The phenomenology of the Computer Science Course Union
Published on 2024-06-15
I'm involved in my school's computer science course union. If you're not familiar with the concept of a course union, ostensibly, they're supposed to provide certain services to students in a particular university program. For example, my university has a whole bunch of different course unions. We've got one for biochemistry (BCCU), chemistry (CCU), biology (BCU), microbiology (MBCU), cultural studies (CSCU—hey… we share an acronym!)… Lots of "bios" and "-ologies" and things of that nature. "Certain services" here is intentionally a little vague; no one really knows what we're supposed to do. Mostly we just act as more-well-funded interest groups on campus.
As course unions, however, we are expected to do a few very concrete things that differentiate us from regular student-union regulated clubs. Namely:
- Our leadership is elected to one-year terms in elections that regularly get <5% turnout
- All of our meetings are public by default, except for the few where we have an explicitly good reason to keep them private
- Our organization is governed by a constitution as well as bylaws passed by the leadership
- Every year, we're required to hold an annual general meeting with a quorum of at least 25 members.
Last year, only one of those things was true—namely, the first. We worked really hard to change that. In many ways, the CSCU was kind of in a league of its own in how informally it operated. It was much more like a regular student-led club than a course union. In fact, it started out as a club dedicated to organizing a hackathon, and that's most of what it's done since it was formally transformed into a course union. But, we were interested in making something more durable to leave behind, so we tried to turn the CSCU into something that met the minimum criteria of acceptability as a formal, ratified course union.
Our crowning achievement, in my humble opinion, was that we pulled off the first ever CSCU annual general meeting, where we passed the first ever CSCU constitution. And my god, let me tell you: it was horrible.
The key detail that I really need to emphasize here is that in the last election, 49 people voted. I'm still on the board of the CSCU this year because more than half of those 49 people said I should be. Considering computer science is one of our larger programs at my school, those numbers do not really tell me I have the faith of the electorate. This was a historic low, too; the year before, we got around 100 voters, so our turnout dropped by 50%. Though, when you're dealing with numbers this low it's hard to do any meaningful statistics.
Voting in the CSCU election takes about five minutes and you can do it from pretty much anywhere since it's all done online. Attending the AGM, however, is a lot more challenging. We need 25 CS students to take time out of their evening to vote on CSCU legislation. That's a much harder sell.
But we did it. By spending an astronomical amount of money on pizza and begging and pleading with every CS student we'd ever met, we managed to find twenty five people who'd attend. Most of this work was actually done during the time we'd intended to run the AGM, because initially, absolutely nobody outside the CSCU team showed up.
When we finally hit that 25 person count, we voted to start the meeting. All the motions were passed unanimously. The whole procedure took about twenty minutes once we got started. The constitution we'd been waiting to put into effect for one and a half years had finally been ratified. It was over.
While this was a massive (albeit depressing) success, there's one thing about that night that really got me. I couldn't escape the feeling that none of it was real. In a certain, cynical way, all procedures like this are a sort of performance, but that night, it wasn't clear to me who we were performing for.
One of the big challenges of our AGM was that due to a number of circumstances, we had to push it to fairly late in the year. If we didn't make a quorum, then we would have needed to reschedule it, lest we face the somewhat ambiguous consequences that range from not receiving funding in the future to not being able to reapply for the official student union rubber stamp in the fall. Another restriction was that the student union, very reasonably, requires that we give them at least a ten day's heads-up that we're running our AGM. The student union is expected to send one of their own board members to attend. They never called it an audit explicitly, but that's the impression I got. Every time we delayed the AGM by 10 days, we'd have an even harder time finding 25 people to attend. Since, for all intensive purposes, everyone who attended our AGM did so out of pity, the only real person we'd possibly have been performing for was that student union board member, but they were notably absent from our 25 in the audience of the lecture hall that night.
I'm not in a place to speculate why exactly they didn't show up, but their not being there fundamentally changed the nature of what we were trying to accomplish.
What is an organization, really?
In the most abstract sense, an organization is a group of people working together. Usually, these people are trying to accomplish some goal. This is where fancy documents come in handy: constitutions, mission statements, bylaws… Things we can circle back to. While it's important to be flexible enough to adapt to change (see: the way people approach the US constitution and the Bible), having these things at all gives us a psychological anchor for what it is we're doing in the first place. Without a constitution, we run a vibes-based shop. Things change with no particular direction. We continually recreate ourselves, leaving nothing to build on.
From our core documents spring rituals. In government, you have voting, parliament, question hour, and so on. In Christian church, you have Sunday mass. In a course union, you have meetings, AGMs, recurring events… All things that do little for the individual except reify and reinforce the existence of the organization in their mind. Rituals are what transform the organization from a description of ideas and procedures on paper into a real, lived experience. And that, I think, is what an organization is to me: it's a lived experience shared by its members.
I think that's part of why I've always liked the aesthetic of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is usually synonymous with cold, unfeeling institutional evil in the West, and sometimes it deserves that characterization, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Bureaucracy might be the price of complexity. When done poorly, it's a force of alienation. When done well, it makes complex systems possible. When people talk about "cutting the red tape," they're usually not talking about removing bureaucracy. Bureaucracy will be there whether or not the red tape is cut. Usually, they're talking about decentralizing the bureaucracy—dividing it up, and putting it under the management of many different organizations. When the interests of those organizations aren't aligned, you get sky-high energy bills and waterways full of sewage.
In this sense, bureaucracy is the lived experience of organization.
For one reason or another, more than half of the 49 voting members of the CSCU electorate decided to have me as their president this coming fall in what will almost certainly be my last term in course union politics. We'll see what hijinks we get up to this year. Hopefully we'll be able to carry this momentum forward and build something real.
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