| Description | Interview with Duncan Cockburn who is President of the Students Association and just about to remit office in 2003 after a two-year stint. Recorded at Luthuli House on 28th May 2003. The interviewer is Jennifer Carter
Transcription: Part 1
JC So thank you very much Duncan for giving your time, as you are leaving the student office, you are probably madly rushing around trying to tidy everything up!.
DC Yes
JC I mentioned in that introduction that you held office for two years. I think this is pretty unusual, isn't? Is it unprecedented?
DC It is true to say that I am the first sabbatical president to hold office twice in that position and there has been a Vice President who was re-elected in my first year.
JC Who was that?
DC Duncan Stewart/Stuart? I am the first ever President that has ever been re-elected.
JC How did that come about? Was it through huge student apathy, or because you were so good?
DC A combination of both! It came about because I think that I had decided by Freshers Week of my first year, probably just before I took up office, that what I wanted to do would take more than a year to do. It would take three. Unfortunately I am forbidden under the Education Act from standing for a third term. But I don't think I would anyway. After two years I am quite worn out. But that's how it came about, I simply realised that I simply couldn't achieve the things I wanted to do within 1 year.
JC What was that agenda?
DC The agenda was to attempt and I think I have been mostly successful, along with others in the Student Association, in trying to make the Student Association more of a success in the first instance. A few years ago the Student Association was formed from the old Student Representative Council, the Athletics Association and the Union Management Committee to form a Students Association, partly to make that a success, but also leading on from that, to make it more relevant to the needs of students, the demands of students and to circulate I think more of a service and membership spirit about the organisation. I haven't succeeded in everything that I would have liked to, but I would like to say that a few years after the formation of an association, I think that we are significantly further down that road.
JC How does one measure that success? Presumably not in turnouts for elections, as I gather the one for your successor had a very low turnout indeed.
DC It was a low turnout. It was just under 10% .. that was usual. It was just down on the turnout that I had for my re-election. It was significantly down from the year before. Compared nationally it is about average. So yes, I am not going to say it is perfectly excusable that 10% of students vote, it isn't. We need to look at ways of making more students vote. Finding more ways of being more relevant to the students. It may be that we should be looking at holding elections over a number of days, having different ways of voting than traditional methods of voting.
JC Before my unkind question about turnout figures, you said that you thought things had improved towards your objects in the time you had been in office, I wondered what other kinds of measures you had applied.
DC When the Association was formed, the services that we offered and the support that we gave, some of our non-commercial services, particularly some of the services that had been based within the Students Representative Council, were weak in some respects. Over the years gradually services had been chipped away for various reasons, some due to funding problems, others due because personnel had moved away and hadn't been replaced in quite the same way. Where as once we had, I think, quite a thriving organisation which had a large number, Welfare Services, for example, or services related to academic affairs, we had no longer got that range of services. I think over the last two, three, years, it has been all about building up those services again. For example over the years in office we launched Niteline, which is a listening service, which operates between 8 in the evening until 8 in the morning. It is there to give out pieces of information, like when train times are, when exam times are, anything that a student needs, but also there to be a listening ear for students who want to talk during the middle of the night when they have no one else to talk to about worries or problems that they are facing. We have also opened an Information & Advice centre which, if you like, an attempt to have a daytime information centre, so that we have leaflets there. We have a very successful accommodation service, which tells students about the private accommodation in the city both with solicitors and through private schemes. We have free legal advice operating every fortnight. We are looking at having accommodation advice by Shelter. We are also looking into the Citizens Advice Bureau and again that centre is staffed during peak-times, that's roughly between 11 and 3 by student volunteers who come to guide students, help students.
JC You have train then I presume?
DC Both Niteliners and information volunteers we have had to train. That's a service we are looking to expand. We had come to the conclusion that the only means that we can stay open on a Saturday, open in the evenings, is by more use of volunteers. That is the only cost effective way of doing so, but in doing so we have got more services of helping students more than ever before. We have also taken the bold step in the last, since Christmas, with mixed success admittedly, towards establishing Liberation campaigns, like the Students with Disabilities, for Women, for Black students and for Gay, Lesbian and Bi-Sexual students, and although those campaigns are really in a very embryonic state at the moment, we hope that in the coming years they will give a focus for students who are oppressed at University, to be perfectly honest, the opportunity to stand up and say that the educational system in many cases works against them as well as a wider citizenship agenda, by highlighting to other students that society oppresses them on a more or less daily basis. I think that is an important agenda. It recaptures some of the spirit of the SRC from many years ago. It also demonstrates to students in that one area of welfare that we are responsive to their needs. For example one of the things we did this year was to move the job link service which matches up students with part-time employment, from the Union in the Gallowgate to campus, because we realised more people would use it as it would be on the doorstep where they were studying and that has been a very successful move. More students than ever now use that service. So in just that area of welfare, and I could go on in other areas, and I am sure I will later, but in just that area of welfare, the number of services that we provide is greater than ever before, and we have clear ideas of how we are going to develop those services. I am not saying that every student out there knows we are necessarily doing them more inclusively, but that is what we are doing and I think that folk that turn out figures that you unhelpfully and unkindly mentioned are symptomatic of that picture having to get through to students. That will take a generation of students. I think these are all steps to make our self a more relevant organisation.
JC And I suppose nowadays there are tremendous quality issues built into this. I mean if you are putting yourselves forward as the people to advise students about the kinds of issues you have been mentioning, obviously the business of getting your volunteers properly trained and so forth, must be a huge difficulty. Is it simply done through previous people who have done it before? Or do you bring in professionals to do it?
DC It is a combination of both. We have, I mean, one of the major changes over the last year has been a staff restructuring of the Association and particularly staff restructuring that has taken place on the services we offer on campus , which is a non-commercial service, particularly the service in Luthuli House, this building we are in today. So we now have staff which are actually aligned to the services that we offer and aligned to the committees that we have. So for example, our Academic Affairs Committee actually has a dedicated staff support in the form of an Education Policy Officer, someone to guide, do research, to write up consultations once we have had our ideas and present, and dot the I's and stroke the t's.
JC Is this a professional administrator or is it a student elected ..
DC No, it is a professional member of staff. So we had I think a mismatch between the staff we had and the activities we were doing, so we know have what is called a Students Activities Department, headed up by a Manager. It has a Societies Administrator, who on a part-time basis looks after Societies. A Volunteer Development Co-ordinator who on a part-time basis, looks at student volunteering, again which is a new service that we are offering students in the last year. We have an Education Policy Officer who guides the Association on matters to do with the Funding Council, we shall engage this year in a lot more consultations than ever before, influencing national policy. I think we are also, as a result, through our Area Study Convenors, who are part-time students, who sit on very important committees, Senate, the Academic Standards Committee, the Undergraduate Programme Committee, while undertaking their studies, as 2nd and 3rd year students in the main, suddenly having to confront academics about issues of academic quality. It is a very daunting task and we are now better able through that staff resource to prepare them for that role. We are better able to communicate with class representatives in individual classes through the Area Study Convenors, but also with having a permanent contact. So class reps can go to an individual where it's not someone like myself or another sabbatical who does ones best or who may not have the time. Time in many respects, our remits are increasingly wider, and hours increasingly longer, but it is still makes answering every question quite hard. I think that one of the biggest shifts has been a move to having professional support. We have a Research & Development Officer, a post currently vacant, because the person moved, who looks at things, accreditation, developing student training, the idea that students train others in key skills like communications, assertiveness, dealing with conflict, time management, stress management. Again, a new service, students helping students and I think that is the heart of what we are doing as an association. Then finally we are about to employ a Welfare Advice Officer, someone who will be there to help guide the Welfare and Equalities Committee and all the services that we have added on like Niteline, and the others that I mentioned earlier.
JC These civil servants, as it were, are they employed by yourself as the Student Association or are they also employees of the university?
DC They are employed by ourselves as a student association. They are, if you like, the civil service that are operated in commercial services, since the unions fought since the 70's or early 80's and I think that the student movement across the country has seen this move towards a slight professionalisation. That is understandable, I mean that under the collapses of some services that were being offered were on someone being terrible enthusiastic and giving a lot of time, and then moving on. It also depended on students having vast tracts of free time to be able to devote to that. Students just don't have that time anymore. More students than ever have to take up part-time work. I think the idea, certainly when I came to university in 1995, I was never involved in the Students Association until I became elected President, which is another deep irony, but I was heavily involved in debating in the Debator. I served for 5 years there and I remember being in this building, up in an attic, every time I wasn't in a lecture theatre! Even during my Ph.D. I spent more time in the attic in this building than in the library and I think that was very much the way students entered the university when I came here back in 1995. A lot of us who were lucky enough not to have to work were able to while away our times doing these things. This is no longer the case, and I think that part of the reason is part-time employment and another reason is I think is that students do actually care a lot more about getting good grades so that they can pay off the debt that they are accumulating.
JC And there is much more continuous assessment as well which of course limits the amount of free time you have.
DC Absolutely. So given that, I think that we have to take responsibilities and say, well our volunteers need a lot more support than they may be did.
JC Very interesting. To what extent, if at all, and here I am purely guessing, are you now providing a range of services, which formerly might have been provided by the University. I am thinking, I don't know if John Powell, was around in your time, but I remember when he was holding that position of Head of Student Services, they were building up from the University side a lot of the sort of things you are talking about now. Not exactly the same but I wonder - has that all crumbled? Have you moved into a vacuum?
DC I don't think it has crumbled by any stretch of the imagination, but I think there is a huge pressure and increasing pressure to provide those services. The demand has certainly risen. I see our services as complimentary. We don't tend to advice people. We tend to listen and refer. We can advise, for example academic appeals, academic complaints. We are not an advisory service in the nature that Student Support Services are. We don't have hardship grants to give out, but what we are able to do, I think, is do a lot of the low key work, which a lot of students suffer from, but maybe don't feel that it merits an appointment with Student Support Services. I think if there are serious cases we always refer them on to people who are more able to deal with them, but what we are able to do is compliment a service that University provides and that is to deal with more low-key problems. The problems that aren't very serious. The problems that students, if you like, it is more self-help than serious problems. That is not to say that serious problems don't cross our path, but I think that in many cases it is a question in knowing where to stop. Stop trying to give information and who to refer on. So I see our services as completely complimentary.
JC Yes, I wondered if there had been something, not a collapse for reasons of people, but a collapse by virtue of you know scaling down the amount of resources that had gone into it. But that is not the case. Well that is interesting and encouraging. But I suppose also on this sort of issue, it is conceivable to argue that students prefer to talk to other students, in this slightly informal, I was going to say scruffy building, but that would be unkind, but you know, a slightly informal building. Is that possibly part of your success do you think?
DC Yes. That is certainly one element. I think there is … if you have a small problem, that small problem can build up to be one large problem by the end of an academic year. I stood for elections the first time and my campaign team and I were very convinced that the word welfare was not to be mentioned at all! The "W" word would simply loose me votes, but you will probably hear when you play this back that I have mentioned welfare continuously. I can't stand the word Welfare, but I suppose I lapse into it … wellbeing is an expression that I still haven't managed to train myself to say! But it has a lot to merit in itself in "Wellbeing" is an expression which accurately reflects what our welfare services really are. They are not welfare. Welfare gives off an element of Jobseekers Allowance or whatever, and as such is a huge stigma for most students. Where "Wellbeing" is what students actually need. I said to someone who was arguing whether or not student development and training and the like was more important than student welfare and I think both are important . The Student Association has a role to play in both of them but personally Student Welfare/Wellbeing is more important. I turned round to this person and I said "When you were at University, did you have flat-mate problems" and he said "Yes". It was a guaranteed certainty. I could ask the question and I knew I would receive a "Yes" response. Everyone who shares a flat or house at university will have a problem with one of the flat-mates. He needed wellbeing. He maybe didn't realise it at the time.
JC So what form would that help take?
DC The help may take just being able to talk over with someone, you know at 10 o'clock when an argument happens. Help may come from knowing about if it is so serious, by being able to move out of the flat and where you stand legally. Help may come from finding a new flat from the accommodation centre. Help may come from raising awareness through how people deal with stress. From whether or not people are stressed that they make themselves ill and how you deal flatmates in those circumstances. I think that the students' health and particularly mental health is an issue has increased in prominence on, if you like, an agenda of welfare over the last ten years and we are now in a situation where many students live in small flats or private flats where these problems are not picked up by the traditional wardenial system or the other traditional systems that existed in the past because lots of students lived with landladies or landlords.
JC That is a long way back, but I take your point.
DC They now live in groups together. Evidence suggests that they are under increasing amount of pressure perhaps due to modularisation, although the jury is still out on that, but all the evidence suggests that they are under more pressure, there is more understanding of mental health problems in students and yet we expect students who live with other students to be able to cope with this idea. The answer is - why should a student instantly know how to deal with another student who is going through these difficulties and therefore awareness campaigns, which is something we have been trying to do this year. Obviously we are not going to permeate a population of 13,000 students, but there is work we can do and in that sense we firmly believe that wellbeing is for everyone and we do have an important role to play there.
JC In that particular connection you have mentioned you know, difficulties over accommodation of various kinds, what do you think yourself of the shift which the University has very clearly made away from providing accommodation? Privatising it if you like that term, at the same time when the demand is growing. I mean walking over here today I saw this new development on the corner of St. Machar Drive and King Street, a huge block growing up of student and key workers accommodation? Or down by the Safeway supermarket, there is another vast new development. In other words the private sector is moving quite vigorously into the provision of accommodating students at the same time as the University seems to be stepping back from it. First, am I interpreting that correctly and secondly what do you think about it?
DC Yes that is certainly the case and the University has indeed sold off its satellite halls. That was the first university committee I had to deal with, the 1st of August just taken up office… was the decision to sell off these satellite halls in the university.
JC And what did you think about that?
DC I had obviously been aware of it, as I had served on court as the Rector's Assessor for 1½ years before, so I was lucky in that circumstances. I had been briefed in this. There is a difficulty for people in my position when it comes to dealings with the University I think I have always tried to be realistic. It would be a very easy battle to have and it would be a very easy popularity contest to have to say "No, the university must carry on providing Halls of Residences, the traditional model, but if you look at the market and what the market provides in terms of accommodation and you look at what the University provides in accommodation then there is a huge difference. In a free market where people have knowledge of the standard of accommodation few people would choose the university accommodation over private accommodation. That's a reality. As soon as people have stayed in it for the first year they move out. That's the reality of the market. Equally well you have to bear in mind the University is under increasing pressure from the Funding Council to spend its block grant that it gets on teaching and research, because that is how the taxpayer gives the money. It is not there to subsidize student accommodation. Student accommodation in a university setting is nearly always subsidized. I could argue that it shouldn't be subsidized. The University should still provide it. In which the service given to students would be even worse and meanwhile the building would be becoming increasingly dilapidated. It is a difficult question. There are problems with the market taking over within the sector. There are great benefits from having the University providing the accommodation, one of the biggest examples is the ideal warden support. The University's concept of wardenial support is a vastly different concept to Jarvis's or one of the other providers, Unite for the sake of economic fairness between the two, their idea of wardenial support is a lot less. It is having a part-time student there to raise a fire alarm, as opposed to having a point of contact for a student who say has a problem with something and not quite sure how to cope with the problem they are experiencing. The wardenial system in the University, as well you know, is there to keep an eye on students. It isn't there in the private sector. I think one of the joys though of the University's decision at Hillhead, is that with any luck it will have a partnership with a private firm and itself and its ideas of student welfare/wellbeing and the wardenial system will be adopted and new halls will be provided.
JC It has always intrigued me that, you know, in this particular area that Britain has not followed any of the kind of continental patterns. For example student co-operative housing, this just hasn't been an issue. I suppose we are coming from a different background and it's all too expensive, i.e. the students taking over the management of their own accommodation.
DC It is interesting that you should mention that. Birmingham University Student's Guild does do that. It actually runs accommodation and as far as I am aware, it runs perfectly well. It generates a surplus that gets reinvested in the Student Guilds.
JC And we never looked at that as a possibility?
DC No, I don't think that was on the cards. I am not sure that we necessarily have the expertise to do that. It certainly works in Birmingham. One of the great shames, I think though that the University has missed out on, isn't a continental trend, it is actually an American trend called "living and learning environments". Obviously you come to university to learn and gain some form of outcome, whether it be a degree or another award, and where you live influences how much you learn by quite a large degree. It is a horrendous factor and that's why parents are so keen to put their children when they come to university in a traditional halls of residence, because they believe that is an area where their children will be able to socialise with one another in gaining a solid ground, a solid footing in a new environment, in a new city, in a new learning environment as well. The "living and learning environment" is an American idea where you combine both learning and living in the same area. A number of universities in the north-east have started to convert their halls and their flat accommodation so that groups of 20 students live together with a senior student and they all have a common interest. So, a common interest might be Elvis, or a common interest may be academic or non academic. It could be the assassination of JFK. And they all agree that the will undertake, and they are given money by the university, to undertake a project for a year on that topic. So that may involve going on visits to different places in the country, or holding a seminar and getting guest speakers in to talk about various things and they with their senior student tutor plan out a programme of activities. Now in these "living & learning environments" it has been seen that average students will gain 4 points on the grade point average over a student who doesn't enter those environments.
JC Some people would say that he was being given something to keep him out of mischief and out of the pub!
DC Cynically you might say that, but I gather that the parties in the "living & learning environment" are quite something as well. If you like it is a different fraternity system. It is a fraternity system with a purpose and the purpose is to get better grades, because if you are happy with where you live and with who you live, regardless of the fact that these people are studying different subjects.
JC Do they pick each other then?
DC I think they just pick the topic and they come together naturally. I think in some they are popular and there is a form of selection. I am not sure, it's done in different ways in different universities. As far as I can see, unfortunately, a trend that in Britain hasn't hit us and could be - given the stress in recent months, when it comes to the enhancement of education quality enhancement rather than quality assessment by the Funding Council, that is a very real way of enhancing a student's learning by enhancing their learning environment, but also dealing with some core welfare questions, which are largely unanswered in Britain.
JC Very interesting. It would be fascinating if Aberdeen became the first place to pioneer that.
DC I doubt it. I think we are too late there.
JC We probably missed that particular bus! Other than accommodation, what have you seen as the sort of principal issues which, not necessarily that the Students Association has been involved with, but have affected way in which students may perform. I mean money is an obvious one. You know student finance is a problem for many people. Have there been other big issues, do you think, apart from money and accommodation?
DC Obviously finance is a major issue.
JC And still is, despite the changes.
DC Despite the changes, we now have a system where we have 13 different forms of grants or assistance or loans and the idea that a student can navigate their way through this myriad of possibilities is, I think, a nonsense. We have a vastly different funding system for further education and higher education and yet this is a time when we are encouraging further education in students to become higher education students. One example of this is that we are particularly keen at the moment in getting mature students who come from FE first into higher education, but these mature students, who often have children to look after, get less money to look after their children in HE than they do in FE. However, if you are an ancient student, and don't like the degree course and end up doing an HNC or an HND at a further education college, or if you are a young person…….
JC I have just turned the tape over, but you were saying that they whole financial background against which students operate nowadays is very, very complex and need a lot of advice.
DC Increasingly also it is relied upon loans and not grants, so students may have, what may be true, more money in their pockets, but it is primarily based around an idea of loans that they have to repay. I am exceptionally lucky. I get very embarrassed when I go to a student demonstration or lobbies of the Scottish Parliament. My student loan, I was lucky enough to have been an undergraduate under the old system. I was lucky enough to get a fair amount of parental assistance as well and I have one student loan. My entire student debt is £1,300.
JC That is about 1/10th of what many people's is.
DC Absolutely. We did what is called a train of debt demonstration this year, just before the Scottish parliament elections, and all over Scotland student associations collected little strips of paper which gave the students the opportunity to write their name the year and the course they were studying and then how much debt they were already in. We calculated that the average student at this university is already in something like £8,000 of debt, and that is a student attending the university. An average graduate from this university will graduate with between £12,000 and £15,000 debt. Compare that with me, 5 years previously, with my £1,300 debt and it is a staggering difference and I think does reflect the changing patterns in increasing student employment at a time when in an arts degree you can have eight hours of lectures a day. (He probably meant to say "week" not "day"). As a part time worker you will be working 15/20 hours, to what degree are you a full time worker if you are working any more than those hours, and many do, and a part time student. Yet the educational system treats you as a full time student. I think funding impacts hugely therefore upon that teaching and learning environment. You did ask apart from funding, so I think ….
JC Yes, accommodation, funding … Tell me what else do you think .. I mean what I have heard a bit about because I spend quite a lot of time in Old Aberdeen and it is not something I have personal experience of, but I am told by friends that there is an increasing difficulty about the relationship between the student population and the local community. I mean has this been a big issue?
DC I think it was certainly an issue a number of years ago, but things did seem to reach a head about 4 years ago, as far as I am aware…
JC So it happened in your time but not when you were holding responsible office?
DC An easy answer I suppose, it has got nothing to do with me. I have had a number of phone calls from Old Aberdeen residents who demand to know what I am going to do about it and the honest answer is I cannot do anything. It has to be a diplomatic.. we need to find a diplomatic way to say that I am not responsible for the behaviour of students. I am no more responsible for the behaviour of the average student than the Principal is, or the Chancellor or the Rector for that matter. I accept that student behaviour is not all that it can be but equally well I feel that often students are blamed for activities that aren't necessarily theirs. I speak to many staff who live on College Bounds who have admitted they have wandered down College Bounds shouting their heads off because they have been drunk, but all the time the focus is on students. There is many young academics staff who create as much noise as the students.
JC So you don't see it as a really big problem? I wondered a bit about that, because historically it is interesting, I mean students used to be the last people you needed to live in your city, in fact many medieval cities refused to have universities set up for this very reason!
DC Absolutely. There is always going to be problems when you put 10,000 or so students in a small area in Old Aberdeen, which is a residential area, which isn't the city centre, and expect them to get on with their life as young people. There are always going to be clashes and tensions there. I wouldn't say that it was a big issue.
JC Your philosophy is that it just happens and there is nought that the University can do about it, so might as well live with it!
DC Well in the serious cases there are things that University can do. It can invoke the code of Student Discipline. It can interview students who for example streak down College Bounds! There was a very interesting case before Christmas, when a number of rugby students who were actually .. one of them came in yesterday and gave me a copy of the calendar that they had produced. It is a shame the tape can't see it! The rugby club made a calendar to raise money, which had them in various poses, and some of them are naked poses….
JC Like the Womens Institute of wherever it was ..
DC All the rage these days. And for one of their shots they wanted to run down College Bounds towards the University, naked from behind and they were caught doing this at 7.00 in the evening when it was dark! It was probably a silly time to be doing it, so there was a mechanism where those students were identified and were interviewed by the University and told to stop being so stupid! So there are mechanisms by which the most serious incidences can be dealt with. But at the end of the day the University has been here for 500 years, and this may sound uncharitable, but if people choose to live in an area where there are students and they know that students live then there will always be noise. I don't think I would live on College Bounds personally by choice and if I did I would expect a certain degree of noise!
JC I think that is a very pragmatic and sensible point of view but I am interested in the degree of proportion if you see this is a problem. So that is a low proportion of difficulty. So what other issues, you know, that perhaps I haven't thought to ask you about that have been in important in your experience, both as a student and as a student representative?
DC I think, and this is very much the student representative, as I don't think it has filtered down to our ordinary students yet. One is about the way in which the sector looks at teaching and learning and I think over the last few years, and the last two years particularly since I have been President here, there has been a much greater look at what we mean by quality in education. By looking at things like quality assurance and changing the way in which in Scotland we talk about assurance of degrees to enhancing the teaching and learning and how we promote an environment that appropriately enhances and the department I fortunately find myself on a whole plethora of national policy making committees in this field primarily and part of that agenda is to have effective student representation so that when things are going wrong it is picked up on and it is noticed and it is actually acted upon. Students' complaints are taken seriously. But I think that that is a great help but not something that is immediately obvious. At the moment we have a Class Representative system at this University, which I regard as a joke. I think most people regard as a joke. And yet we are quite happy ……
JC A lot of time is put into it, by academic staff as well as by students..
DC We are quite happy as a University, as an Institution to say that this is an effective system. Effectively feeds back student responses, but yet we know that a Class Representative system .. The Class Representatives meet in a small committee, with a number of academics and sometimes their complaints are taken responsibly and other times they are not. They are then generally as a course fed back to the departments, teaching & learning committee, or equivalent, not by a student, but by an academic. If students are lucky they get to find out what happens and that may have been acceptable - I think, a number of years ago, a decade ago, but when students are making personal investment in time, effort, money and debt into their education, I feel that it is no longer acceptable. I don't think anyone wants to go down the idea where we view the student as a consumer because in that model the student is passive, they merely receive knowledge by miasma or by osmosis. That isn't the model that anyone would find pleasure in, but students are active participants in their learning and an extension of that means that they don't just learn, they actually participate in what goes on in the learning processes. So I don't think it is an acceptable anymore that are no students on a teaching and learning committee in a department. If the University .. If I sit on something like 30 committees, including the University Teaching & Learning Committee .. it needs to be replicated if it is going to effective. I think we are at a stage where that is going to happen where the flip point if you like, that will happen in a number of years. Playing some role in that has been very satisfying and it has devoted a large amount of my time. The effects will only be felt in four or five years' time. Connected to that there has been a move amongst the sector and I think the sector is united in Scotland in this, in ensuring that we can guarantee that students are learning in the best environment… One of my favourite national committees that I sit on is a steering group for Quality Enhancement Assessment. There are certain groups that are set up every year, two themes are chosen, and they are explored through a number of engagements with various people in the sector, the University lecturers, senior managers, student, employers, even perspective students. One of the themes is responding to student needs and the other one is assessment and just by sitting on the assessment one and just by sitting on the last three meetings I have learned so much about the way in which the way different universities vary in the way in which, say they exam their honours marks or the way in which certain departments in certain universities find it acceptable to award a degree, and the fact that really struck me was that there many ways in recording student learning, some of them are inappropriate to some student needs, others are very appropriate and it seems that in a fairer system as possible to mix the way in which you assess students and increasingly continuous assessment, by adding in tutorial presentations or other oral presentation work, formats that are different from essays, like report writing, by adding in group work. By even adding in some element of group assessment and self-assessment to some courses we are going someway down that agenda. We are looking at the ways in which we assess students, trying to enhance students learning while they are being assessed and assess them in a fairer way so we can more accurately record their outcomes. Now I am struck by my own History degree where I did the sums in my head and my honours degree classification is ultimately based upon one dissertation, which if you like is an extended essay, and 21 other different essays and I am not sure .. I think were are at a turning point in the way we view higher education. That has always been an acceptable way of examining History, for example, but are you only skilled at History, especially given an increased desire to evaluate transferable skills and have a system of degrees that are a passport to all kinds of employment through the transferable skills that a degree gives you. Is it really appropriate that a degree is accessed solely on your ability to write essays? Is that the best way of assessing History? Now I agree History will always, by its very nature, need to have a heavy predominance of essays, but does it need to be solely essay driven?
JC So you would like to see some other things taken in as well would you?
DC I think there is for me, maybe wanting to become a teacher, these questions have excited me greatly in my job in a way that quite frankly that I didn't think possible, when I started the job and over the last year have become increasingly interested in these questions. From a student perspective as well as just generally …
JC There is an interesting tension of course within what you have been talking about and that is .. well at least one that has always me a bit, and that is that when you introduce methods of assessment which are not based on the written word they become more personalised, don't they and against that is the pull towards anonymous marking, which you can do with written work but you can't with the other methods and certainly anonymous marking has made huge differences, particularly to the performance of women. Even in the departments where everybody thought that they were being totally fair, once they adopted anonymous marking they suddenly discovered that women did a great deal better!
DC Yes, that is partly true, although if you look at say the University of Cambridge that has just published a major study into how many women get first and how many men get first. There is still a great deal of evidence that even with anonymous marking, women are under achieving compared to men. It may be that and I think that the evidence that we have so far uncovered at Aberdeen a similar pattern emerges, that women on the whole get worse degree marks than men. Now that raises questions not only about assessment but by the methods by which you teach at a university and it goes back to something I said right at the beginning, when I said that when it comes to liberation campaigns there needs to be an acceptance that we live in a society and as part of living in that society we replicate institutions on that society, like a university, which merely repeats, what is nothing more than oppression against some people. One of those groups is women. Women who get less first class degrees than men which is merely replicating the oppression of society at large when women graduates get paid 15% less, on average, than a male graduate, and there are large questions about how we,
not just in the last decade, how we change society so that it effectively means that it does provide a true quality of equal opportunity, but one thing I do think is exciting is that a place which has always seen itself as being somehow cut off from that debate often, due to issues like academic freedoms, institutional autonomy, or other ideas of the refinement of learning, is actually now seriously starting to engage in those debates. So when it comes to assessment it is acceptable if a student has a disability to set different conditions for an exam or to change the methods of exams so that those students are on a level playing field. What is interesting in many cases these are often better forms of examination, so why shouldn't they be used for everyone! And I think there is now, very, very recently and still to emerge, I think, at large amongst the academic community, a very real desire to start thinking about ways in which you can improve the ordinary, every day, experience of a student. I think that is a very welcome change and something that will take many, many, more years, perhaps a decade or two, to really influence a whole cohort of students to the fullest level. It will be quite a revelation, I think in years to come. One of the things I have been very lucky to pick up over the last two years, is that shift away from a traditional basis of - we have always done things like this, we have always assessed the History degree on essays and nothing more, we never made special arrangements for students with disabilities, why should we consider issues regarding ethnic origin when putting together an assessment and even course programmes, why should we change our teaching methods because we might be getting fewer first than them. There is now I think a real desire to ask what two years ago, when I became President, would have been unthinkable questions, but now beginning to be asked. I think that is a major change that will take place, which will shake up a lot of the ways in which we deliver teaching to the very foundations.
JC Without wishing to cut short that debate, a lot of what you say has interested me for two reasons, which we haven't made explicit. One you have several times mentioned that you had input into kind of national debates about issues like these and the other is, I sense, perhaps rightly or wrongly I am not sure, that you feel fairly integrated into the processes of the university. In other words that as a student representative you are getting a very fair crack of the whip, an opportunity to say what you want to influence things. Am I picking that up right or am I wrong?
DC Yes, I sit on something like just over 30 University committees. I think that is more committees than anyone in my position has ever sat on. It can be back breaking work. Most of the piles in this office are University Committee billets. And of course every billet is so thick and you have to read it, then you have to do the homework before hand..
JC And when you are there do feel you are being attended to or are you brushed off?
DC Absolutely not. I think part of that depends on how well you have done your homework to be perfectly honest. If you had had this interview with me last year I wouldn't have been involved in so many national committees. I think that has vastly helped both my own homework and also the way in which I am treated at certain University committees. There are University committees where I have declare my interest of sitting on 3 or 4 national committees right at the beginning of the meeting so that obviously indicates a certain head start in some of the other members, which I think is an unusual situation to be in.
JC It does sound relatively unusual situation, partly because you have done it for two years.
DC I think that there is a danger if you want to do the homework properly for the University committees, that I now sit on so many university committees that the work I have done internally within the Students Association at getting the Students Association to provide more services and welfare for societies, which is a matter which we haven't even touched upon really, or for Class reps., or responding as an association to consultation. They are going to be quite hard things to drop without any doubt being a second year president has made it so much easier to do the committee work, because it comes more naturally. In fact as an appalling admission, we had out annual dinner a few weekends ago and I was sitting next to the Principal and he said "You must be disappointed to be going, especially at the end of two years, especially having been Rectors Accessor you sat on Court for 3½ years" I said "Well it will certainly be a change, and some of me is disappointed, because having taken the decision to re-stand, it is clear that I obviously enjoy the job, I don't think I could cope. I don't think I could cope with another year. I know what I would do in the third year", I think that goes back to what I said in the beginning, about my decision to stand for a second year that I knew what I wanted to do would take three years. I know what I would do in a third year. I would be worn out. I would not have the physical energy to go on for a third year. The hours can be pretty killing and I think I need a break now! But also I don't think I can attend a 4th year of Court meetings, and I have got to the point where I am now attending a 4th year University Court meeting, and a third year on some committees. In some cases the same issues have been discussed for the 4th or 3rd time and it is a struggle to say what has to be said to the same proposals for the 3rd or 4th time. With the same perspective essentially on the matter and the same answers, which are often, for various reasons the answer, "We cannot do that at the moment". It is a bit depressing and it is probably time, and one of the joys of the student movement is that we are here for an average of 4 years, this office usually for one or two years and there is that degree of change and that change brings fresh ideas, new perspectives and I think on University committees I think it is probably time for new ideas, fresh perspectives, whatever my experience has been on the University committees, whether the homework if you like of being on nation committees, it is time for another person with a different perspective and a different agenda to be there, to challenge the University on areas that have nothing to do with assessment. The University has probably challenged enough. I have nothing to do with say Class Representatives. One of my favourite hobby horses for the past three years is Graduation Fees is probably a healthy thing that the University has engaged on a different level and in different areas. Because it has been engaged in these areas and I think we have won where we can win and we have lost where we cannot win! I think both for my sanity and for the students at large it does need someone new and fresh to take over.
JC Well that is very, very interesting and obviously we could go on about these topics almost indefinitely but if I could just switch in a rather different direction, because we haven't talked a lot about you, oddly enough! We have talk about your ideas and about your term as president and what the big issues have been, but I wondered if I can ask you to just round out the picture. A few questions about you personally. I suppose in an ideal interview I should have done this at the beginning and not at the end? For example you had been Rectors Assessor on the Court? How did that come about?
DC I don't know. I think I was plucked from almost obscurity. It was Clarissa Dickson Wright. Interestingly, I had been very involved in Debator so although I was never a member of the SRC or or any part of the association, obviously the Debator has an office within this building so I knew a lot of the SRC members. I was reasonably good at debating, I was President of the Debator, for 1 year immediately before I became President, and when I was Vice-president I was randomly approached to become Rectors Assessor along with someone else initially until they graduated. Ironically I had no more than a year and a half before been campaign manager for Magnus Linklater, who had lost against Clarissa as Rector, so another irony. I ended up loosing a Rectorial election as campaign manager, but ended up being Rectors Assessor anyhow to Clarissa. And it was that having been Rectors Assessor which then gave me rights to attend Association meetings when it was formed and the like, which drew me into this in a very big way and eventually someone came up to me and proposed "Well you have sat on Court, you a quite competent and you can argue and we think you can win". Well, I stood and that was it.
JC Great, fascinating. You mention being on court first as Rectors Assessor and then in your own right as President of the Students Association. How did you view that as a decision making body? I mean one gets varying feedback about the relative importance or unimportance of Court nowadays. How did it seem to you? I mean I know what its technical position is, but I meant as quote "the real hub" of decision making in the University. Does it feel like that?
DC I think - less so than when I first joined.
JC Even in the 4 years of your experience?
DC I think that that's on two grounds. I think there is more rubber-stamping. At some point the agenda was re-formatted. There was more rubber-stamping from the committees. The committee structures were reorganised. That might have something to do with it. The other factor I have to say is, it is probably that as I have sat on Court more, I have realised that it is not really the opportunity for grandstanding. It is really the last opportunity and the arguments should be won a lot earlier and I think that has been quite key in my determination Student Association determination to sit on more committees, because you sit at committees on a lower level you get in the argument earlier and you convince the people who have more to do with it and they are more like to back you, than people who are more distant and less likely to back you. And I have also appreciated, as time has gone on, that there other ways of doing business. I think the Association has a very good relationship with the senior management team, that doesn't stop me .. yesterday I argued against a proposal in Court on a few grounds. Graeme Roberts, the Vice-Principal, slapped me down, but it doesn't stop me having a good working relationship with these individuals. I think that good working relationship although may be viewed cynically by a large number of students, has often been very instrumental to actually winning arguments. Winning sometimes on individual cases as well, being able to approach someone at a social event and joke with them and ask them how their holiday was, and then get in your business, and that is how the world works. I appreciate that many may view that in a bad light. I think many of predecessors would have viewed that, and there will be many of my successors who view my relationship with the University as having been too close, but it has got a lot done.
JC With whom do you mainly interact with among the senior management? Steve Cannon?
DC Anyone who will give me anything! I don't mind sounding like a harlot there. You know anyone who will give me anything. So it may be John Sewell, it may be Dominic Houliham, Graeme Roberts, it may one of the Deans …
JC The Principal himself ?
DC That is an interesting one. I suppose over the two years I have been President I have grown aware that if you want something done, you don't go to the Principal. I would go to the person who is responsible for it. It may even not be Steve Cannon, it may be the Director of Estates. The more activities the Students Association engages in, the greater our remit in terms of committees and the way in which we say well that does actual effect students, you know, which lecture theatre, you refurbish, it is a matter that effect students and we would like a say on that, thanks very much. It means the more people you have to get on with in the University Administration.
JC It is very interesting. It suggests that the University has become so big now it is kind of more devolved than it used to be.
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