Aldwych goes to Sheffield

Fabian and I spent Friday and Saturday in Sheffield, at this year's second Aldych Group meeting. The Aldwhych Group is formed of the students' unions of the Russell Group of elite (or elitist?) research intensive instituions and was created as a reaction to the Russell Group in 1994.

So why come together? Well, there are a variety of mission groups operating withing the UK University Sector, such as the 1994 group. These are self formed groups of similar universities, which collaborate and lobby the government. The thing that amuses me about the Russell Group is that its members are actually not the top twenty universities in the UK, but that having declared themselves to be special gives them a collective air of importance that it's easy to buy into.

So, this weekend we talked about the future direction of the Aldwych group and looked at the things we had in common, identified problems and issues particular to RG institutions and looked at ways we could solve them together. We talked about the upcoming fee reviews for Undergrads and Postgrads and how we could best react to that and how we could play our part in shaping them. We looked at the great things we were already doing individually and how we could adapt them to work in our own institutions.

The point of a Union is to come together for the common interest and purpose, and unions that opt out of the NUS are sorely missing out. This was evidenced to me from meeting officers from non affiliated unions at Aldwych; they operated very much on their own, with little scope of the bigger picture. I cannot stress how much seeing how other unions operate and how other officers work has helped me in my job so far; there is no point is us sitting in our isolated unions reinventing the wheel constantly, and there are issues we cannot solve on our own and must come together and fight together. Our Universities sure as hell are, and we are only weaker if we don't mirror them and come together ourselves.

But I digress; it's time for me to go back to my wonderfully relaxing weekend and go cook fajitas with my housemates...