The news this week that College did not charge first and second-year students the student centre levy would be comical if it were not completely maddening.
Consider the following:
Some 88 per cent of those who took to the polls in last year’s vote on the student centre levy supported the introduction of an annual €30 charge. College did not then charge students like they were supposed to.
Then, last month, students voted overwhelmingly against the introduction of supplemental exam fees. College then went and decided to introduce those fees anyway.
No, this isn’t upside-down land. But we do seemingly study at a university that hasn’t bothered to figure out how to charge students a fee they’re actually happy to pay, and instead one that truculently introduces an outrageously high fee that students really do not want.
If any of the officers of this college are wondering just where the potency of the protests of the past month came from, then they need look no further than the farce that is Trinity’s bumbling – and often insidious – bureaucracy.
Its continued failings, as this Editorial Board has pointed out time and time again, are infamous among students. When the College Board isn’t impetuously introducing fees, students are faced with inadequate online systems or delayed responses to queries from all rungs of the administrative ladder. Societies are confronted with systematic hurdles when it comes to trying to achieve their aims. Students return from Erasmus with a mewling paranoia, uncertain whether their foreign paperwork will be sufficient to prove they can rise with their year.
The delay in charging students this levy has forced Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union and the Central Societies Committee to apply for a loan from the College just to update student and society spaces. Meanwhile, a location for the new student centre has yet to be identified.
Administrative hiccups, of course, are not signs of moral turpitude. But the sum total of Trinity’s bumbledom could only leave you with the impression that students are not this university’s priority.
