| 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 continuation from MS3620/156/1
JC The big question then is about the University constitution and you were going to tell me a little about how far the Student Association, as an Association, had achieved its ideal in three years of bringing together the different parts that constituted, that is to say the Union, the Athletics Association, etc.etc., Has it worked well? Has it been a sensible move or would they have done better to stay separate?
DC I think unquestionably it has been a sensible move. It has been a sensible move because we have been able to develop services from the old SRC in a way that would have been unimaginable.. I talk a lot about that because it something very close to my heart. I am very involved in, particularly where it has been very good for the Sports Council and the services that they provide. We have been able through commercial services to generate sponsorship arrangements that they wouldn't have had otherwise. We have been able to in the year we have produced a surplus, to give them cash to finance needs that they would otherwise not have got. Through more efficient management of our resources we have managed to give them more staff resource and an extra vehicle. So small things, but added up are quite a substantial impact into their daily operations.
JC Before this they had to go individually to the University for their particular needs.
DC Yes, whereas now, I won't say in one big happy family, but in one big family there is more ability to share those resources and that certainly has happened. I think that has been to the benefit of both the organisations, because best practice has now been shared now, but also in terms of resources and being been able to provide new and different services to the students who are using us. And being able to say look we are better than we were a year ago.
JC And afford this professional backup which we spoke about before. Interesting.
DC As to how we have come together. We started off in a situation where we had a merger and it was one of those mergers where you let everyone keep their own federal identity and you just shove something on top, an executive and a general council and that was really the structure that I inherited as President. It is not workable. You can't have one organisation with three. I can except that theologians can explain the Trinity, but I am not willing as President of the Students Association to explain the Trinity and the mysteries of it to students! Essentially that was what I was asked to do in my first Freshers Welcome. To say "Hello we are one organisation but we look surprisingly like 3 and even 1 year after merger we were still surprisingly like three. I had a game plan, that by the end of the second year of being President that we would be one organisation, we wouldn't be the separate organisations, but this was slightly complicated by the merger of Northern College and the only way we could merge with them, because their Students Association did all the things that we did in one organisation, was to create a 4th Council, specifically for the Faculty of Education on the Hilton site. So it became 4 in one, even more complicated than the Trinity! I think I was quite cynical, I picked off the Union Management Council and the Students Representative Council and I persuaded people that they should meet jointly this year for the first … well I didn't say it was a first step, but in my mind it was very obviously a first step to having one council and many committees across the board. We gave a number of arguments some of which were I think very sensible about the cross-over between the activities in many respects, others were frankly spurious but it was accepted at the end of my first year and for this year the UMC and the SRC have worked very closely together in a joint meeting. We then started talking about how the Association should be structured in the future, as it was fairly obvious, that this con-joint meeting as it was called between the UMC and the SRC hadn't answered all the questions. We knew it wouldn't, but it was a step in the right direction at last, so we also decided at that point to ask the University for an extra Sabbatical officer. Sabbaticals had a large number of meetings in November, at which I think every single Sabbatical stormed out of the room or burst into tears and stormed out of the room. Quite a fractious two weeks really and in the end we only resolved the whole problem by agreeing after three weeks of real, real deadlock and stalemate, that we would go away for a day to a hotel and we would lock ourselves away free from the distractions of the office and just hammer it all out. Which we duly did. We agreed that would ask for extra Sabbatical, which we fortunately got in the new year, which I was very pleased about, so we now have changed our systems again they reflect what we actually do, as opposed to what we used to do.
JC So how many Sabbaticals are there now?
DC There are now five Sabbiticals as opposed to four. So from next year there will be five. So this year we had a President, a Vice-President Representation, who is essentially the SRC person, we have a Vice-President Sport, who is essentially the AU and we have a Vice-President Services who is essentially the Union person. Now the SRC used to have two Sabbaticals, a President and a Senior Vice President so, if you like, the President of the SRC became the SA President and the Vice-President became the Vice-President Representation. So a lot of my role and job inherited, for example the major part of my job is to represent students to the University through committee meetings and that is a very large percentage of what I do, unfortunately that is how I have to wear a suit most of the days! We have changed the system where we have a President, who has a clear remit and that is something I have lacked over the last two years. The President now has a clear remit and that has developed in my time of office, to steer the organisation, to communicate with students, to deal with off-campus students and to look importantly after education policy within the Association, as well as to look after staffing matters as I now line-manage through the General Manager, all the staff in the Association. We have a Vice-President, Advice and Support, given the huge increase in the welfare services that I talked about right at the beginning, we have made leaps and bounds in that area and we need a lot more leadership there and we now have a Sabbatical Officer who looks after those services and who does the academic appeals, the disciplinary matters in halls and the complaints of the University, to represent students there. That last section is really something that Vice-President representation has done, has devoted most of their time to. Which meant that the other aspect of a job this year, Societies, has increasingly become lost in our other expansion, so our third Sabbatical is a Vice-President, Societies and Student Development. This is the first time we have ever had a Sabbatical Officer who is specifically responsible for Societies. We have something like 103 affiliated Societies, admittedly not all of them are active, but we do have something in the region of 80 active Societies. This compares with 52 Sports Clubs and a Sabbatical Officer for them. So I think we have now approached something which is an equality between Sports Clubs who have historically always been well provided for and Societies, which historically have always been under provided for. I think I am very proud in having won that argument both in the Association and with the University. You know Societies offer as many transferable skills and as many opportunities for personal development as playing sport at this University. It is probably because I am less athletic than I could be! Then obviously we have the Vice-President Sport and we still have the Vice-President Services, although they have taken on a financial remit as well to do that job. So that was a major change but in amongst that doing that, allowed us to change our structures, so that again our committees weren't merely SRC, they looked after lots of things, and the Union they looked after different things, but we split them down to their component parts. So we now have different committees, Sports, Societies, Academic Affairs, Welfare and Equalities, Commercial Services, and we have a Foresterhill Committee and a Hilton Committee and they all report to one Council and one Executive which has been a great change from as system, where my Executive of 24 individuals, which is a fairly large Executive of the Sabbatical Officers plus 4 people from every Council, so it is very much a federal system based on historic lines, to a system which is based upon what we actually do and the areas that we have activities in with the Convenor from each of those committees plus the Sabbatical. So it is a smaller Executive team and a more focussed team, more focussed on what we actually do as an organisation and the major areas of our services. So that was a fairly major plan. For me the greatest joy was having sat down over summer and drawn this plan up and having been able to negotiated it to completion at the end of the year which I suppose is really quite devious to have constructed the way I wanted the Association to look like and to have actually have achieved that before the end of the year.
JC It is unusual to do something as big as that in such a short time.
DC Well it had a preparation the previous year with this merger, but it is a major change and in doing so, we talked about apathy at elections, but in doing so we also agreed that all the executive members, not merely the Sabbaticals, but those who convene committees should also be directly elected by campus at the same time as the Sabbaticals. All the Executive Committee would be elected at the same time and they would all stand with manifestos, and they would all have to fight campaigns. I think that will produce a major change, it is the first we have done anything like this. I think one of the weaknesses is that we have elections to the old committees and then we choose our committee convenors from amongst those groups which often means that committee convenors haven't thought about what they want to do in their important roles before they find themselves elected. They then spend 6 weeks getting into that job and by that time first term is almost over. Start of the second term, people start plotting elections fairly early on in February, and elections in the third term. So very little is done. But at least now we have an executive team that has stood on clear manifestos. We know over summer what they want to do so the staff can start working on that, taking on board their ideas. We can factor them into our Business and Development plan. Incoming Sabbaticals know what they have to try achieve over the coming year, and the executive has a fairly good idea as individuals and committees have an idea what their agenda is. So I think that there will be less finding of feet and more action and I am quite excited about that. I think there is no point in talking about constitution and structures for the sake of it, unless it reflects what you actually do and you are confident in changing the constitution you will enhance the service and the sense of membership to people that you are meant to serve which are the students.
JC Excellent. Well done you indeed. I simply can't see you settling down in a classroom where you said you were heading after you had finished all this good work. It sounds as if you should be heading into a major company or something, as you are so interested in structure and how they work! Never mind .. I am not offering you career advice. Tell me finally Duncan a little bit more about looking back on all this experience in Aberdeen. I appreciate that you are going to have another year with us yet, so it is not a sort of valediction, but your experiences in the Student Association as being hugely important to you hasn't it? Probably more educative than anything else that has happened?
DC Yes, of yes!
JC What about the undergraduate degree? Did you enjoy that? You enjoyed your History degree?
DC Yes it was so long ago now …
JC You can hardly remember!
DC I can hardly remember! One of the ironies is that I was in a committee meeting the other week and they were talking about lectures and I said "Well I am scarcely the right person to ask about a lecture, I haven't been to a lecture for 7 years in this university". So in that sense there were problems in being a post graduate elected to this office. The undergraduate degree was mostly enjoyable. I greatly enjoyed it. I anticipated coming to university spending a few years, going back home to London as it was then and getting a high-powered, well-paid job, somewhere in the city, maybe doing law or something like that. That changed fairly early on in my student career here. I came back home at the end of my first term at Christmas and told my parents I had decided to settle in Scotland and I wasn't going to come back to London.
JC Were they expatriated Scots, your parents ?
DC My father was from a very young age, but my mother no…It came as a shock to my mother who had in her childhood very bad experience of being in Scotland. She was very negative about going up to Scotland ever when I was younger and said that she refused to allow us to go to the Highlands as her only experience of the Highlands had been as a very young girl which she had been camping with her own parents and all these drunken Scots had chanted and sung and urinated all over the place when she was trying to sleep in her tent and that was her image which was just sort of transferred onto Scottish people at large. So she was a bit disappointed at first but I think she has come to accept it in the last few years. From there I think I decided to settle in Scotland because in London if you speak to anyone you are considered to be ill and you are given a very, very odd look. People do not speak to one another!
JC You were brought up in London were you?
DC I also feel that there is a different spirit of humanity in London in many respects to the spirit that exists in Scotland in a sense that…. I have to be careful as I don't want to make Scotland sound like a social utopia, as it is certainly not, but there is a far greater sense of community within Scotland than there is in England full stop, and London, and an ability to see that individuals actions effect society at large and I genuinely don't believe that the majority of people living in London feel that at all.
JC How interesting. I have never heard that view of London.
DC And I may be being harsh I may be zealotry of the converted here, but my abiding impression of Scotland is a society which is more at ease with itself, more comfortable with its warts. More readily to accept, though often it, I think at this university, we forget that two of the worst housing estates in Scotland are on either side of the campus, but a society none the less that is more willing to accept that yes, there are places like Tillydrone and there are places like Seaton and in no means say these are places that should be accepted, but Scotland I think is a place that is far more willing to say that these are places that exist. I don't think that there is that there is that spirit of frankness in London.
JC Though heaven knows it has many districts with appalling problems. I don't know where you lived in London ..
DC I lived in the south east, a leafy suburb, but to get into London I had to go through Brixton and the likes..
JC So you saw …
DC Yes.
JC Where were you schooled then?
DC I was schooled in Orpington, in the London burgh of Bromley. My father was very involved through work in a charity in Thamesmeade so I was certainly aware of it, but I think that the way in which people lived their lives in absolutely poverty is not something that I think a lot of Londoners are happy, or people are even happy to except, certainly in the south of England, whereas there is a willingness to accept the very real deprivation which exists in Scottish society. Not to celebrate it but to accept it and try and better it. Of course you can only better it if you acknowledge that it is there.
JC And as you say England ignores its problems
DC Yes, and I think I am far more comfortable living in a society that says yes, hello, we do actually have some very serious problems and we would like to address them. Rather than a society that has to sweep them under the carpet.
JC Well shall we stop on that interesting note about yourself and your ideals. I wish you very well for the future. As I say I cannot see you staying for a long time in the classroom, it seems that either business or politics beckon!
DC I have to say, if I had received a pound for every time anyone had told me while I have been the student Association President, you are not become a teacher, I wouldn't need to become a teacher, I could retire on the profit!
JC Well I have a sort of, you know, symbolic contribution to your retirement fund! Thank you very much indeed.
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