Disaffiliation

CUSU provides many invaluable services to the students of Christ’s and our continued affiliation is hugely important for the continued success of CCSU. To make this more explicit below is a summary of some of the key examples of what you would lose and what the JCR would lose if we disaffiliated, how disaffiliation affects CUSU, and finally some details about the way CUSU spends their money to show what we are getting.

How members of CCSU would suffer:

• CCSU would no longer be affiliated to NUS and as such we would no longer be entitled to NUS discount cards.

How the JCR exec would suffer:

• Welfare, Women’s and LBGT would all lose the training provided by CUSU. This would be a great loss, the welfare training, for example, was extremely useful and provided a forum for exchange of ideas between various welfare officers, whilst also imparting the knowledge required to provide effective support within college.
• The links to other colleges which provide ideas, experience and support to the JCR would be lost. This would affect hugely diverse areas, from ents to rent negotiations.
• Christ’s access campaign would be damaged severely with no CUSU support, and the shadowing scheme would stop within Christ’s.

CUSU and Disaffiliation:

• CUSU gains a large portion of its funding from affiliation fees. Without these services would have to be cut. This could translate to students not getting the support they need, and the pulling of CUSU ents.
• CUSU sabbaticals could not suffer a pay cut realistically as they already are some of the lowest paid sabbaticals out of all universities in the UK.
• Autonomous campaigns are appealing for more sabbaticals or support staff members to aid their campaigns. By reducing funding this makes this even less likely to occur.

Finally...

If when it comes down to it you get more than £5 worth of discounts over a year from your NUS card, or you are willing to help subsidise individual student support that you may well need at some point, or you enjoy CUSU ents so much you are willing to subsidise them £5 a year then you are getting your money’s worth. There are many other ways in which you are gaining from CUSU and I do not seriously believe that we can argue that each student gains less than £5 a year from CUSU.