President launches ‘Academic Representation Utopia’

HWUSA president Mike Ross has published his ideas for "academic representation utopia" on the union website. 

Mr Ross believes he knows the formula for the optimum student representation within universities.

Mr Ross explained that employing an "excellent representative structure" together with encouraging "excellent engagement from students and staff" will ensure the perfect working partnership between students, their student union and their university. 

Mr Ross told The Journal that the idea was originally meant as a “philosophical approach to the nature of academic representation”.

Mr Ross acknowledged that it is an ambitious plan. He said: “Academic representation utopia will never be 100 per cent achievable, but it is something we’ll be working on and striving to achieve.

“The initial blog post was to provoke anyone reading it. These are questions everyone involved with academic representation should be asking themselves.”

The idea behind the academic representation utopia blog post was to find out what a perfect representation model would look like and create a debate about the logistics of achieving one. 

According to Mr Ross, student unions are excellent at developing representation structures, as they are very aware of the different issues students engage with. However, they need to become better at communicating their work and ideas efficiently with the students and the university.

The success of this relies on the level of engagement from students and staff, and the facilitation of conditions where students are “co-creators of their learning environment”.