Throughout my time as an undergraduate I participated in multiple work and volunteering opportunities, as well as attending a number of careers-related workshops. I then filled out a skills bank, identifying and describing instances in which I had embodied a number of positive characteristics during these activities, before completing a mock video interview and submitting a CV.

What did I do wrong?
Your whole style of writing.

In the previous instalment of this two-parter I laid out the details (as fully and as neutrally as I could) of my run-in with some elements of the Lancaster University LGBTQ+ Assocation back in my second year. In this instalment I will analyse why things happened as they did (and, most importantly, how my own actions fed into them) with a critical comb. Could it all have been avoided? Do I think, in retrospect, there may have been some substance to their criticisms? Did I handle things as well as I could have?

Let’s find out.

The article ¶

I’ll start by looking at the spark that lit the bonfire: my article for The Tab Lancaster. What was my intention when writing the article? I think I had a couple:

1. to draw attention to the Free Speech University Rankings, and explain them to a widely unfamiliar audience;
2. to emphasis Lancaster’s specific ranking and explain the methodology by which it had been granted; and
3. to tie this in with my own experience at Lancaster and explain whether it supported or challenged the ranking.

And how well did I do? Not very well at all in the first and second cases, and I overdid it on the third. Allow me here to attempt to rectify that imbalance.

In the article, I explain that the rankings divide universities in the UK into green, amber or red, with brief explanations of what each of those categories supposedly represents. I also add that the ranking is determined by an average of the ranking given to both the university itself, and to its pet SU. In a roughly 600-word article, these are all of what I devoted to explaining the central subject.

I do not mention the issues with the methodology used to produce the rankings, such as the fact that all policies are gleaned from publicly-available documents which may or may not (more likely the latter, in my experience) be up-to-date. spiked do not appear to contact universities or students’ unions for comment, and no notice is apparently paid to the actual enforcement of the offending policies. For example, though no platform policies may be on the books, are they actually being used to stifle speech?¹ I also neglected to disclose that the rankings are a nakedly ideological effort by publication with an outspoken stance on free speech.

How about the coverage of Lancaster University’s place? I mention that we were awarded red, and put it in the context of what some of our rival² institutions achieved. I then detail the specific policies of ours that spiked take umbrage at. I link to the policies in question, but I, too, fail to do any further research into how they are actually being implemented in practice. Where in the article did I contact the Students’ Union for comment? Where are the Lancaster University students whose opinions I have elicited? Nowhere.

The remaining 230-odd words were the cause of all the trouble and looking at it now, I can see where the misperception has arisen. By closing one paragraph with the statement that …we don’t half have a militant lot in our beloved SU before opening the next with …their most recent campaign…, I created an unintended segue that, since the Gender Grammar campaign was an LGBTQ+ Association campaign and thus the their could be quite reasonably interpreted as insinuating that the Association were part of the militant lot, whereas I only meant to say that they were part of the SU. I should have made the they less ambiguous, better separating the two paragraphs’ subjects—the subtleties of using they will come up again later.

I then go on to make an embarrassingly cliché appeal to Orwell and continue to criticise the Gender Grammar poster. My criticisms are made partly tongue-in-cheek,³ but the point remains that they detract from the very argument I had originally been trying to make. The entire paragraph after the photograph of the poster could be excised and the article would be no worse-off for it. In the penultimate paragraph I do finally return to the point I had been trying to make with the poster, an argumentum ad absurdum to demonstrate the …can of worms… that is regulation of speech, but by this point it’s too late: the preceding paragraph has already done its damage.

After I have so muddied my actual argument, I will have produced one of two articles in the mind of the reader, depending on their personal views. Either it’s an article by an insecure cis white male who is scared by a few posters challenging my gender norms, or it’s a call to arms against the SJW invasion of campuses. At this point, the remaining two paragraphs serve only to reinforce whichever article the reader thinks they are reading, and not the one I thought I was writing.

The public letter ¶

Yeah, the public letter probably wasn’t the best idea. Whilst I don’t believe anything in the letter was necessarily wrong, it probably didn’t need to be said in the form of a public letter. I don’t think I contacted the CCO: LGBTQ+ prior to releasing my letter to them, and that was certainly a mistake on my part. Where we could have had an in-person discussion⁴ and resolved our issues—their concerns about my views, my issues with their handling of the matter—I instead presumed they would enjoy a public discussion/verbal punch-up as much as I would.

Whilst I still believe that that is a reasonable assumption to make of someone who has chosen to run for a publicly-accountable position within a representative body such as a students’ union, I still feel I should have made private contact beforehand. True, I was perhaps not wholly unjustified in considering them to have drawn first blood in complaining to the Pendle JCR Exec. without attempting to contact me first, but it all comes back to the old adage of going high even when one’s opponents go low. Worst case scenario they may have simply ignored my entreaties, in which case I could have still decided to go public and would have had more of a leg to stand on in doing so.

The counter-complaint ¶

My counter-complaint was 100 % indignance-motivated counter-dickery. I think I probably realised that, even at the time.

Conclusion ¶

Looking back, the whole affair is a prime example of the harmfulness of any conflict in which all parties feel aggrieved and are keen to escalate matters, and none attempt to de-escalate. The initial article allowed itself to get sidetracked from the point it was originally making, which gave rise to not-unreasonable misinterpretations. It is thus not unreasonable for a group who, based on one such understandable misinterpretation, feel attacked to attempt to fight back, particularly after presumably putting their time and effort into an event that they feel passionate about. I believe that their attempts to apply pressure via indirect means, rather than by contacting me directly with their concerns, were a bad idea, but I can empathise with them in thinking that contacting me would probably be unproductive—I cannot guarantee either that, at the time, that it would not have been.

I viewed this as an underhanded attack on me, and responded in kind. I do not think ignoring the issue was an option—recall that even before making their official complaint they were accusing me (and Pendle College) of hate speech, which is both reputationally damaging and, in England & Wales, potentially even a matter for police interest. However necessary some kind of response may have been, it should certainly have taken a different form to the one it did. I should have taken the high road and contacted the Association and/or CCO; I certainly had enough intermediary contacts who would have helped with such rapprochement. Instead, we countered each other with escalation upon escalation until I found myself facing down financial- or union membership-targeted sanctions. I was acquitted, but things could have gone quite differently.⁵

Whereas, at the time, I considered my acquittal a victory, I now consider the fact that it ever reached such a point an overall failure.

Footnotes ¶

1. increase readership of the Witch; and
2. update the College websites.

These promises usually last until the dust has settled on voting and a new officer has been chosen to spend the year failing to achieve everything they set out to do.

So I did everything I promised to do, because I’m great like that.

Screenshot by author

Who’s what for? ¶

The first issue was what to do with Pendle College’s two websites. The College website at lancaster.ac.uk/colleges/pendle was considered the SCR’s site, and the one at pendle.lusu.co.uk the JCR’s. This makes some sort of instinctive sense — the JCR is a body within the LUSU whereas the SCR is a University construct, so it would make sense that their website hosting would be split thus.

However, in practice it wasn’t ideal. Whilst authorship may have been clear, there was no such delineation in audience. Information would be present on one site and not the other, or duplicated across both of them, with little rhyme or reason. For example, the page of information on the annual College Awards for third-year students was only present on the SCR page.

In light of the interlinked nature of the JCR and SCR, the semantics of the hosting of each and (especially importantly) the relative ranking of both for an online search of Pendle College, the only solution was to divide one site into a current students site and the other into an everyone else site. pendle.lusu.co.uk would be the former as LUSU would only hold relevance for current students, whilst lancaster.ac.uk/colleges/pendle would be the latter as it is the earlier hit for an online search, as well as non-students being more likely to search for the site via the Lancaster University website.

I used the wonderful draw.io to create sitemaps of both sites. After collecting the leaves from each graph, pendle.lusu.co.uk \( \cup \) lancaster.ac.uk/colleges/pendle produced the complete set of all pages that anyone, over the years, had considered likely to be of worth to someone, sans duplicates. Then I divvied them up into two sets. There were a couple that were arguably relevant to the audiences of both sites (e.g. Merchandise, which would be of interest to both current students and alumni), so I left these aside for the time being.

pendle.lusu.co.uk ¶

Screenshot by author

The first to tackle was the LUSU-hosted site, since it was technically the only one actually in my remit as Media & Comms Officer. I logged into the WordPress backend and like an archaeologist unearthing an ancient lost city could see the remains of hundreds of years’ worth of human activity, all amounting to nought. Countless Pages, created by countless past Media & Comms Officers, and all abandoned with nary a speck of content on them. Contact addresses that still led to Officers over half a decade gone. Photos of students for whom uni is now but a distant and hazy memory.

It all went in the bin.

Screenshot by author

The few that had actual content on had it salvaged beforehand, but many were too far gone to be saved and would have to be rewritten. After this great purge, I stuck on a couple of lorem ipsum Posts and Pages and got to work on redesigning the layout. Which is where I discovered Thesis.

All the LUSU college sites used Thesis. Now, I don’t know if it’s Thesis’ fault, or if there was some LUSU meddling that left it the state it was, but restrictive hardly does it justice. For a suite that purports to be all about empowering the designer, it was an ordeal to do anything more than change the colour scheme of the website (slightly). Considering the site features such classic infomercial lines as There’s a dirty little secret other theme companies don’t want you to know, I’m inclined to not cut it too much slack.

One email to LUSU IT Support confirmed what I’d also been worried about: whenever Thesis was bought (I suspect around 2011, judging by the publication date of this review), the login needed to access any form of support or documentation wasn’t deemed worth retaining for future use.

Basically, LUSU had lumped me with a $197 white elephant. And disabled the Add New button on the Themes page. I had clearly hit against the same wall that stopped all my predecessors, and after hours of fruitless work was about ready to give up in kind.

But wait, what’s this? They left in Twenty Fourteen? Lovely, customisable Twenty Fourteen?

Screenshot by author

If at first you don’t succeed, break everything and build on the rubble.

With Thesis ditched, I spent hours playing with all the settings offered by Twenty Fourteen, tweaking the site to be just how I wanted it. The end result, I think, is something of a large step up:

Screenshot by author

Obviously, it would have been better to be able to customise more in-depth, for example getting the content to stretch right across the screen rather than leaving that unsightly blank gap on the right half of the page, but an improvement is an improvement.

To finish off, I went through my set of Pages that I’d assigned to this site and added them in one-by-one. Most of the text had to be completely rewritten, so it’s a good thing chatting shit is one of my many skills.

One quickly-made trailer and post on the Pendle College Facebook page later and it was done. I even got a shoutout from the LUSU Twitter account:

New @PendleCollege website is looks pretty good! Well done #TeamPendle Take a look https://t.co/SIqDMInDZM pic.twitter.com/yjlCDefBtO

— Lancaster Uni SU (@LancasterSU) February 10, 2016

lancaster.ac.uk/colleges/pendle ¶

With what I’d learned on pendle.lusu.co.uk, this was less of a challenge. It didn’t use Thesis, just some ancient terrible Theme called Productz. Aware that using Twenty Fourteen again would yield two very similar-looking websites, I took advantage of the fact that the Add New button wasn’t disabled here and downloaded Sydney. Hours of tweaking later, and we had a fully respectable new site.

It was time again to add the Posts and Pages, and when that was finished, figure out what to do with the third set of pages. Eventually, I settled on having pages like Merchandise on pendle.lusu.co.uk, with links in the navbar of lancaster.ac.uk/colleges/pendle to them — this seemed the best compromise to avoid redundancy, which is a surefire way of leading to information decay and inconsistency.

Screenshot by author

One slip of a mention into an end-of-year post later, and I was done.

Then LUSU shat the bed ¶

As I sat, resting on my laurels, I began to hear disconcerting things through societies on whose execs I sat. LUSU were bringing in some sort of new digital system, and as a consequence all societies were being subsumed into pages within it. I inquired. What I found horrified me to my core.

It was something called NUS Digital. NUS. I shuddered: stop the ride, I want to get off.

Screenshot by author

I’ve talked about the NUS in the past, but now they had moved out of just ludicrous student politicking and onto my turf. I remained optimistic, however. Maybe it’ll be good, I thought to myself. One day, I’ll learn to stop giving the NUS even the slightest modicum of credit.

Okay, so it’s a CMS only its mother could love, thought I. But maybe the colleges, being bigger than societies, will get to keep their sites. SCAN does. Again, my optimism was misplaced.

I may one day write a more about my issues with NUS Digital and their UnionCloud service, but for the time being I just had to salvage what I could of the site before it was taken down. Rushing back from T in the Park, with nary a pause to retrieve what was left of my legs from the all-covering muck, I exported everything and imported it into lancaster.ac.uk/colleges/pendle. A bit of fine-tuning and messing about and I had everything sitting smoothly in its new home — lancaster.ac.uk/colleges/pendle was now the home of everything Pendle, for everyone, be they a student prospective, current or past.

Now the uni’s going to shit the bed ¶

I know that all Principals have been approached by the University about College websites coming into line with departmental ones…there seems to be a lot going on about that at the moment. Tell me about it, College Administrator.

I got more information from the Principal. The central University system is currently developing a more corporate Content Management System for all colleges, to be rolled out more or less immediately. Fair enough, it is the University exercising its right to market itself in the way it determines is best globally, but it’s still a bit like adopting a kid and then having them emancipated. After you’ve paid for college.

We were all of us cogs in a great machine which sometimes rolled forward, nobody knew where, sometimes backwards, nobody knew why.

Alas, forces greater than myself had had their say and if The Wire taught me anything, it’s that the individual is powerless in the face of an establishment that has made up its mind. I exported everything from lancaster.ac.uk/colleges/pendle just in case and wrote this up so that, when the last traces of both sites have been expunged, there will be some evidence of their brief existence.

However, optimism ¶

I wonder how I can break UnionCloud to look nice.