More on VSU and social fractions
Today, my email conversation with Michelle Smith, Publications Officer for UMPA, continues with more from me. Tomorrow: A further response from Michelle…
For newcomers, VSU = “Voluntary Student Unionism,” and UMPA = “University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association.”
Ben Hourigan on VSU and Postgraduate Review, part 2
Thankyou for your prompt and extensive reply. I did not intend my letter to be a complaint: rather I had composed it as though it were to be published on a letters page, intending to reflect on the relationship between identity politics and VSU. You and your editorial staff put in the work to compile PGR, and I would consider it inappropriate to complain about content unless it was factually incorrect. Content decisions are yours to make according to your professional judgement.
I completely understand why UMPA representatives and staff would oppose VSU, since the organisation relies on funds compulsorily extracted from students. UMPA’s opposition to VSU makes sense from it’s own perspective, but I do not believe it is in the interests of students for the organisation that represents them to oppose their freedom of choice and association. On that point, Steven Halliwell’s reasoning in “Voluntarily Student Unionism is Anti-choice” is entirely spurious and misleading: there is, logically, nothing anti-choice about making something voluntary.
In response to your rejoinder that:
The fact that we have devoted one edition to women’s issues (as well as providing regular content such as higher education news, book reviews, relevant concerns such as plagiarism) in ten years of this publication hardly seems like a scourge of rampant Leftism.I agree, but I wouldn’t say that what I characterised as “a kind of new left politics that has wholly assimilated identity politics” was intended to refer to “a scourge of rampant Leftism” in the alarmist Cold War, Keith Windschuttle or Miranda Devine way. Rather, I’d say that the basic tenets of collectivist and identity-political thinking (that too much economic or personal freedom is unethical, that capitalism is a pernicious influence on life, that affirmative action on behalf of disadvantaged social fractions is desirable, etc.) have so permeated intellectual life in this and so many other countries that they could hardly fail to influence the activities of a student association and its staff.
I reiterate my point: letting an organisation take students’ money and spend it on products and services they may or may not want is not a fair or efficient way of treating anyone. The only fair way is to indulge the atomization of society by letting students make their own purchasing decisions. The very existence of PGR is against this principle. Whether you publish practical advice or reviews or propaganda, students have to pay for it whether they wanted it or not.
For the record, I don’t care what social fraction you or anyone prefers to favour, but whether you produce a women’s edition or a men’s edition or a queer edition or a straight edition or anything similar, using funds that come from all students to serve the interests of one group of students is unacceptable. Though I disapprove of such publications in general, since they encourage members of social fractions to pit themselves against each other, there is one way to produce them with minimal controversy. Magazines directed at a social fraction can easily be produced and sold for profit or using voluntarily given funds, and then marketed or distributed to a particular niche audience. Therein lies some of the beauty of free markets. If students, male or female, want a copy of a “women’s edition,” they will soon be able to take their amenities fee and use it to buy a few copies of Cosmo or Cleo. Or they may just choose something that doesn’t indulge their childish instinct to pit “us” against “them.”
On these issues, I think we’ll agree to disagree. I’ll be posting my letters to you on my blog at http://benhourigan.com: if you’d like your full response(s) to appear unedited on the site, please give me your permission by email.
Sincerely,
Ben Hourigan
A couple of caveats about this reply: 1) It’s a reaction to what I understand about VSU from all the rhetoric on each side. I’ve been taking the pragmatic view that I’m about to finish my course anyway, and the last thing I need while applying for further stay/residency is the government noticing me doing anything to piss them off :p
2) As per usual I took the relevant posts home to respond to, so I hadn’t seen the latest 3 entries when I wrote it.
3) I haven’t figured out which kind of html tags this site accepts, so quotes and italics might disappear.
Anyway…
I donât think we discussed the Nolan Chart specifically (or you mightâve told me about it, but the visual impression doesnât spark any memories), but itâs not unique. Have you come across ? Anyway again, I think these things are pretty arbitrary where theyâre not actively out to make some laboured point (I love the wiki description of the NC as pseudo-science. I think thatâs being pretty generous if weâre supposed to believe it has some ethical significance). I still prefer âleftâ and ârightâ for the simple reason that though they’re equally fuzzy, people generally understand what they mean, even if specifics (eg. gun control) get confusing.
I really disagree with you on this point; this is what I mean by black and white. Thereâre at least two choices involved, and peoplesâ two answers often contradict. On the one hand most students would probably choose not to pay the fees given the choice (at least under VSU), but on the other, especially judging by Michelleâs reply, most would choose to keep compulsory fees. This is a good example of what I meant (in the email) by the potential conflict of economic and democratic choice. Imposing VSU on students is foregoing one for the sake of the other… Since (virtually by definition) most students would prefer the democratic choice over the economic in this situation, I donât think you can justify VSU simply by claiming to value student desires.
You can go the JS Mill âtyranny of the majorityâ route, but as his critics have pointed out, if you interpret âOn Libertyâ too literally it becomes incompatible with his âUtilitarianismâ (and less defensible).
True enough, but how is making the situation even less appealing for the economically disadvantaged who had to work hardest to get here going to help matters? Weâre back to statistics again, but I would guess this kind of thing will simply up the proportion of private schoolboys here on daddyâs money.
Hang on, I think you misunderstood me. What I mean is that if the university is a private organisation in the business of selling courses to students (their clients), then (by libertarian rationale) the government has no business telling the universities how they should run their business. If potential clients want to enter into a voluntary contract with a university where they exchange a certain amount of money in return for services rendered, they review the terms and see which academic businessâs terms appeal to them most. If they donât like âcompulsoryâ union fees, no-oneâs forcing them to sign up to anything. In fact, if compulsory fees are so detestable, thereâs a gap in the market just dying for some backwater uni to fill it by offering VSU to its students.
But the government is removing this freedom for academic businesses by telling them that under no circumstances are they allowed to write a particular clause into the contract clients voluntarily sign with them.
So pro-VSUism actually opposes normal minarchist reasoning. As far as I can see, minarchists are committed either to favouring the freedom for universities keep compulsory student unionism, or to biting the bullet and accepting its near-universal existence as an instance of the free marketâs failure. Sure, unis arenât pure businesses, but I really canât see any mitigating context through which other laws have somehow coerced them into universally offering CSU. Presumably they just think itâs what most of their clients want.
But anyway, all this stuff puts me uneasily in mind of rights based ethics. The question should just be whether VSU will create a net increase in welfare. Given the high ratio of opposition to it by the people it will affect, I suspect it wonât. A shake-up of the SU services may well be in order so not so much money gets wasted on (eg.) political causes which half the students donât support – but perhaps something short of complete abolition…
Sasha
22 Jun 05 at 17:25
Shit, caveat 1) was supposed to end on… ‘so I haven’t actually read anything to check my facts are right’. But the fundamentals seem pretty straightforward.
Sasha
22 Jun 05 at 17:26
Re: this particular entry, I get the feeling you’re being a bit lazy with this argument. In Australia, for a magazine to be financially viable it needs something (very roughly) in the order of 7 or 8 thousand readers. Melbourne Uni supposedly has about 40,000 students… let’s say 10% are postgrads (probably overestimating), that immediately makes a commercial publication dedicated to them impossible unless it had an obscene cover price. Even if you put together all the postgraduate students in Victoria, you’d have trouble getting the requisite number; especially since the broader an area you cover, the less proportion of potential readers will actually buy it (ie. Melbourne Uni postgrads are more likely to buy a Melbourne Uni postgrad mag than a Victorian postgrad mag).
As Michelle rightly pointed out in her response, you can’t compare the women’s ed of PGR to mainstream women’s magazines… much less PGR as a whole. It fills a gap that would be pretty much impossible for the free market to fill. For the same reason, the odds against finding enough sponsorship to run a non-profit version are pretty low.
The questions should be something like a) ‘do postgraduates really benefit significantly from its existence?’ and b) ‘if so, can we justify taking money from people who don’t directly benefit from its existence?’
On a) you’d really need to get some kind of impartial observer involved in UMPA (assuming we’re generalising ‘it’ to cover the whole postgrad association) or just to run some sort of survey (if we’re just talking about PGR). On b), I would go so far as to say that, assuming a strong affirmative to a), the answer is ‘yes’ – these are people who’ll probably benefit society in the long run more than just about any other sample of the population, (and whose success or lack thereof has direct consequences on the uni’s undergrads). If that sounds elitist, it’s meant to :)
Sasha
22 Jun 05 at 17:48
Re: black and white on the issue of choice, I see where you’re coming from now. Yes, the way I’ve put it is black and white. And the way you’ve put it, contrasting democratic and economic freedom (in this case), seems to work very well.
The truth is that I don’t actually value the democratic freedom very much. I’d much rather be ruled by a hereditary dictator who guaranteed maximum personal and economic freedom for all than by a government elected by a mob that thought they were right to legislate on large swathes of human behaviour. Choosing a compulsory fee is a valid choice for oneself, but not to make for others. In this case I’m making a judgement that the services unions provide are not worth their cost in liberty. I concede that it’s valid to choose to prohibit others from stealing and murdering (as an example): here the cost in liberty for a few is worth paying for the safety and security of all.
As for the majority of students being in favour of compulsory fees, I know this sounds condescending, but they’re not thinking straight. The real test will come when students have to decide whether to pay a few hundred dollars a year for services they may never use (especially the ones who never come to campus, who Michelle mentioned).
And yes, I misunderstood you on the uni/business thing. Point taken, although I think it’s poor business practice for any company to put its services together as a package and make you pay for them all whether you wanted them or not. “For an extra $400 a year,” uni effectively tells you, “we can offer you sporting facilities, a union library, lockers, a magazine, health-care, dentistry, counselling…” If you don’t want any of that stuff, too bad. It’s like EB making you buy a PSP value pack when all you wanted was a PSP.
Yes, I have been a bit lazy with my argument. Thanks for bringing out the editing/publishing knowledge. This is just an anecdote, but one of my friends (who has finished her degree and now works at a commercial law firm) stumbled upon a copy of PGR on the weekend (the women’s edition). Her comment: “This is crap! It’s not about anything.” My comparisons with women’s magazines are fatuous, but I think on the question of “do postgraduates benefit from PGR’s existence, the answer is “no.” It doesn’t appear to have been created to fill a need or desire. How many people want to and do read the office-bearer’s reports? Probably very few. The rest of the magazine is arguably filler.
Well, I’m out of ideas for now…
Ben H
23 Jun 05 at 7:34
By the way, Sasha, I fixed your tags. HTML tags use angle brackets, not square. :-) This site also accepts Dean Allen’s excellent Textile markup.
Ben H
23 Jun 05 at 7:39
By the way, Sasha, I fixed your tags. HTML tags use angle brackets, not square. :) This site also accepts Dean Allenâs excellent Textile markup.
I could have sworn I tried standard html tags before… Ah well. Not familiar with Dean Allen; what’s that about?
Interesting that you openly favour despotic minarchism – I think that’s the first time I’ve heard someone say that openly. I think your position has several problems: eg. you’re still comparing individual preference under VSU to individual preference under CSU, which I just don’t think is a valid analogy; and I assume the universities are reasonably competent in their business practices (and even if not, presumably you’re not in favour of legislating on many other poor business practices).
I find the democracy vs other values question pretty interesting, though… I’m still undecided myself (which is to say, I think there are much greater values, but I’m not sure whether democracy is the best chance we have of maximising them), but I can’t help but think despotic minarchism is some sort of contradiction in spirit, if not in terms – isn’t a large part of the point that minarchists don’t want anyone to wield too much power?
Anyway, I daresay we’ve got a drunken night of politicking somewhere down the line (aside from me not being able to afford alcohol :p), so I think I’ve said everything I will on this topic until then. Although I’ll probably feel compelled to respond to whatever you say about my first email, come to think of it. Curses.
Sasha
23 Jun 05 at 23:55
Ok, I’m obviously using the wrong html tags… is there a list of valid commands somewhere obvious that I’m overlooking?
Anonymous
24 Jun 05 at 18:37
Try the W3C’s HTML tutorial.
Ben H
25 Jun 05 at 18:27
I’m familiar with the basics of html, but I don’t know of any quote format besides the relatively standardised BBS html-like [quote][/quote] format which I don’t think is a part of standard html.
And I know italics should be [i]like so[/i] (with angle brackets rather than square ones), and this page seems to recognise them since they’re not appearing on the page, but the text isn’t italicising:
(This text is surrounded by angle-bracketed italics tags)
I remember something about an alternative bold and italics tags, but I can’t remember what the alternatives were, and Tim BL’s page appears to only cover the format I’ve just described.
Sasha
27 Jun 05 at 15:17
Ok, that’s just weird… I’m sure that italics format didn’t work in my other posts. But it doesn’t answer how to quote (I tried the BBS format with angle brackets somewhere in that post and it obviously didn’t do anything).
Sasha
27 Jun 05 at 15:20
No, there’s no angle bracket quote tags in that comment. But actually,
I tried
though, and that works.
Ben H
27 Jun 05 at 15:23
Quick question – what are these ‘social fractions’; do you mean women, queer, international students, etc?
Christian McCrea
7 Jul 05 at 0:56
Oh, thankyou… A quick question…
When talking about “social fractions” I do mean women, queer people, international students, subalterns, the colonised, working-class people, middle-class-people, families, and so on, because these are the kinds of social groupings most often identified in political discourse. It’s possible, of course, to make up new groupings as one sees fit.
Thinking about social fractions, and fighting for the interests of particular fractions is, in my opinion, a good way to get involved in partisan bitching and fighting. For productive political and ethical thinking and activity, however, I think it’s better to make statements and decisions that proceed from universally applicable principles.
Ben H
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