General Secretary Pierre Deludet proved incapable of maintaining control of the meeting. Indeed, he did not even appear to fully understand the UCLU constitution, with attendees being called on stage to explain the standing orders to him. His constant dithering led to a call for a vote of no confidence in him. This led to further confusion as the General Secretary failed to realise that such a motion took precedence over all others. Meanwhile, the Bloomsbury Theatre slowly emptied of students, bored of the chronic incompetence of the Union.

As Deludet made vain efforts to regain control – in spite of persistent attempts to remove him from his position – quorum was called. He then instructed the audience to ‘press any key’ on their voting pads to determine whether there were enough students to continue the EGM. Unfortunately, the screen behind him informed the audience that they could in fact only press buttons 1, 2 or 3, meaning that the consequent result, declaring the meeting inquorate, may well have not been valid.

The democratic meltdown at the EGM was born out of factional infighting over a motion supporting the introduction of the London Living Wage to UCLU. Predictably, the verbose proposals from UCLU’s answer to the Third International (Brown, Chessum, Griffiths, Rackley et al) were met by the distasteful Tory warbling and wobbling of the Union’s very own Eva Peron in the form of Mandy Smith. Her obstructionist behaviour and incessant Point of Ordering culminated in the Sabb elect running across the auditorium to snatch a microphone from Griffiths’ hands, leaving whatever dignity she had to begin with back in her seat.

With the meeting looking like the Moscow State Circus had come to town, it is perhaps hard to believe that anything worse happened that evening, but it did: the rejection of the Special Resolution to Incorporate UCLU as a Charitable Company on its second reading. Despite impassioned pleas by the Sabbs that such a move was supported by independent legal advice and would secure the independence of the Union from College, opposition led by Trotsky Inc. and the President of the Postgraduate association Dante Micheaux – on grounds of a lack of consultation – saw the resolution fall short of achieving the required two-thirds majority. With the likelihood of resignations from the Union’s board of trustees following the failed vote, and several years of work on the part of management down the toilet, it is little wonder that the Sabbs had their heads in their hands.

Having secured her position as Democracy and Engagement Officer for next year, you’d think that Mandy Smith would wait until September to cock up her job. However Smith has already gone above and beyond our expectations by setting up a Facebook group encouraging students to oppose Union policy. The group, UCL Students Against 3rd Term Strike Action, goes against a motion passed at this year’s AGM to support staff facing job losses. Despite Smith’s position as Sabb elect, and hence her duty to support UCLU policy, she has completely disregarded this by creating a Facebook group to do just that. As she declared on the group (grammatical mistakes included): ‘Ive stood against the union on a number of issues before, and I’ll do it again if i feel its necessary.’ We can therefore look forward next year to more of Mandy’s questionable brand of ‘democratic leadership’.

In other election news, The Cheese Grater has got its grubby hands on a confidential dossier, compiled by Kieran Weisberg, detailing some election offenses committed by Michael Chessum, Craig Griffiths and Greg Brown. The three are variously accused of heinous Facebook offenses (all tenuously related to actual campaigning) and poster-sticking in cluster rooms. The punishments inflicted on the three miscreants by a three hour hearing probably speak for themselves: Brown was cleared, Griffiths was given an oral warning and Chessum was docked a ‘symbolic’ 0.25% of his first preference votes. It is interesting to note how, despite the fact only 2859 people voted in these elections (a mere 13% of the total student body yet apparently a record), egos have been running as high as ever over things of no consequence such as this.

Beale had previously complained about the article ‘Beale’s Bell-end’ (CG23), claiming that many UCL students believed that he had written the article himself. Upon being informed that UCL students were not that stupid, Beale responded that our university contained numerous ‘numskulls’ who were unable to understand a simple parody of his Pi column.

Beale’s latest complaint is based around our reporting his homophobic statements, made by him at Debating Society; he claims that they are libellous, despite the fact that they were witnessed by a packed room, including members of The Cheese Grater. Beale has not helped refute this claim of homophobia by publically declaring on Facebook that ‘That fag [The Cheese Grater editor] can rim me if he thinks his loose tongue will go unchecked’.

Beale has further strengthened his case by branding Cheese Grater writers as ‘clinically insane’ and suffering from ‘mental illness’. His recent actions display a disturbing refusal to take responsibility for his own comments. He has simply attempted to suppress what he knows to be true by threatening us with a libel lawsuit, wasting UCLU’s time as well as ours. The Cheese Grater refuses to cave in to such attempts at oppression and intimidation and will continue to fight them.

According to UCL, the Wellcome Trust is pushing the university cut admin staff in their current renegotiations over the the WTCHM’s programme grant (being considered for renewal from October 2010). The Wellcome Trust has indicated that the WTCHM’s bid should be around £4.5m, almost a 50% reduction from the current grant of £8.8m.

A proposal for restructuring was given to WTCHM staff on Friday 19th March. It places 6 out of 13 staff at risk of redundancy, a 46% cut in numbers for support services. Staff have been placed under a great deal of uncertainty since November when they were told that UCL considered the numbers of admin staff to be ‘too high’ for ‘the UCL norm’.

To support this the proposal states that the ratio of academic to support staff for WTCHM is at an ‘unprecedented level’ of 1:1, but this is misleading: of the 13 support staff listed one, for example, edits an established academic journal. The proposal also seeks to cut the department’s two IT staff and replace them with one Information Officer. However whether their duties will actually cease or will in reality create a new position – either in the Information Services Division or in FLS IT Support – is not mentioned.

Up until this point students had been kept in the dark about Woudhuysen’s two phase plan for carrying out the merger; while phase one was clearly outlined, Woudhuysen had refused to explain what would happen after that. He asserted that ‘there is no document for phase two. I haven’t even thought of how we’re going to come up with it.’

However this was undermined last month by the leaking of an early document entitled ‘Review of Modern Languages: document for discussion’. Circulated privately back in June 2009, the document goes into far greater detail on many issues not previously touched upon publicly.

Despite Woudhuysen’s profession that he hasn’t ‘even thought’ of how phase two will be drawn up this so-called ‘secret document’ does just that, detailing specific deadlines and restructuring. It outlines that ‘formal changes [should be] in place from 1 August 2010’ with ‘the teaching of current students [having] to change to the new structure’. The document also acknowledges that cuts are intended to create a ‘cost-effective undergraduate programme’, despite Woudhuysen’s public denials that the restructuring was in any way financially motivated.

Woudhuysen released the document himself last month after it had been leaked to the student body. When confronted with it he claimed that staff were consulted on it, rejected it and consequently that it has no relation to his current plans. Yet Woudhuysen’s own phase one, that same phase one that he claims will allow us to ‘think radically about phase two’, is almost identical to the initial stages outlined in ‘Review of Modern Languages: document for discussion’. Moreover it shows that ideas for phase two have been in circulation for over nine months, despite claims that none have even been thought of.

Fears among staff and students are that once phase one is completed, the only possible structure for the departments will be the one outlined in this initial text – there will be little practical opportunity afterwards to restore the current faculty structure.

The trouble is, in the latter case only 15 positions have more than one candidate. Perhaps even worse, with regard to the former, there are only 2 candidates for 6 positions on Elections Committee, 3 for 6 on Governance Committee, 2 for 3 jobs as Union Councillors without portfolio and 5 candidates for six places on Finance and Services Committee.

Some may grumble at the likes of Mandy Smith running for the position of Democracy and Engagement Sabb despite having attempted (as pointed out in CG23) to move the discussion in Union Council about the London Living Wage to a private session. Kieran Weisberg may also prove a contentious candidate for Education & Campaigns Officer, owing to his rather distasteful defense, as Conservative Society President, of an article in ‘The Caerulean’ supporting Enoch Powell. However, they will at least be subject to close examination by virtue of standing for contested positions.

This is more than can be said for the cringeworthy crackpot Cassandra that is Martin Beale. Fresh from his threat to sue this magazine for libel – following its parody of his Pi column – Beale now seeks to leave behind his role as a universally ridiculed student journalist in order to pursue election to the Finance and Services Committee. He is the example par excellence of the true horror that comes from an uncontested election.

Indeed, he has already breached UCLU campaign rules by virtue of his housemate creating a (now deleted) Facebook group in support of his candidacy, long before campaigning was allowed to start. Even if this was an honest mistake, it begs the question of how on earth he can claim to be suitable for such a complex post when he can’t even be bothered to read the rules surrounding his own election. It is also worth noting that as yet, the Union hasn’t taken any action – such as docking a percentage of votes as it did last year over a similar breach in rules by a candidate in the Sabb elections. The fact that Beale’s ludicrous views will remain unchallenged is disturbing. Whether it be the deeply insensitive comparisons between interracial marriage and dog breeding in his latest column or the homophobic abuse to which he subjected journalist Douglas Murray at Debating Society, it is quite clear that Beale is in the words of Murray “a crazy” and quite unfit to hold office.

Pi made no apparent budgetary considerations despite the fact that the previous issue had been released only days before the end of first term, allowing hardly any time for its circulation.

This has not been the Pi Media President’s only lapse in recent months. A needlessly critical review of UCL Drama’s Doctor Faustus (described by the reviewer as a ‘massive bitch’), was published without going through the full editorial process.

Students were informed by email that all of their reading material would be moved to a separate site, with no mention at the time of the reduced opening hours or severe deficiencies in RockLib’s facilities. RockLib is closed all day Sundays, as well as opening later and closing earlier than the main library for the rest of the week.

Criticism has also been directed at the fact that the library contains no photocopiers, as well as only a handful of work stations and computers. ‘It is completely insufficient for a department with several hundred students’, commented one UCL student, while others have voiced their concerns about the fact that RockLib will probably not be operating a 24 hour opening policy during Summer Term as the main library does. Diana Herman, Arts and Humanities Academic Support Manager, confirmed that she was “99.9% certain” that RockLib would not employ 24 hour access, owing to “financial stringencies”.

Further problems were caused between 16th and 18th January, when power cuts caused RockLib to close for the whole of this period. This happened only days before all dissertations and course essay plans were due to be submitted to the English department. Many undergraduates were unable to access books for essays which counted towards 10% of their final degree mark. Reports also suggest that a number of books have been mislaid by the library during the move and are unavailable to students altogether.

Many within the English department feel that UCL has acted without consideration for their needs. One undergraduate commented: ‘As a department where students get an average of six hours contact time each week, independent reading is vital to our degrees and access to texts is one of the main things that we get for our tuition fees. For the university to hinder our wider reading to this extent completely undermines the thousands of pounds that we pay each year to be here.’

Helpfully, the motion before Debating Society in the second week of term was “This house believes UCL is not complicit in acts of terrorism.” Perhaps predictably the motion passed, but the evening’s speeches highlighted an unease within the student body. The best example of this was a face-off between two Muslim students. The first, a member of UCL Isoc, claimed rather disturbingly that whilst the society had invited extremist speakers, it did not expect them to say extremist things when they addressed their meetings. The second stated that despite being a practising Muslim, he refused to join Isoc due to what he saw as its inherently extremist nature. The latter was loudly applauded by guest speaker and regular Question Time panellist Douglas Murray, who – after angrily dismissing NUS President Wes Streeting’s claims that he was an Islamophobe – condemned the Provost for allowing extremist speakers to address a union society. Indeed, Murray pointed out that as part of Isoc’s upcoming “Islam Awareness Week” a number of these speakers were due to visit UCL again.

The Cheese Grater therefore went along to two of the Isoc’s events to see if the views being bandied about were as extreme as Murray had made out. The first of these featured Haitham Al-Haddad and Hamza Tzortzis, who spoke about Islam in the 21st Century. Al-Haddad calmly stated that as a Muslim, if he did not pray five times a day, “hellfire” awaited him after death. When asked if non-Muslims, apostates and homosexuals would be condemned to hellfire, he said that whilst his statements on the afterlife were just opinions, they were opinions those outside of Islam would do well to heed. Tzortzis argued that Intelligent Design supported the notion of an Islamic God, and was asked by the Cheese Grater about recent allegations made against him by The Daily Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan; in particular, whether he had said that “we as Muslims reject the idea of freedom of speech, and even of freedom.” He responded that he had made the statement, but that Gilligan’s interpretation of it was “media vomit”.

The second meeting, with speaker Saleem Chagtai was also interesting in the light of the Gilligan article, in which he had been accused of stating that he hoped for offensive Jihad to bring about Sharia (Islamic Law) in Britain. However, this then disappeared from the online edition a few days later, after Chagtai denied making the statement and threatened legal action. Indeed, whilst he clearly said at the meeting that he favours a form of Islamic law within the Islamic community in Britain, he stated unequivocally that the notions of groups such as Anjum Chowdhury’s Islam4UK were not at all in line with his own thinking.

Whether UCL Islamic Society is a breeding ground for extremism is questionable, indeed Saleem Chagtai appears at the moment to have been misrepresented in the Daily Telegraph. Yet, listening to Tzortzis refute – oh the irony – freedom of speech and al-Haddad speak about hellfire, was at the very least, highly distasteful. For the Cheese Grater to call for restrictions on freedom of speech at UCL would however go against all this magazine holds dear. It is just a pity that the Union’s censorship of these pages appears over the last few years to have been far more stringent than its monitoring of potentially inflammatory guest speakers.

So in March 2009, hot on the heels of the Research Assessment Exercise findings for 2008/09, the Modern Languages Review Committee for UCL was launched. With the ostensible aim of helping UCL’s MFL departments improve their research (see: research ratings), the panel – headed by a Provost-appointed Physicist among other moonlighters - set to work. In June that year, they published a baffling report which said little or nothing about improving Modern Languages research. What it did suggest was a brutal restructuring of departments into a centralised block, including a sea change in curriculum and numerous redundancies. Opposition was fierce, meetings held and finally a two month pre-consultation held – over the summer holiday, when no students were available to voice their concerns. The final report was scheduled to appear in October. It failed to do so. The consultation proper was put off until a later date.

After months of silence, the official Modern Languages Review Committee consultation began in early February. Basing it on new and entirely different documents from the original pre-consultation, and well aware of the presence of a lot of angry students, the Committee has launched a rapid-fire sequence of (largely closed) meetings, releasing relevant documentation at short notice and under password protection. The apparent aim now is a restructuring and rebranding of MFL at UCL in line with elements of the Vice-Provost’s report. It seeks to homogenise Modern Languages into a single ‘Division’, one that is lean on administration and heavy on so-called ‘interdisciplinary’ courses. It will be smaller, offer less, and cost as little as possible. It will be composed of 50% postgraduates, paying top-dollar and presumably each adopting the ‘orphan centuries’ bawled about by Worton in his the HEFCE report. It will also be centralised – no specific language will be granted its own curriculum agenda, and unique departmental support offered for students on years abroad will be the responsibility of decreased administration numbers and ever-busier academics, who will themselves be appointed from an unspecified point higher up the stack.

Phase one of the consultation is on its way to completion, and the facts are beginning to trickle out. Crucially we hear that, in the name of ‘avoiding duplication’, each former department is to be maintained by one ‘departmental secretary’ of a lower grade. They will in turn be supported by 6 separate ‘general administrators’ in another building entirely, dealing with admissions, finance and years abroad. As we have yet to be told who these will be or where the current administrators will fit in, this will probably mean up to five redundancies.

Phase two remains a worrying mystery. As Woudhuysen put it himself, “There is no document for phase two. I haven’t even thought of how we’re going to come up with it”. However, we do know it will involve the announcement of course cuts, course mergers and changes in the academic structure. Big stuff. But we’re still waiting on the documents and will be seeing through a glass darkly until then.

Having kept quiet for most of this term, the sabbatical officers are now looking to improve the Union’s democratic structure by drowning Union Council in verbose paperwork. On 24th November, Council received no fewer that seven Special Resolutions to amend various parts of the Union’s Standing Orders, mostly from Finance & Democracy Officer Andrew Caddy. Each of these resolutions has to be passed  at two meetings of council. As there is only so long at each Council meeting before too many Union officers get bored and leave, the resolutions will no doubt be using up the time of the Union’s elected officials well into the New Year.

While The Cheese Grater has neither the inclination nor the patience [or the space. Ed.] to describe the proposed resolutions in full, here are a few salient points:

1) The Media Management Committee is to be disbanded. The committee is supposedly responsible for coordinating the actions of Rare FM, Film & TV Soc, Photo Soc, Anime Soc, Pi Media and this lowly rag. Despite a move to meetings limited to 30 minutes every three weeks, the last four meetings of 2008/09 were cancelled due to poor attendance. The solution? The committee has finally resolved to give up the ghost, with Student Activities Officer James Hodgson claiming that the Union’s media societies “function very well independently”. If you say so…

2) The Sabbatical Officers want to simplify their job descriptions drastically, removing most of their specific responsibilities to leave just basic statements of value. Also omitted are the requirements to meet with the Provost and with University of London Union sabbatical officers. To give an idea of just how generalised the sabbies’ descriptions are to become: while the current descriptions stand at a whopping 3,330 words in total, the proposed replacements take up just 672.

3) A “Sustainability Committee” is to be formed, presumably with the intention of producing environmentally-friendly paperwork.

4) “Networks”, similar to the Welfare Groups proposed last year (see CG 19), are to be set up to help various minority and special interest groups. These will act as permanent societies that can be formed by UCL Council and do not require a set number of members in order to be affiliated. Examples include LGBT, Black and Minority Ethnic, Disabled, and Women’s Networks.

5) The Finance Committee is to merge with the Services Committee to form the, err, Finance and Services Committee.

6) The membership of Union Council is to be slashed by excluding halls representatives, cutting the number of faculty representatives, and getting rid of the Campaigns and Equal Opportunities Officer. While the latter was probably a mistake (Andrew Caddy submitted an amendment to include the C&EO shortly after submitting the resolution itself), the other changes are intentional and would leave various parts of the student body without a voice at Council. As such, a second amendment has been submitted by Environment and Ethics Officer Craig Griffiths with a view to reinstating all those to be removed from Council in the first place. Thus, while the resolution aims to make Council run more smoothly, it will no doubt cause Council to waste time by arguing amongst itself over its own membership.

Poverty Wages…

Following the Union’s motion for UCL to pay its staff the London Living Wage, UCL Union itself has come under scrutiny. On 24th November, Union Council debated and eventually rejected a motion stating that the Union should pay the Living Wage to its own staff, such as students working part-time in its shops and bars. Clinical President Amanda ‘Mandelson’ Smith began the discussion with a procedural motion that observers be excluded from the meeting, but lost the vote. The minutes note that Mandy later claimed that the Living Wage was “intended for specific groups such as single parent families”, only for someone to inform her that it would be “illegal to pay certain staff members from different social groups different wages for the same job”. Another Council member helpfully suggested that “if people would work for lower wages then current wages should remain as they are”. UCL is certainly the champion of the proletariat…

Meanwhile, Andrew Caddy was criticised for circulating an email containing misleading statements about the Living Wage motion. Caddy claimed that the Union’s average wage of £5.73 is 20% above the minimum wage – it is, but only for those aged 18-21. For staff aged 22 and over, the pay is barely above the legal minimum, and nowhere near the £7.60 of the Living Wage. Caddy also argued that the Union cannot afford to pay its staff a decent rate, which is odd considering both the £8.70 that LSE Union pays its staff, and the £5 million that UCL Union currently has in the bank.

By Alex Ashman