Student Voice Via Student Representation: UMSU Position on MSF 

You may have heard about the University’s plans for a Melbourne Student Forum (MSF). You may have even been one of the lucky students to be invited to a design workshop about it yesterday. 

UMSU does not oppose any efforts the University makes to actively listen to students. However, our position is that the Melbourne Student Forum (MSF) is a focus group with limited application to most big-ticket decisions and consultations at the University. 

If the University wants to use small focus groups for the purpose for which they are intended (marketing and social research) – that’s fine by us. We just ask that the University is clear and honest that that’s the most the MSF can really be. 

However, small forums of handpicked students like the MSF have no legitimacy as a representative student voice. 

The University says it’s serious about the student voice. If that’s the case, then we invite it to partner with UMSU as a well-established democratic representative body with 55,000+ (opt-in) members, and over 100 democratically elected student representatives. 

To be honest, the roll out of the MSF so suddenly has come as a bit of a shock to us. The University needs to understand the context here, and how the MSF initiative comes across to students who have been trying to get their voices heard for decades. There is a history of the University failing to listen students’ voices in established forums and declining to acknowledge that elected student representatives have a democratic mandate to speak about student matters. 

Importantly, we are concerned that the MSF has potential to undermine your voice, not amplify it. It is a university-initiated and led process which has the capacity to be used in ways which would displace student-led initiatives. UMSU believes that this is completely antithetical to the “students as partners” model the University has previously put forward.  

We welcome a statement from the University making clear that this is not the model being pursued. 

There were also a number of other mapping and research activities the University committed to do to gauge the adequacy of the existing opportunities students have to be heard. But it seems the decision has been made to go ahead with this new initiative without any objective evidence base or effort to consolidate and enhance the existing structures which are genuine student-led activities. 

UMSU is concerned that this is part of a wider move in the tertiary sector to displace democratically elected student representation. It is being spearheaded at universities which have already effectively gutted and stripped their student-led organisations – such as Swinburne where the University proudly boasts that it is busy creating its own “single student representative body at Swinburne” with students, for students. These students are not democratically elected by other students, they are selected by the University. 

We don’t want this model at Melbourne. We want genuine student partnerships with authentic democratic student representation. We want the University to address the limitations of the existing settings and resource student-led activities better. We do not want the University to pick who speaks for us – we want to choose and keep democratic student representation alive. 

We call upon the University to come out and unequivocally state its respect for student democracy at the University of Melbourne and its willingness to partner with UMSU to elevate your voice.  

You've joined your student union for a reason!  Read the position paper and join us at our UMSU Assemblies. Can't make it? Have your say and add your thoughts and ideas to our Student Powered Suggestions board here.

Hiba Adam
UMSU President
president@union.unimelb.edu.au