He's a very good draughtsman, David, so I'm sure he's very helpful on the Constitution.
C-H Yes. He takes it for bed-time reading - it's lovely. So we got on very well and I'm happy to say the sabbaticals this year got on just as well as the ones last year. We worked together and put in hundreds and hundreds of hours work to produce the final constitution which was accepted by the three bodies and we are going to have that ratified in the first few weeks of the new term by my successors. It represents a more stream-lined organisation, certainly something which I hope will have a lot more impact on both the University and national government …
C You'll presumably save a bit on admin support and that sort of thing and be able to rationalise there.
C-H Yes.
C I suppose one downside argument, if it is a good one, I don't know, is that often I think people, as I indicated earlier, seek office partly because it's good for their careers, and at the moment we've got four presidents, now there will only be one. Do you think that's a loss to individuals, perhaps the sort of people who might not aspire to be an SRC president because it is a rather political role, but who might have been very good managers and therefore good at running the union, they'll be deprived of that top office won't they in future?
C-H I think that's certainly one way of looking at it. I'm not going to lie to you, it is a very good thing to have on your CV, but I'm of the opinion that those people who want the job enough will not be put off. Certainly if someone had told me that running for President would be now termed running for Vice-President representation I still wouldn't have had no second thoughts about running it. Certainly a very much secondary consideration of what it will do for oneself but the returns and actually the work and experience of the year in office are such that it really overrides any sort of thought about what it's going to do for one's CV.
C So how will the new structure work? The overall boss will be what?
C-H President of the Association.
C Then a tier of people under that?
C-H That's right. I'm the last ever SRC President.
C The next person will be President of the Students Association?
C-H That's right. Then there's three vice Presidents. There's Vice-President, Services who takes over the Union, Vice-President, Sport and then there's Vice-President, Representation which is the SRC. The main body of which would be the Association of General Council. We'll still have people elected to the three bodies but they'll be specialised areas. It's just that we were worried that we might have 60 rugby players who didn't have many ideas about the Union or representation. So it's really just electing areas of special interest but they work very much together in integrated committees like the Finance Committee, there's the External Affairs Committee, Communications, all which are very much integrated but there is also specialised areas. It's more like the left hand now knows what the right hand's doing and we have high hopes for it.
C Will you all move into this building, will it be the headquarters for the Association, or will the Union stay down where it is now?
C-H We have fairly stringent promises from the University that they are actually going to build us a new building.
C Yes, back of Johnstone Hall or something.
C-H That's what the rumours are, I couldn't possibly comment. Obviously the Association will be bigger than some of the parts.
C But meantime you'll stay where you are?
C-H Yes. The Union will always be at the Gallowgate and any services that are built into the new building will just represent a day trade rather than a competitor to the Gallowgate. There will be improved sports facilities and certainly we've drawn up a wish-list of the blue sky ideals of what we would like to have in it but I think a sauna, jacuzzi is probably out of it at the moment.
C How interesting. Well it will be fascinating for you to watch how all this develops in the future, won't it?
C-H Yes.
C You've been speaking of your role as SRC President in connection with this new Student Association idea, what about the sort of day to day stuff during your year of office? I mean your interactions with the University as a whole, with the Court, with the Senate, with students on campus, any little vignettes there?
C-H It was immensely rewarding. I think some of the highlights of my year have been when I have actually tangibly helped individual students. There's a number of people I've won academic appeals for because they really deserve a second chance as it were. I think probably my best time in office was when there was a guy who was being threatened with discontinuation of studies because he'd not passed one set of exams and not got the credits necessary to progress and because he was grappling with methadone after his heroine addiction and he intimated to me that there really would be nothing for him if he was chucked out of university and I'm happy to say that we managed to get him reinstated and he's now thriving as a very successful student.
C It's wonderful isn't it when you hear real success stories like that?
C-H Definitely. That was very much a jewel in my year.
C You've got a big welfare role in looking after individual students?
C-H Not so much, that's more the work of Lyndsey who is my Vice-President, I sort of take a sweeper role whenever she's got too much on her plate and I'll see the students and that's how I came to help that guy and a number of others. But that has been very much her role this year is handling the appeals, and the one to one welfare, but I found it immensely rewarding when I did step in. My role has been much more strategic this year with bringing the Association on-line, doing the tuition fees work and so forth. I found that the University committees, well at first intimidated me.
C They're usually rather large, aren't they?
C-H Yes. I sort of found myself being the youngest person there by about 30 years and at times it was difficult to be taken seriously or get the respect of the peers but I found that after a short while that came naturally and the people got used to me being there and really valued what I had to say which was immensely useful. I think that things like Court and that I never got used to, it was very much people talking about making decisions concerning millions and millions of pounds and I was bowled over by that. If it hadn't been for the guidance of Clarissa Dickson-Wright, the Rector, then I probably would have freaked out on a number of occasions.
C Do you have much day to day communion with the Principal for example? Do you have regular meetings with him or just when you bump into each other at Committees?
C-H It's very much that. The Principal started a programme of meetings with us but I think his diary is full of other things. I get on very well with the Principal. He's been very friendly to me, he's cooked dinner for us, that was very nice, but I'd say that the people I meet up with most have been the University Secretary who I've got on tremendously well with,
C Steve Cannon?
C-H Steve Cannon and the Regent, I've got on very well with John Powell, but no I don't see that much of the Principal.
C You mentioned the Rector, the famous fat lady. Were you involved in her election or was this just something that happened while you were SRC President?
C-H No. She was elected before I came to office, she was elected last year and I was very much thinking about my own campaign at the time so I wasn't involved in the election but I met with her very soon after she came to office. Clarissa and I have got on very well. We share a love for the same sort of music, and Rasputin by Boney M, is a popular favourite of both ours. She's taken me to dinner which as you can imagine is a very huge treat and we've also shared a laugh. She's been very willing to put aside her own views about things and listen to what myself as an ambassador for the students, what I feel is in the students best interest and as such she's always willing to give me air time in Court or whatever and we'll have a meeting before Court to carve up the billet to decide what I need to say something about and what a little bit of constructive impartial chairing.
C She actually chairs the Court.
C-H She chairs Court, that's right.
C Because not all Rectors do, do they?
C-H No. I think Glasgow have real problems because he's quite intimidated by the whole thing. On numerous occasions I've called in what I like to call a "Clarissa strike" in Court and she will impartially chair a debate which she actually sways things towards my position.
C Can you think of an example?
C-H Yes, numerous ones. There was a suggestion to ban children from the library and obviously I made the point of view you can't just tie children up outside like dogs and that there are students with families at the University who need to bring children in and that maybe we could come to an arrangement where if a child was overly noisy then the library staff would be in a position where they could ask the student and child to go. Clarissa, she told me tongue in cheek she thought that was a perfectly sensible idea that children should be banned from the library but because it was my view that really that was unfair to students with families she was very much on my side, put her own views aside and swung the debate in my favour.
C Yes, that's a very interesting example, any other?
C-H Numerous but all relating to things like individual student rights. She was finding that some of the students pester her quite a lot but she still puts aside any sort of ill feeling towards them and be willing to represent them to the best of her ability.
C How often is she in Aberdeen?
C-H She's a very good Rector relatively speaking to the other Rectors that I know of. She's in Aberdeen at all major events. She makes an effort to come to hold surgery at least once a month and that's certainly very popular. She has no qualms about actually coming face to face with students and they love that. We're hard pressed to keep the tourists at bay from making appointments. She's fabulous I think. She has absolutely no delusions about herself, she doesn't have tickets on herself as a celebrity, and then once you speak to her she very much takes you up to her level and it's very much a one-to-one conversation.
C Of course a lot of people didn't realise I think until she'd taken up office that she was once a barrister.
C-H That's right. I didn't know that.
C She's not stupid.
C-H She's always a very open person, she's always willing to talk about things like her alcoholism when she was younger and she tells some very funny stories.
C Who's her assessor on Court, I don't know?
C-H This year she had two assessors. Louis Durand and Duncan Cockburn. Louis has now graduated and gone on to other better things but Duncan Cockburn is doing a PhD.
C So he'll be around for a bit
C-H Yes and he's been a good friend to me as well. We struck an alliance on Court, and estates and Finance and so on.
C I'm very interested to hear that while you found these university-level committees a bit intimidating you've obviously put your two ha'pence in and contributed something to them.
C-H It would be more than my job's worth not to really, that's why I'm there.
C Another issue you mentioned to me a little while ago was this question of the consortium of Aberdeen students? Would you say a bit about that?
C-H This came out as a result of bus fare negotiations. I'd been talking to bus companies and they were very rigid in their position that they weren't going to budge an inch and I was talking just as a matter of factly to the president of Robert Gordon's students association, Mike Cooper, and he said that he'd had the same problems but we also found out that they'd been playing us off against each other. They'd offered one thing to one and not the other and we thought this represents them trying to play the market. So we put our heads together and decided that we'd probably have a lot better success if we united and we got Elana Morrison and Gavin Oats who were presidents of Aberdeen College and Northern College respectively and we are now a body which represents a total of 50,000 students in Aberdeen and has had successes now on bus fares. We've managed to get them to the negotiation table and lower fares on certain routes. We are hopeful that the consortium will now address other issues such as safety in the city and all issues which students share common interest as it were. We've also used the consortium in the tuition fees and maintenance grant campaign as a group to house Aberdeen-centred activities is regard to that.
C Because that is a significant body of people, 50,000. Even in a city where the young population is quite high actually.
C-H Yes. People have to listen to us now, we are a market force.
C What exactly has happened about the bus fares? There is now a student concession is there or not?
C-H It changes. The bus company in all fairness are looking to find the best student reduction which will keep their profit margins at an acceptable level and I can see that, that's obviously the market economy, but they are experimenting with various reductions and fare cards and stuff like that. But at least they are recognising the need for student discount and they are addressing the student need.
C So we will see a discount?
C-H Fingers crossed.
C We've covered a lot of ground. I haven't asked you at all about your own kind of experience of being a student outside your representative capacity. You may want to say a word or two about where you lived and what it's been like socially at the University and so on?
C-H I've made a lot of friends, that's for sure. Friends that I hope I'll keep until the day I die. I've lived in Halls for the first two years.
C Which Halls were you in?
C-H In Hillhead.
C In Hillhead from the beginning?
C-H That was quite an experience.
C It's a huge concentration of people.
C-H Oh it is and they really need to send a psychoanalyst up there to have a look at the interaction that goes on because it's amazing. It's a little microcosm of society up there. I had to move out really because I wasn't getting any work done, you're never more than 300 yards away from a friend at Hillhead and when people are continually popping round you never get any work done. So I moved to King Street, well Dunbar Street, and then King Street where I live today.
C With mates you've made in the Halls?
C-H Yes.
C What's your sort of general impression from your own and other peoples experience about Aberdeen as a place to live as a student?
C-H Aberdeen I think gets a bad reputation.
C Everybody says expensive city.
C-H Expensive, cold, grey. All of those are true, but there is a significant upside to Aberdeen, the weather in summer is lovely, I'm told. The atmosphere, I suppose being up north the nights are longer in the winter time so there is definitely people who seem to have a good time at night and make the most of it and the night life is great. There's a lot to do in daytime. A wonderful beach and I've taken advantage of all that.
C Good, that sounds splendid. I don't know if there are things that you want to cover but there is certainly one question I'd like to ask you and that's really about your perception in the four years you've been here of what you might call the kind of changes in mood of students. You know because you've done a four year degree and now you've had a fifth year as President, so it's quite a time span, 5, years in the one place and it's often very difficult I think if you're in a university to capture how things are changing in terms of general attitudes, and for example whether student poverty is now so serious that it's affecting many, many people's lives. For instance where the students are becoming more politicised because of that or not and so on, you know those sort of issues?
C-H Yes. I have noticed a definite change in the student attitude and the student experience. When I joined the University in 1995 there was very much a sort of apathy which had stagnated in - an atrophying feeling that there really wasn't anything that anyone could do about things like tuition fees or hardship so people just knuckled down and got their work done and not bother getting involved. When tuition fees were brought in there was a very significant notable change in student attitude. There was suddenly a value for money view, people were paying for their education so they wanted to get most out of it, so there was a big increase in the membership of societies. People wanted to get the most out of their experience now they were paying for it. Also on the other side of that there was people wanting to obviously change the situation. They wanted to get rid of tuition fees and when the Cubie committee was announced and the new Scottish Parliament there was a great feeling of suddenly we were on a level and a feeling of empowerment that we now had the ability to input into this committee, have the committee, hear are recommendations and act on them and there was a feeling that we could actually win and that actually came to fruition and we did win. I'm hoping that people will see what happened this year so in future years they will have that feeling of empowerment and that apathy will drop away.
C Of course it's always been said, I mean I can't remember a time, and I've been around this University ages, when it wasn't said that Aberdeen students were apathetic in a political sense. But you're saying that they are less so now at the moment.
C-H A case in point, in November there was a March in Edinburgh and we managed to get 500 Aberdeen students to it in coaches, we outnumbered every other university in the country by at least 400, so it was certainly a phenomenal force to be reckoned with.
C Do you think this value for money thing you were talking about, do you think that has made students more critical of the teaching they are getting and more litigious in appealing against decisions and so on.
C-H Absolutely. There was a time when lecturers would decide not to have lectures on certain weeks or tutorial tutors would sit back and let their students talk, now there is a real demand on lecturers, or certainly while fees were in and they still are for English students, that there is a need for quality and things like the Quality Assurance Agency, I wouldn't like to be a teacher at the moment because everybody is snapping at your heels to improve.
C Do you find, this is perhaps too general a question to answer, do you find people hopeful about the future or are they so burdened with the spectre of debt and trying to get a decent job straight away?
C-H The victories of this year have certainly been a guiding light for a lot of people. A lot of people have been stunned by what we've achieved this year and I hope that that will act as a sort of springboard for them in the future and will rally the spirit of all the masses and I think there is a lot of scope for hope next year with the new Students Association, that's a new vibrant thing, and I'm hoping people will want to get involved in that and take advantage of that.
C What are you going on to yourself now?
C-H I enjoyed immensely the work I've done with the Parliament and I would like to go into lobbying or some sort of policy analysis but I'd like to be on the outside looking in as it were.
C You don't want to be an MSP?
C-H I don't want to be an MSP, no. My election days are over and I would like to work very much for a charity as a lobbyist and try to achieve something similar to what we have done this year.
C Are you actively pursuing those opportunities or are you going to take a little break first.
C-H I am. I had a job interview last week unfortunately I didn't get it but they said I was second choice. Yes I need to take a little break, go off to Spain tomorrow and relax in the sun for a few days and then join the fight again next week.
C Great. It's been lovely talking to you. Is there anything else you would have wished to say that I haven't happened upon.
C-H We've certainly covered a lot of ground and just to say that my time in Aberdeen has been a very rewarding one. I've seen the University grow and develop and I wish every luck for the Students Association and the students of tomorrow.
C Lovely, thank you very much.
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