The University have just announced that they will be cutting the opening hours of college bars from next term! The opening hours will be halved, with some bars on campus being reduced to a mere 2 nights per week.
We believe that the bars provide a communal space for all clubs and societies on campus as well as resident students. If we lose the college bars we will lose the college identity, a college without a bar is simply another accomodation hall, and the lack of consistency of opening hours is likely to confuse students and lead to further reductions in student opening hours, and even worse in student numbers.
The Students' Union Executive Committee have written a position paper to try to increase the popularity of Campus bars, and prevent the loss of bars, or restricted opening hours. However, the University look set to not negotiate on their position of cutting the opening hours! As such we are proposing a two week long campaign to get the university to listen to what Students at York really want.
In Week 9 we aim to fill every bar on campus every night! The aim of this is not to show the University what we can do, nor to show them how much Students spend but to show them that Students care about the bars - that we feel they are an integral part of life at this University.
The second week of action, Week 10 will be a complete boycott of the bars on Campus - to show the University that having a profit (they make over £100k a year in profit) is better than having nothing, and to show what a campus with no spirit is like!
We ask you to publicise this to your membership and to join the campaign, if you have a committee meeting in Week 9, hold it in the bar. If you are planning a social, organise it to happen on campus. If you want to hold an event, contact the JCRC, YUSU or GSA. There should be something happening in every bar on everynight of Week 9 - the perfect time for a bar crawl!
Visit www.yusu.org/saveyourbar for more information and information on how you can campaign to save your bar!
Save your college bars!
Ginge (GSA Internal Officer)
Micky (YUSU President)
Nat (YUSU Services Officer)
Anyone fancy playing a bar during wk 9?
As part of the campaign, Breakz DJs will be performing in Derwent on Saturday night. Come and support the bar and the dnb.
More details to follow when we get them... :rolleyes:
Just got this in from a graduate student:
RE: Campus Bar Closures
Dear Fellow students
If you’re really serious about reversing the decision to close campus bars, then read on, and I’ll tell you how…..
I’ve been a student at York Uni, on and off, since 1996. And I’ve been a student at four other universities, too. I know of the ‘Barcotts’ of old.
I’ve seen many a petition flap its pointless way around campus. I’ve witnessed (allegedly) unwelcome and brief and fruitless student ‘occupation’
of Heslington Hall, the great University seat of ‘Admin’.
I’ve sat in meetings where changes to facilities have supposedly been ‘debated’ with students and I’ve even worked for the other side, in Heslington Hall itself, as a team member on a university wide project.
For a few successive years, Admin played a wonderful game of promising each new Students’ Union President that they would be the one to steer York’s student population to the Nirvana of a student-run, Central Venue. Then they dropped the idea at the end of the academic year, and it resurfaced the following year under a new president. And we fell for it every time.
Admin played that game very successfully, and they never had any intention of giving us a student venue, they were just buying time. Nowadays they don’t even bother playing with us, they just tell us what they’re doing, and ignore our protests.
I learned a surprising and thing when I worked for Admin, though. Without exception, the first response of professors and academic department heads to any new proposal was to ask, “Is it going to be good for the students?”
Admin would tell them what they wanted to hear, but it was only lip service.
So why has it all gone so terribly wrong? It’s quite a simple one: the professors have delegated all matters non-academic to their Admin staff. So completely have they delegated that power that the Admin staff do what they hell they like and the professors, bless them, assume they do what’s right for students and for research and for the university because that’s what they asked them to do.
We students do rather get in the way of the York Conference Park’s real agenda. But, we mustn’t be so naïve as to contend that our university shouldn’t seek to maximise potential revenue from conferences outside of term time, but nor should our University Senate be so naïve as to fail to realise just how woefully inadequate their appointed business administrators are.
The simple fact is that we’re now victims of Admin’s incompetence, and that’s the real issue here, not ‘falling student bar patronage’. Not so many years ago, Alcuin had a friendly, popular, quirky and comfortable bar.
But Admin replaced it with the snack bar thing we now have…..far more suited, they determined, to the needs of conference guests. Admin also shut down the bars in Wentworth (now a reading room) and Derwent (now the porters’ lodge) and replaced them with canteen things with uncomfortable furniture, wide open spaces and no hope of ever generating a welcoming, sociable, bar-like atmosphere. (Derwent was a far more sociable place a few years ago than it is now).
Of course, Admin are too incompetent at their jobs to realise that conference guest are similar to students (and the rest of the population) in that they want comfortable, bar-like surroundings when they go to a bar.
The Students’ Union is right to argue that closing college bars and limiting services at others is going to have a huge, negative impact on student life, but the arguments are falling on deaf ears.
Shouldn’t we demand of our professors just why they don’t hold to account their appointed business staff and ask why such clear incompetence should be allowed to destroy the fabric of our university?
We don’t need to deliver a petition to them, we just need to talk to them in lectures and tutorials and we need to exercise our individual rights to book time with our professors and tutors. Let’s do it. Let’s use up their precious research time with talking about our welfare needs……they have to listen, it’s in their job description. Perhaps then, they might decide to appoint a more effective Admin staff to delegate business matters to?
Moreover, we need to recognise that Admin knows prospective students will apply to York University, thereby keeping it and their competition-free jobs in existence, so long as the picture presented to the outside world is one of harmony, achievement and academic excellence.
What if our Students’ Association President, when approached for a comment for next year’s Times Good University Guide, said “We, as a student body, recommend that no prospective student applies to study at York University because the campus is a dark, miserable, unwelcoming, desolate place where the bars and social areas are closed by the University and all forms of fun and recognised student social activity are actively discouraged and inhibited by the actions of the University’s Administration staff.”
What about those of us who act as campus guides, telling prospective students that they should come study here? What ifl we instead mount protests on open days to proclaim that the student body recommends they should apply to study elsewhere?
What if our Students’ Union Welfare Officer wrote to all the headmasters up and down the country telling them that their former pupils will have to get buses into town if they want to socialise, that they’ll have to wander across a dark campus in search of somewhere they might be made welcome and that peer support will be desperately difficult to access when locked away in a box room at night with nowhere to go to meet people?
What if our Students’ Union Services Officer orchestrated protests and invited the national media to visit campus whilst we wave banners proclaiming that no one should apply to York University whilst our essential services and social areas are closed?
What if our Students’ Union Communications Officer set up websites and forums and used all modern means to spread the message worldwide that prospective students should not apply to study here whilst the current Admin regime goes unchallenged and unchanged?
What if the GSA president emailed all GSAs and JCRs around the country to tell them that research and postgraduate study at York is a lonely, uncomfortable existence…..and that you get thrown out of the college’s social area at quarter to eight at night (as happened to me and my friends earlier this evening)? Will our foreign students report the same back to their universities and funding bodies?
Now, perhaps if we tried all of the above, we might just get somewhere. But what we have to determine is whether or not we really want to win this fight. If we don’t want to win it, we’ll sign a few petitions and write on our CVs that we organised the biggest petition in the history of York Uni, ever! If we do want to win it, for our own good and for the good of future generations of York students, then we have to sacrifice our own CVs a little bit here.
It won’t make York University look good if we spend the next few months telling the world that it’s a dreadful, unfriendly and unsociable place to be. But, if we do just that, we might actually keep the university in existence.
Who wants to employ a graduate who hasn’t experienced the riches of a university social life and who hasn’t learned to juggle the responsibilities of work with the other realities of life? Everyone knows that a central and fundamentally vital part of a university education is the benefit gained from a full, varied and culturally mixed social life.
Everyone, that is, except York University Admin. And right now, they’re the ones in charge (not our professors and lecturers) and they’re the ones devaluing not only our university experience, but also our future employability and the very existence of our university itself.
If you care about this, and if you care about our university, pass this email on to everyone you know.
(Until I get Computer Services to fix my inbox, I can’t receive replies, so please direct your responses to this email to the SU and GSA Presidents as it is to they that we must turn in the hope that they can generate policies more effective than simply signing petitions……but we have to give them a mandate to do that and we have to back them up with all the support they’re going to need to win this fight.)
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