Dear Vision,
I attended the S.U. demonstration against portering cuts, and during the protest itself it seemed like the S.U. really did care about portering and could maybe get some results.
But now it occurs to me, is all of this anything more than posturing? It’s easy to come out from under the rock of the S.U. building once a term and shout down a megaphone and it might provide a good photo opportunity, but what is actually happening about getting some practical results? The president came out saying that the only option now is to put together a list of problems which the lack of portering has caused and hope the management spontaneously give porters back. But apparently he had just tried that in the meeting itself, and it didn’t get anywhere because the managers found ways to wriggle out of taking responsibility.
Avoiding responsibility in this way is easy to do. In the future someone may get attacked, having been followed with nowhere to escape to, or they may get in to trouble because of a lack of first aid, but the management can always just say ‘Well, even with 24/7 lodges, the porter could have been away somewhere else doing a security check’. Even if the burglary rate doubled, the management could just say, in relation to any particular incident, ‘Well, there were burglaries before so you can’t prove that this specific incident wouldn’t have happened anyway’.
Proving that the cutbacks are causing harm sounds easy, but in fact, however much trouble the lack of portering causes, it’s almost impossible to prove.
What the S.U. officers need to do is get the management to commit to precisely what sort of evidence, both in terms of individual incidents and in terms of overall crime rates on campus, would get portering returned. If the managers avoid doing this then that’d be a tacit admission that however bad things get the kind of proof they are asking for is impossible. Or if they do give examples then at least we’ll know that, if the kind of thing which is described comes true, we can perhaps get portering hours restored.
If (and it’s a big if) the Student Union really does want to get portering back, and if they think that using a list of incidents is a good way to do it, then they need to get some ground rules in place, or they’ll just get shot down in flames again and there’s no chance at all that we’ll get tangible results.
Yours,
A Vanbrugh first year