Election Coverage Roundup

The Beaver focused its coverage in todays issue on last weeks elections, even including a post-election pullout section featuring the goofiest pictures of the Sabb-elects they could find (but don’t worry, they included embarrassing pictures of the Media Group crew, too). Additionally, a somewhat mish-mashed article by Kevin Perry (presumable in his toga) and Michael Deas managed to simultaneously pat the Media Group on the back for its successful coverage of the ballot counting night and include a thematically unrelated, if important, interview with Returning Officer James Bacon on the merits of the single transferable vote scheme that was employed in the election. The statisticians on the editorial staff even got their chance to insert some graphs and figures – notably taking the opportunity to bash Hack Attack’s 36% success rate in predicting the election outcome.

The newsiest of all the stories, meanwhile, was among the shortest: the race for residences officer will be referred to the Constitution and Steering Committee (C&S) to determine whether there was any breach of campaigning rules by Emma Fischer, who received a mere 3 more votes than her opponent, Helen Roberts. According to the Beaver, if Fisher is found to have deliberately and knowingly breached the rules her candidacy could be terminated, making Roberts the Residences officer by default, although the Beaver also suggests that a rerun of the vote is another possibility. Fischer is alleged to have violated campaigning rules by adding to a form email sent out to students in the High Holborn residence (where she is the hall president) and also to have worn a campaigning t-shirt inside the library, which is against the rules. C&S is expected to make a decision this evening.

Beaver Strikes at ‘Old Boys Club’

The Beaver hit Houghton Street today and its front page was splashed with pictures of the recently-elected Sabbs with the headline ‘Jobs for the boys’. The article then suggests that the four – two of whom won by narrow margins and one who ran unopposed – are a cliquey ‘old boys club’ of Students Union establishment figures. Goodness gracious!

The article was frankly audacious in its focus on the closeness of the four victors, noting that three of them (Aled Fisher, Wil Barber and Emmanuel Akpan-Inwang) had all lived in the Rosebery Hall dorm together and were all ‘long time friends of [Communications Officer elect Dan] Sheldon’. Your Observer doesn’t condemn or decry this reporting at all, indeed if anything it makes the Beaver somewhat more readable. But nevertheless, it is a bold choice by editor Kevin Perry to put this on the front cover as opposed to a more staid recounting of the various races. Could this be a bit of blowback for some of the candidates pledges to modernize the Media Group?

More of the Beaver review to come.

LSE Sanctuary on the Ropes

Way back in January we wrote about how the Media Group was facing some serious competition with several new student publications hitting Houghton Street. Well after that, things went rather quiet, didn’t they? The Gateway, a national student-run business newspaper is still publishing regularly, but the paper is frankly so boring that I can’t be bothered to keep tabs on it or write about it here. The Sanctuary, on the other hand, promised to provide an irreverent alternative to the Beaver with its emphasis on satire and arts coverage. But after the first issue debuted back in January, Houghton Street has gone wanting.

Well the Observer can reveal that the reason for this long break has to do (not so surprisingly) with serious troubles among the Sanctuary staff, including multiple resignations within the paper culminating with the chief editor’s departure last Friday. In an email to the Observer, new editor Ariel Elkin describes the paper’s current health as ‘deplorable’. Still, he promises that a new edition will hit the streets before the end of term, at which time the Sanctuary will be looking for a refuge in which to reconstitute itself for next year.

This Observer hopes that they are able to pull it together and put a paper on the stands, as any contribution towards breaking the stranglehold of the Media Group is welcome in my book. If anybody is interested in getting involved with the Sanctuary, their Facebook Group is probably a good place to start.

Party Director Davies Phones It In

LSE Director Howard Davies is a man of many talents – we’ve seen him chiming in at quiz nights, singing songs at cultural shows and cracking jokes at the UGM – but one of his greatest skills appears to be keeping himself in the public eye. Besides writing book reviews and chairing the Booker prize, it appears that Mr Davies also pens a regular monthly column for Management Today magazine (I know, it sounds terribly exciting). Sadly, however, it looks like this month Davies has really phoned it in, with his column focusing on a recap of the parties of the World Economic Forum at Davos.

You may recall that Davies showed off his new media credentials at Davos by keeping a blog for the FT during the conference. Although we chuckled a bit at some of what he wrote, at least we couldn’t criticize his work for its timing – the event was going on around him as he mused about the impact of the losses at Societe Generale or whatever.  But now more than a month has passed. Is a column about how Turkey hosted a party with whirling dervishes dancing on a covered pool or a report on the pots of foie gras that he consumed at exclusive parties really timely? Oh well, at least he’s secured his invitations for next years crop of corporate parties.

What’s On

The Grimshaw International Relations Club has pulled together quite a roster for its latest event in the Ambassador Series, with ambassadors from the nations of Afghanistan, Armenia and Serbia as well as the consul general of Canada and the chief diplomatic representative of the Palestinian Territories to the UK all discussing the issue of national integration. It looks to be quite an interesting discussion.

When, Where: Tonight at 6pm in the New Theater

If you think you’re one of those know-it-all smartypants, then you have your chance to prove your chops today. The first round of testing for the team to represent the LSE at the University Challenge will take place this evening in the Underground. If you’re interested, register by emailing su.gensec@lse.ac.uk

When, Where: Tonight at 6pm in the Underground

Now I know the idea of sitting in the Hong Kong theater discussing sex might not be the most erotic thing that you can think of, but just imagine the amount of psychological trauma that an evenings discussion with psychoanalysts Darian Leader and Susie Orbach can relieve (or uncover!). And seriously, your difficulty confronting intimacy obviously suggests some suppressed feelings about your mother and/or father.

When, Where: Tuesday at 6:30pm in the Hong Kong Theater

The Results are In

Well it’s been a long week of campaigning and assaulting passers-by on Houghton Street, but the elections are now over and we can get on with our lives. If you are interested in more in depth coverage of how it all went down and who got pissed at the counting event, check out the official coverage, as well as the work of our friends over at Hack Attack.

Having left the insider work to them, this Observer is just going to post a list of the winners – these are based on the reports coming from the Media Group’s blog.

GenSec: Aled Fisher

Comms: Dan Sheldon

Treasurer: Wil Barber

Education & Welfare: Emmanuel Apkan-Inwang

Societies: Zoe Cooke

Returning: Ossie Fikret

Environment & Ethics: Justus Rollin

LGBT: Lizzie Merrow

International: Ayushman Sen

Women’s: Ruby Buckley

Part-Time: Luke Spyropoulos

Residences: Emma Fischer

C&S: Antonia, Helen, Nadeem, Aliabbas Virani, Mukarram Ali and Rabyia ‘Ruby’ Aslam

NUS: Brian Duggan and Sadia Kidwai

Anti-Racism: Joseph Brown

Disabilities: Jessica

No word yes on F&S

Uni’s Need to Get Used to Blogs, FB

Times Higher Education ran a long piece about the use by students of blogs, Facebook and YouTube to air grievances about their lecturers, their departments and their uni’s. Focusing mostly on efforts to stomp out libelous material and to manage PR in the face of online complaints, the article is rather interesting, but at the end of the day it shows that uni’s still don’t get it.

So a student creates a Facebook group slagging off the LSE, so what? Should the school freak out and call up Facebook to ask them to remove the group? It doesn’t take a degree from our fine institution to know that such an action would have exactly the opposite effect – probably increasing membership in said group. The LSE already learned the hard way when it drew attention to former LSE professor Erik Ringmar’s blog after he posted a contentious lecture cajoling the school to improve teaching standards. Ringmar’s blog, which no doubt had a modest readership at the time he posted the offending lecture, was suddenly inundated with thousands of pageviews following coverage of the fracas – not exactly quietly sweeping the issue under the rug, is it?

What is most interesting about the THE article is that it appears to reveal that what most bothers the uni’s is that they have lost the near-total control they have been used to exercising over their own appearance. Effectively, this means that the school can be held to account by external agents. So your teacher is crap? Write them up on ratemyprofessor.com. Your lecturer fell asleep during a student presentation? Post the pictures on Flickr. You received a rude email from your course convener? Post it on Facebook. The point is, these things that the schools would prefer to hide behind their slickly produced catalogs, are finding their way into the light of public scrutiny. This is a good thing!

In the article, the author writes “damaging messages about academics’ abilities and institutions’ performance circulate [online] as fast as the positive ones. If left unchecked, they could have a damning effect on student recruitment.” So is the alternative that unfortunate students accept offers from less-than-honest schools without being aware of the grievances that existing students have? What about the reverse – unrealistic promises of school recruitment catalogs have a damning effect on students’ minds when their expectations and reality clash? This desire to prevent the dissemination of information seems rather at odds with what most would imagine is the role of an institution of higher education.

The most level-headed comment in regards to the way students use the web comes from Dean Russell, of the branding agency Precedent: “Just because somebody is saying something negative doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody believes them.” He adds that uni’s, along with whatever other organization or brand, can potentially dig their own grave by overreacting to marginal or isolated complaints online, thus drawing far more attention to them than would otherwise have ever been brought on its own.

The point of all this babbling? Let students criticize. If their complaints are legitimate, then try to address them and fix the problem. If they are illegitimate, then ignore them – that’s probably what everybody else is doing, too.

No Sudden Death at the Beaver

Caught red handed! The Beaver, in a raft of apologies printed in yesterdays edition, admitted that its office was not, in fact, a death trap. Saying that it would like to apologize for “any alarm caused” by the comment in an article in the previous edition that stated that staffers in the Beaver’s office “face imminent death every time we work here”, the editors acknowledged that this was, in fact, an exaggeration. Tongue-in-cheek, the kids call it these days.

Additionally, I have to admire the choice of a editorial cartoon featuring a student reading the Beaver on the loo. I’ve always said that the Beaver is a useful toilet paper.

Voting Opens

Well, it’s finally come. Voting has opened in the Students Union elections, and Houghton Street is crammed with hacks trying to gain votes with colourful banners, plentiful fliers and simply shouting students into submission as they try to make their way to classes.

The polls will remain open through tomorrow afternoon, providing ample time for students to weigh in on the various choices – although as the Beaver’s cover story reports today four of the positions are uncontested. In principle RON (re-open nominations) votes could defeat any of the unopposed candidates, but the Observer has heard that this is unprecedented.

Voting is taking place in the Quad, as well as online via the Students Union website and the Election website.

Davies on Sex, Science and Profit

If you weren’t aware, our own director moonlights as a book critic in his spare time. And according to the Guardian, Davies is something of a pugilist when it comes to his reviews. His latest target, Terence Kealey of the University of Buckingham, gets socked for lacking self-discipline in his latest book, Sex, Science and Profits.

Writing in the Times Higher Education supplement, Davies criticizes Kealey for his provocative title, saying that “in fact, there is rather more about science and profit than about the other thing.” Kealey’s book, which Davies dismisses as a ‘polemic’, is about the value of private investment in education, particularly in scientific research. The poor Vice Chancellor even receives an unfortunate literary insult, being likened to Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

You’d think that the director could lay off, although maybe he is still smarting from being shown up by other university leaders online – Kealey, on the other hand, doesn’t even register. Pick on someone your own size, Howard!