While less visible than the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) and University of Sydney Union (USU), the University Senate is a crucial decision maker that votes on policy and appoints executives like the Vice Chancellor. With voting open and physical campaigning well underway, Honi sat down with three of the postgraduate candidates to get an insight into their policy priorities and how they would approach the role.
Uncommon in most student elections, current postgraduate fellow Benny Shen (Independent) is running for re-election. Shen is quick to point to his eight years experience serving as a student representative as an asset. “Stability and understanding,” he told Honi, were crucial when serving in governance roles.
Shen’s pitch to the student body is that his wide range of experiences, as an undergraduate and postgraduate student, and as a tutor, allows him a unique insight into students’ needs. Shen won by a landslide 866 votes in 2022, although Senate turnout is historically low with under 6% of postgraduate students voting.
Having negotiated a three-way preference deal, Shen’s incumbency must make the other three somewhat worried but they were cautious to criticise Shen directly. Weihong Liang (Independent), who served alongside Shen within SUPRA said he “did not want to comment on other people’s work.” Cooper Gannon (Liberal) was similarly wary of outlining specific issues with the last two years, beyond pointing out that a lot of Shen’s election promises were recycled from 2022.
A general sense emerged that the challengers wanted the role to be a lot more public facing. Many students Honi has spoken to are unclear what the Senate does and are less aware there is student representation on it.
When asked if this approach would change if they were elected, both Gannon and Liang argued the fellow needed to take a more active role advocating to students directly. Gannon said a focus of his platform would be “communicating what the Senate is doing” to students and Liang said the focus of the fellow should not be “the internal politics of the Senate” but on public campaigns with other bodies like the SRC and SUPRA.
When pressed why he was not as active in such campaigns, Shen argued he had a strong record of consulting student and faculty bodies but also suggested this critique revealed his opponents did not understand the Senate’s operations.
“No one has any independent decision-making authority,” he said. “The Senate reaches a consensus on governance policy.” Rather than being involved in public campaigns, Shen argued, the role of the fellow was to provide important context to management from a student perspective.
When asked for examples of those pushes, Shen said his internal pressure was crucial in getting the Senate to formally endorse the Fair Fares campaign and actively participate in the Yes campaign for a First Nations voice to parliament.
Shen may be correct that working behind the scenes is a crucial part of the job, but students are frustrated when policies come out with little notice or direct consultation. For example, when the new Campus Access Policy was announced, cracking down on protests, sources inside the SRC and SUPRA told Honi they had not been warned it was coming.
When asked about the University’s crackdown on free speech or refusal to divest from weapons manufacturers, they all gave noncommittal answers. Shen acknowledged that the CAP “has to be revisited” but also said he understood the University’s position, given that many students “have experienced stress” following the Gaza solidarity encampment.
Both Shen and Gannon refused to comment on divestment saying they would have to await the recommendations of the working group and Gannon also took a centrist position on the CAP. He maintained he was a “strong supporter of free speech on campus, but also said he supported measures that prevented permanent fixtures like the encampment from occurring again.
Liang took a slightly stronger stance saying that the CAP was “not legitimate” because students had not been adequately consulted and that he was in principle against investments in weapons manufacturers.
Many of the policies from all three platforms were not specific to postgraduate students but were continuations of existing campaigns in student politics. Expanding scholarships and opal card concessions alongside protecting simple extensions hold almost unanimous support across the student body. The latter is so galvanising it’s hard to find any stupol advertisement without a promise to defend the five-day extensions.
On issues that impact international students, like opal concessions, Shen and Liang’s experience in past campaigns likely gives them a greater mandate to lobby the state government to pay for the policy.
Gannon has a more ambitious proposal suggesting that the University take a proportion of students’ fees and pay it as a contribution to the government. Alongside pressing for an itemised breakdown of what student SSAF and course fees go to, Gannon argued that instead of going to capital expenditure projects that “didn’t always support students,” the money should go to pay for expenses like transport.
Gannon is echoing a lot of student complaints when he calls University spending “a bit of a black box,” and suggests “there would be a very strong public interest argument” for more transparency, but it’s unclear the University wants to pull all its cards on the table, especially if they look bad.
Liang has by far the most ambitious policy document with his priorities being a new buffet-style dining hall on campus and guaranteed student accommodation for first-year students. He argued the University “does not have a clear plan” to increase student accommodation and “needed a clear goal.”
Housing and food affordability are crucial issues in the current cost of living crisis but Liang was not convincing when pressed on the feasibility of his ideas. He conceded that the University had always explicitly rejected the dining hall proposal and was unable to articulate how the University could quickly acquire more student accommodation.
Ideas that cost less money and political capital such as Shen and Liang’s promise to bring back Alumni emails and Gannon’s promise to stop the use of recycled lectures seem more within reach in a two-year term.
Voting links have been sent to all postgraduate students via email and will remain open until October 24th.
Honi reached out to Cole Tyman for an interview but did not get a response.
