Tallie, Ben and Elle have all just been in touch to let me know that The NUS Governance review has been defeated by a very, very narrow margin - the review needed 717 votes to be passed, but only received a (scarily-close) 692.

While I am a lot less opinionated on matters of student governance than some of my colleagues - a conscious decision to avoid a heart attack before 30 - I have to say I wholeheartedly disagree with the way in which bluster, rhetoric and speculation have been used as the main selling points of a "reform" process whose single biggest change appeared to be the abolition of the NUS Conference which, for all its faults, has served for many years as a vital proving ground for policy review and direction-setting by democratic consensus.

What happens next remains to be seen, but I sincerely hope any similar attempts to review and restructure the NUS are carried out with a significant amount more openness, honesty, and consultation with the students' unions the NUS is responsible (and duty-bound) to represent.

(As always, anything here is my tuppence-worth and not the views of the Union as a whole, or of anyone apart from myself!)

That's the end of elections for another year, and the last year I'll be involved in the Union. It's been a helluva fortnight, with a larger UPSU Media presence than ever before.

For the first year ever, we've had photographers and videographers (is that the right term?) running around at pretty much every elections-related event, a massive amount of visual media, a great deal of coverage in Pugwash News, not to mention Pure FM's involvement in interviewing the candidates live on air and broadcasting the hustings candidates' question time events in the evenings last week.

I'm amazingly proud and grateful to all of our student volunteers for all their work in the last few weeks - we have, for the first time, a lot of video footage (and there's more to come, which will be used as teaser-material for next year I hope), and there's been an almost constant stream of photos and updates going online from elections-related events.

(You can check out the elections photos, videos, and Pure FM podcasts, and our elections minisite - the largest ever at 75 pages - here).

This year, we've seen roughly a 15% rise in voter turnout despite the poor weather and the end of term (who doesn't know at least one friend who went home half way through this week suffering from parental withdrawal symptoms? ;o) and, although candidate numbers were the same as last year (fourteen candidates), the distribution among positions has been almost diametrically opposed, with last year's least-contested positions seeing the largest numbers of candidates this year.

A couple of people have observed that this year's line-up has been a very marked "pitched battle" between sports clubs and societies and, while I can't comment on how accurate that statement is - it is, after all, a pretty narrow-focused assessment of a candidate to say that they're a "sporto" or "society person" (or "soco"?) - the figures do seem to show that the candidates who received the most votes in each position are all well-known fac...

Just a quick question - have I scared everyone off from running for my position or something?

There's only one candidate for Media & Publications Officer ("MAPO") this year - last year there were 4, and the year before that there were two...

What gives?!  I'm confused...

I read today on the Epigram's website - the newspaper of Bristol students' union - that the students' union feels they are facing a very real and present danger of their University taking over their Union.

If you're at all interested in students' unions, and their right to remain independent of - and to challenge - their parent institutions, I urge you to read these stories:

• Epigram: Senior University staff plot to seize Students' Union independence
• Epigram: Not on my watch, says Webb on Union take-over
  
• Epigram: New precedent for Union control

I wish them all the best in their struggle. This is a topic I have no doubt I'll be returning to in a short while...

/al - working late. No surprises there then :o)

If you're in the market for something interesting to read, you could definitely do worse than take a look at University College London SU's PI Magazine, which has a fascinating piece by one of its student journalists on their take on student "apathy" at their Union. The article makes some very interesting, very eloquent points which apply, I suspect, to a vast majority of the students' unions across the country.

Go read it now :o)