Notes for Freshers

In the near future, a Special General Meeting of the Students' Association will be held to adopt, amend and wrangle over the new draft constitution. The present constitution has been amended so many times in the last forty years that it now consists mainly of amendments; it is large and cumbersome and it is very difficult for the uninitiated to put a finger on a required section. The new constitution will be simpler and it is hoped that it will be made available in printed booklet form, so that the provision it contains that it should be available to any member at a small charge can be more easily observed.

It is profitable at this juncture to review some of the basic rules of the constitution. There is one which seems to us to be well overdue for revision, and that is the rule which excludes freshmen students from voting at any meeting of the Association until after the Annual General Meeting. The introduction to this rule which most freshmen who are interested in the affairs of the student body receive is a blunt statement from the Chairman at the meeting of some Club or Society that "Fresher's can't vote." This exclusion from voting in the first six months of the academic year is a great enough imposition when it is considered that there is no other organisation in which the payment of the membership fee does not entitle the payee to vote; but this six months exclusion means that students have no say in the election of the executive which administers their affairs for the next year; this is virtually disfranchisement for one and a half years, with the only safeguard that a subsequent General Meeting can demand the resignation of the Executive.

It will be argued that the enfranchisement of freshmen would mean that many of the voters will have very little knowledge of the affairs of the association. This argument hardly holds water when it is considered that only about a quarter of those students entitled to vote do so, and the restriction on freshmen means that there is little incentive for them to take such an interest in their first year. Giving them the vote would at least encourage them to attend meetings and join clubs.