Nowadays, student co-governance is in a weird position. Student representation is declining and we are seeing fewer and fewer parties represented in each faculty council. University policy is being pushed top-down and many students feel like their hands are tied. Yet debates persist over whether student union representatives should hold seats in faculty councils. Unions are often dismissed as redundant in faculty-level debate. However, this perspective ignores the structural parallels between student unions and trade unions, such as AOb or FNV, which are often also represented in faculty councils, playing a crucial factor in determining, shaping and enforcing workers’ rights. Just like trade unions, student unions provide an organized, collective channel for members to influence decisions that directly impact their environment. They can play a key role to prevent deadlocks. Here are 5 reasons why union representation strengthens student governance, parallel to trade union representation.
1. Advocacy and Accountability
Executives hold institutional authority, while individual students often lack leverage to challenge unpopular policies. Student unions provide a formal democratic structure that ensures representatives are held accountable to its members. Unions organize these student voices into a collective force across multiple faculties or even multiple institutions, creating a counterweight to top-down decision-making. This is similar to how trade unions negotiate contracts: uniting and organizing workers across departments or sectors, establishing more leverage in collective bargaining. Student union representatives can achieve similar leverage with presence in the faculty council. On a faculty-level, they are able to identify the relation to institution-wide or national trends, and above all are capable of advocating or escalating on institutional, local or national levels.
2. Training and Support
Unions train students in governance, negotiation, and policy design. For example, the GSb offers the tools and knowledge to help union members articulate student concerns effectively in meetings. This mirrors trade unions’ role in empowering workers to engage with management. Over time, this creates a collective of trained and informed advocates who understand institutional systems, strengthening the governance system for future representatives.
3. Consistency and Knowledge
Student unions maintain continuity across factions and across academic years, preserving and sharing institutional and political knowledge. They provide continuity, by being able to hold executives accountable across multiple terms. But they can also agendize broader issues present across multiple faculties. Trade unions excel at this: they don’t abandon company reforms after leadership changes and share knowledge across departments. Unions ensure short-term councils don’t erase long-term student interests, and can facilitate multi-year initiatives, like degree reforms or curriculum changes.
4. Holistic Perspective
Unions also advocate for broad issues that transcend individual faculties, such in the case with the reforms at the Faculty of Arts, where the faculty board pushes measures as a complacent response to planned austerity measures. Furthermore, students converging on broader issues, such as in the lead-up to the Velvet Revolution, prove how organized student movements can drive systemic change, from mere curriculum adjustments to complete democratic reforms. By contrast, faculty-specific parties may prioritize niche departmental concerns, not agendizing broader student issues or tendencies present on institutional and even national level.
5. Preventing Tokenism
Without unions, student representation potentially risks becoming symbolic. A single student faction can be ignored or outvoted; a union-backed bloc ensures students aren’t merely “consulted,” but act as major stakeholders. Student unions are able to organize members and other faculty factions alongside their elected union representatives. Trade unions don’t just want a seat on a company board, they fight for enforceable agreements. Similarly, student unions demand binding commitments, turning performative inclusion into real change.
Democratic Empowerment
Multiple factions empower democracy by broadening the spectrum of political voices, ensuring that broad and diverse viewpoints are integrated into decision and policymaking. This inclusivity not only prevents a concentration of power, as seen in a single-party system, but it also moves parties to negotiate and collaborate, creating more balanced and innovative policies. Ultimately, this dynamic pluralism improves student engagement, empowering the democratic process with transparency and engaging governance.
Conclusion
The decline of meaningful student co-governance demands urgent rethinking of how we structure student governance in academia. Dismissing student unions as redundant ignores their capacity to amplify student voices with similar strength and organization that trade unions bring to workers’ rights. Student union presence in faculty councils can turn fragmented, symbolic participation into an actual system of accountability and collaboration.
Just as trade unions have shaped workplace democracy, student unions can rebalance the power dynamics in academia, ensuring decisions reflect collective needs rather than top-down mandates. Union representation in faculty councils is not only practical, it is democratic. A pluralistic governance model with union member representation is the key to governance transparency, policy balance, and student engagement. To strengthen student co-governance, unions should not be approached as outsiders, but as essential partners in establishing systemic change. Student unions empower democracy, so they can empower students to reclaim their rightful seat at the table.
