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"Student behaviour... please note that no electronic recording equipment is allowed during the lecture. If any is discovered, then, again, the texts of the lectures come down, and other disciplinary measures will be taken." (Some literature module)
Wth. Maybe they're going to be making a lot of subversive comments during the lecture. Or dropping a lot of exam hints. Or they remember the Ho Poh Fun incident (most likely).
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Techno Prince:
"While I believe most of us in the NUS Students' Arts and Social Sciences Club privately salute Darryl's courage for taking the initiative and starting the e-petition, faculty clubs like us also have to be held accountable to the administration and NUSSU. Any form of endorsement of dissent, or acting independently of the system may invite a backlash from the Dean's Office, from the Office of Student Affairs, and from NUSSU itself, for not consulting them beforehand and for acting like a renegade group. After all, these are the very same people we have to maintain good working relations with (and sometimes suck up to) throughout the academic year, and publicly showing support or helping to spread dissent in any way may place that in jeopardy. Why risk all that you've worked so hard to build up because of a single incident?"
This got me thinking about why a non-negligible number of people (and an even less negligible proportion of generally non-apathetic NUS students) dislike NUSSU, the NUS Students' Union.
- Like NTUC, NUSSU is emasculated. There were not even token words over the recent CORS debacle despite its rhetoric about being the voice of the students. The Internet and petitiononline.com are the students' real voice, and NUSSU is more like a rubber stamp and the administration's yes-men. No one cares about free NUSSU Welfare Diaries or NUS centennial mugs when they are silent about important issues.
- It's troublesome/hard to get posters approved. I am informed that red tape exists in other areas too.
- They are bureaucratic/obstructionist (no examples provided to protect the confidentiality of my sources)
- They exhibit high-handed attitudes towards fellow students, especially other student societies and faculty clubs. For example, they levy fines for petty/stupid reasons
- They're always very defensive, and don't react well to (or possibly even recognise - a friend sent them a scathing email and didn't even get a boilerplate, bureaucratic response) criticism. It's a thankless job, but no one forced them to join NUSSU.
- What they do is not visible. They always conduct closed door negotiations with the administration, so no one knows how they are being the voice of the students (or indeed that they are even talking to the administration in the first place). It's not even clear if we have democratic centralism; like the feedback unit, everything seems go into a black hole, and even if it emerges on the other side, it may not be in a recognisable form. And meanwhile, "they try to act important when they dun appear to be doing anything". They need a makeover.
- You see smaller clubs holding more events. The behind the scenes work they do (eg matriculation fair, rag) is not always visible.
- There is a lot of politicking going on within NUSSU. Whether this is solely or mostly due to its relative size, as opposed to any intrinsic flaw in NUSSU, I cannot say.
- [Addendum: They are effectively unelected, since it's the Westminsterial system of indirect democracy, twice removed: students elect NUSSU representatives to their faculty clubs. These then form the NUSSU council which
- Other things I can't reveal to protect my sources. You can ask me privately, though.
It seems the NUSSU magazine hooked has added comments to its article pages, which are acting as magnets for outpourings of discontent. The CORS one is a prime example: "most of the comments on the petition website were about the uselessness of nussu as a whole. sadly the pple who defended nussu stated tt nussu offered gd milo etc. hence it is doing its job... and not abt any substantial things tt nussu had done to better the students' situation." [Addendum: My No 1 fan points out that "it's not NUSSU who gets the milo. it's the clubs themselves. think they've to promise 1000 ppl or more to get the milo stand"]
In a peripherally related issue, some people don't understand that some articles are written frivolously and in a self-ironic manner, and start flaming the author. How can anyone take seriously an article that includes a poem like this: ‘Tis the season to be naughty, fralalalalala. Deck the girls in FBT, fralalalalala. Boys out of NS, hot and free, fralalalalala. Orientation’s the time to be funny, FRALALALALALALA, and self-referentially observes: "What makes me suspicious is whether the magazine was named Hooked because it has a hidden agenda to promote hooking up"? (I highly recommend the second half of the article, incidentally. It's a hoot.)