Why I am stepping down from Bailrigg FM – an open letter to Lancaster University’s Student’s Union

I am simply hosting this; the letter was written by another student. From here on out it's his words.

The views expressed in this letter are my own and not those of 87.7 Bailrigg FM.

In my first year at Lancaster University, I had one of the greatest years of my life, largely down to my deep involvement with the historic 87.7 Bailrigg FM. Over the year I hosted two successful shows, commentated at Roses, and even organised and hosted the debates during the FTO Elections that earned the current officer team their positions. I was honoured to receive awards for all three, as well as the award for Best Student Media Newcomer. Following this I was elected Assistant Station Manager, a position which I held for the duration of this academic year.

Bailrigg was, is, and always will be an incredible society ran by amazing, hard-working, creative students, and I always assumed I would spend my entire university experience on the Management Committee. But it is with great sadness that, due to the conduct of the Student’s Union, and the vile personal treatment that I and many of my closest friends have received over this year by some of its staff members, I am stepping down from my role at Bailrigg, and from student media all together. This year the Union has made me feel unvalued, insulted, stressed to the point of tears, harassed and bullied. That is why I am quitting, to find a new hobby for my upcoming third and final year that I can pursue healthily, as far away as possible from the immense anxiety the Union has caused.

I want to make it clear that this is not specifically related to the current FM licence scandal, though I do think it was a ludicrous decision. I understand the new Bailrigg management are in the process of reaching a compromise with the SU in order to keep the licence and I hope that they are successful. I also want to make it clear that this letter is not an attack on the current FTO team. For the record, I think for the most part they are doing a great job and I find it incredibly unfair that they are regularly scapegoated for things that are out of their control. Hopefully, any of them reading this will be able to sympathise with me on feeling completely unvalued in a role they are working very hard for. This letter is much more of a comment on those behind the scenes at the SU, and on the SU as a fundamentally flawed institution that currently hinders students more than it helps.

The SU, quite simply, does not treat us with the respect that we deserve. Over the past year, I feel that the various representatives of the Union that I have interacted with in my role have either treated me like a child or like a member of staff. Throughout Michaelmas and Lent term, amidst the difficulty and stress of adjusting to the workload of second year, I would not open my Bailrigg Assistant Manager gmail until I had 100% finished all the academic work that I had to do for the day. When I did this, I was regular met with a barrage of aggressive, patronising emails from Union staff whom I didn’t know. The content of these emails would either be about alarming, ‘URGENT’ jobs that needed doing (that were actually not urgent in the slightest), or they would be multiple paragraphs about various tiny things that either myself or the Station Manager had supposedly done wrong. Reading these at the end of a hard day always made me go home feeling stressed or upset no matter what else I had achieved that day academically. On one day I received sixteen of these such emails.

I remember on one Friday in first term, possibly the worst experience I have ever had on campus, I popped into the radio station around 5pm for the first time all week as I had several deadlines coming up that I needed to focus on. When I arrived there was a Union staff member whom I had never met before who, upon being told that I was the Assistant Manager, proceeded to shout at and berate me about various issues in the station. When I tried to explain to them that these issues were a result of our previous Station Manager resigning in third term of the previous year with no time to elect a replacement, they were completely unaware that this resignation had happened, or that I had moved from Bristol to Lancaster two months earlier than planned just so I could keep the station operating over summer.

While I’m sure this person’s aggression may have been the result of having a bad day, and I don’t expect them to know literally everything that happens in the station, I feel that this kind of incident underpins a key issue with the SU: they demand a certain level of respect from students which they refuse to give back. I often find myself frustrated when I see posts on the Union’s social media in the aftermath of something like the Grad Ball situation, reminding students that the FTOs are still people and they are doing their best. Of course, I agree with these sentiments, but I do not feel these sentiments are returned to thousands of students in society exec roles. The respect has to go both ways for this to be a real union. At no point in any of my interactions with the SU was it even acknowledged that I was a student trying to obtain a degree, or that I was in this exec role on a purely voluntary basis. Instead, I felt treated as if I were incompetent, while my hard, good work for the station was being ignored.   

Here we come to another gaping issue at the heart of the SU that has lead so many students to become disillusioned with them. In Alex Square, pasted onto the window of the Learning Zone, there is an ad for the SU that reads ‘profits straight back into the great things you do’. Whether this is actually fact or not is arguable, but the issue I have with this ad is not with any claim about where profits go, but with the implication that the SU actually care about the great things we do. The fact is, for the most part, the SU does not care about the great things that societies do. They only care about the tiny, pernickety, administrative things that societies do wrong completely by accident. Then, instead of helping societies to rectify these mistakes, we are made to jump through countless hoops, we get passed around the ridiculously bureaucratic system like a hot potato, and often the issue either just sorts itself out naturally or the union just don’t bother fixing it. The whole process just feels like a weird ritual designed for the SU to assert power.

A prime example of this was when, in October, one of Bailrigg’s entrance doors wasn’t locking properly; between then and Christmas we sent three separate emails to the SU asking for help in fixing the door. The SU never responded to any of these emails, but in February they sent me another aggressive email, this time at 5pm on a Friday, demanding that we fix the door by 12pm Monday or face being shut down. This was not an isolated incident; the morning after the climax of our annual Battle of the Bands competition, the organisation of which had caused me so much stress that I had to go home to Bristol for a week, I already had another email angrily asking me to move some equipment that I had temporarily left in the station overnight. There was no acknowledgement of the great job myself and the Bailrigg team did on organising the biggest music event on campus. I would be surprised if they even knew we were running the competition. To be honest, I doubt any of the SU staff even know my name.

For Bailrigg, and for so many other groups and societies at Lancaster University, it feels as if our Union is not working for us, but actively against us. This is obviously the case in the current FM licencing scandal, but there are so many students from so many groups that feel this frustration too. It is not enough for the SU just to wave criticism away with reminders that they offer us thousands of extracurricular societies and we should be grateful. Firstly, this is pretty much the bare minimum expected of any Student’s Union. And secondly, the societies on offer at Lancaster are pretty much all run by hard-working, talented students in their own time, and not by the Union at all. Speak to almost any society and they will tell you that they would much rather not have anything to do with the Union.

At this point, I want to reiterate that the SU has done some great stuff in the time I’ve been at Lancaster. Objectively speaking, I think they do a good job running the Sugarhouse, and I think VP Welfare & Community Emily Delaney is doing a brilliant job with her period poverty campaign. Last year’s VP Campaigns & Communications ran an amazing student media conference, which I hope will be organised again by this year’s VP.

But this letter is not about what the Union does or does not, this is about how the Union make students feel. And many students feel unvalued, unheard, and like their voices do no matter. I believe one of the main reasons for this is that trying to communicate with an SU member of staff, either over email or in person, is an utterly alienating experience. Any time I’ve tried having a conversation with the SU I feel like I’m hit with nothing but a wall of rhetoric, buzzwords and stock phrases, as if I’m talking to a website and not an actual person. This is particularly frustrating when any student complains about the Union, and instead of opening a dialogue – a real dialogue, not a survey – the Union shuts them down either with more rhetoric that no one not wearing a purple t-shirt will understand, or by simply asserting that they are right and the students are wrong. The latter is certainly the case regarding the current FM scandal.

Clearly, things are just not working. The SU need to realise that it takes more than a brightly coloured office playing peppy songs to create a welcoming environment. They need to realise that it takes more than a rebrand to actually change their reputation. I’m sure there will be people reading this and thinking ‘well if you care so much, why not run for FTO?’ If you are one of those people, I think you have missed the point. The Student’s Union is broken. Not only can it not be fixed by an elected officer in one year, but I certainly shouldn’t have to give anything back to an institution that has caused me nothing but misery. If your child was being bullied at school, your advice for solving it wouldn’t be to join in with bullying other kids. After this year, I really just do not, at all, want anything to do with Lancaster University Student’s Union.

I really hope that any SU staff reading this do not dismiss this as just ‘lusu bashing’. I truly believe that there are many people inside that ominous purple building that are doing their absolute best, and I appreciate that. But the fact is that the SU have driven me away from a role and a society that I was supposed to love. That isn’t debatable. I’m sure no one intended to make me feel this way, but that is what happened. I’m sure I could have tried to address these issues earlier through whatever complaint systems the SU has set up, but at the time I always just assumed it would eventually get better and it never did.

I am by far not the only student who has received this kind of treatment. The general response from students any time I even mention the SU is ‘f**k LUSU’. I agree that just saying that campus catchphrase doesn’t help anything, but I hope the SU can acknowledge that there are reasons for why people say this. Almost every student I’ve met at Lancaster has had some experience at some point where they’ve felt disrespected, alienated and let down by the SU. It is time for us all to acknowledge that this is just not good enough. This University is full of some of the brightest, talented and most exciting individuals I have ever met. We deserve better. Things need to change.