The bid of students seeking to establish a Classical Liberal Society in Trinity will face one major hurdle: the Central Societies’ Committee’s (CSC) ban on societies taking political stances.
While the society first emerged as a chapter of Students for Liberty, a global libertarian organisation, the students behind the proposed Classic Liberal Society say that the society would not be a political movement and that it would not advocate specific policy. But because of the many ambiguities in the CSC’s policy, this is unlikely enough to get the society the green light.
Last year, DUGES’s (Dublin University Gender Equality Society) attempt to change its name to “Fem Soc” caused a stir. The move was, rather controversially, disallowed by the CSC, with then-secretary Fiona May saying that it would be unconstitutional for a society’s name to include the world “feminist” due to its political nature. But, as this Editorial Board noted at the time, the distinction between the terms “gender equality” and “feminist” are hazy at best, and surely if the rules were as rigid as the CSC makes out, a gender equality society should never have been approved in the first place.
The case of DUGES is just one of many. It’s obvious that societies like Trinity Environmental Society are, in many ways, deeply political – campaigning as they do for certain causes. To complicate matters further, several overtly political societies do exist on campus, though they are all linked directly to an external political party, with many of them having been grandfathered in from the pre-CSC era.
It makes sense that the CSC doesn’t want to wade too deeply into politics. As it argues, that’s Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union’s (TCDSU) job. But considering the likelihood that it’s going to deny official status to a society seeking to promote free speech on campus, its variegated approach to applying this stance, something that was previously little more than a curiosity, is now verging on the problematic.
