Photo: Hendrik Kueck

For various reasons, I got interested in what was happening at the local institutions of higher education. This is easier to find out at some places than others. Because I am lazy, I did the easy places. Good gossip from other schools may be addressed to the comments.

The easy places? UBC (crisis among the Young Liberals), SFU (I’m not sure what the IBT is, but it must be important), Douglas College (the DCSU has a little fiscal catching up to do), and Langara (shocker: the relationship between the student society executive and its employees is strained).

UBC: The UBC Young Liberals have made a big mess of themselves. The story got so sordid that Maclean’s blogger Paul Wells noted it.

The basic problem is about membership lists, but it’s really a general power struggle that speaks to the shoddy ways that Liberals in general have been handling their organization.

SFU: The IBT deal passed Senate. No, that shouldn’t have made sense to you. The precis? IBT is a private company, and SFU is contracting with them to attract more international students. This is controversial, apparently, because international students are a profit centre, and that’s bad.

What students should be concerned about is that the SFU pub (suggested slogan: “unprofitable for over a decade!”) may close during the Summer. You read that right, by the way: the organization that has a virtual monopoly on liquor sales at SFU can’t make money, and hasn’t for years. If you go to SFU, your student society fees subsidize the pub.

Douglas College: The student paper has been clumsy about covering this issue, but the short version is that a few months ago the college administration declined to give the Douglas College Students’ Union their usual student fees because the DCSU was three years behind on its financial audits. The campus has also been subjected to a low-key, weeks-long guerilla postering campaign asking the DCSU where the Performing Arts Students’ fund is. I have no idea what the specifics of that campaign are about.

Langara: The journalism school’s paper reports on the rather bizarre relationship (sorry, that link is probably impermanent) between the Langara Students’ Union, their unionized employees and the LSU executive. Note that regular Langara students are not mentioned in the entire article, though the SFU student body is. Note also that in my experience, you could probably write that article about most higher-education student societies.

And at most regional campuses, the student election campaigns are about to start. We now return to our normal coverage of the three Cs: Canucks, churros, cherry blossoms.