€60,000 for fancy lights at the lake, and €35,000 to light the water tower up in glowing psychedelic colors, admissions made by Mary Clayton and Aidan Grennal at a meeting of students tonight when confronted with questions about the 150th Celebrations. The money was spent as part of a ‘health and safety’ strategy presumably the shifting colors of the tower are there to occupy tripping students on their way home and save them from harm.
Coming out of the meeting I was enraged. The college played it cleverly; accusing the union of engaging in inappropriate activity in targeting Brady over the decisions that were made regards the house. Even hinting at threats of invoking the policy of dignity and respect. Of course, when ever students try and channel complaints through it they are sidelined by committees and excuses, as was the case last year with the campaign against sexist posters.
It seems we are creating a distraction, accused of not targeting the state and pursuing an agenda of division in the college. We should unite with the college authorities against the government they claim. Yet the union’s agenda is very different from theirs. While we think increased public funding, grants over fees are a solution to economic disadvantage they repeatedly call for private funding instead of taxation. They strive against any sort of democratic opposition to undermine education as an end in itself, break it up into small units and hawk them off to private enterprise. All of this is dressed up in the facade of social inclusion. Apparently, the discriminatory practice of creating a system where one class have to work full time and go to college over a prolonged period of time is a solution to inequality. Shifting the burden for a lack of access and inequality away from the state and onto the individual. Where as we stand for increased grants and less fees, they stand for stripping away democracy in UCD.
When decisions are made democratically, as with the coke boycott, they systematically undermine it by inviting in Coke CEO’s to receive degrees. Their model of a university is the shopping centre that is the commerce block, where the unions posters are persistently ripped down underming the organization of opposition to the college. They bust our union by ‘electing’ academic reps, when class reps should sit ex officio on all faculty level bodies. When we highlighted the decisions governing authority took in raising post grad fees by publicizing the names of Brady’s ‘yes’ men the union was hounded, they even threatened to throw representatives off. And all because democracy was promoted, all because those that elected graduate reps could know they voted to raise the fees of some of their same electorate that persist with their studies. All because people wanted transparency and accountability, God forbid.
When asked would the college respect democratic referendums on modularization and semesterisation , we were told to expect ‘focus groups.’ So instead of democracy we have the corporate model of researching what the ‘customers’ want, something the college increasingly define us as. Instead of democracy, we have ‘surveys’, instead of answers they beat around the bush and attempt to pacify us.
We were patronized, the caricature of Brady was described as “grotesque” and the union as engaging in ‘unproductive’ campaigning. Of course, do any of us really expect the college to join us in marching on the government when the college head Hugh Brady is one of the most avid supporters of restructuring education in the detrimental manner advocated in the OECD report? Yet we are meant to ‘collaborate’ in undoing those small benefits we have under the present system of education. The decision to renovate Brady’s gaff, was of course taken through ‘normal procedures.’ The point remains, and will remain that these normal procedures are no longer valid, they have become willingly corrupted. We of course are fools for marching On Brady’s gaff, and his wife’s private gym. But it’s not like the college were willing to put such information into the public domain until the pressure of a protest forced them to own up and make excuses.
The issue is not the decisions, but how they are made.