USI President Resigns

by Godot Sat Oct 13, 2007 21:54

Won't the delegations from SUs around the country who voted for this guy simply vote in another right-wing eejit? The problem isn't the president of USI, it's the lack of organised activity among students at a grassroots level.

by . Sat Oct 13, 2007 23:39

The person who wrote this article called themselves "USIOB", likely standing for USI Officer Board. This is not a statement from USI's officer board, i know that for a fact so this person is lying about who they are.

by Graduate Sun Oct 14, 2007 00:49

Don't know anything about the current kerfuffle, but in the late 1960s through the 'seventies USI was a stomping ground for a couple of people who later became prominent in SFWP.

The big clever move was in the mid-sixties when USI Travel was formed and became a big moneyspinner by selling lots of cheap flight and train tickets. Students could globetrot on the cheap. Lots flew to Amerikay, did summer jobs, then saw America on Greyhound bus trips.

Taking a year off degree studies to be president of USI brought a salary and useful work experience to put on the personal CV - good for entry to glam career areas, RTE included. Would be interesting if a researcher could track each USI president since mid-sixties and see where their career and/or political trajectory led.

Small footnote: Vincent Browne cut his teeth in a national current affairs monthly that received financial help from USI (anybody remember the title? It had a famous cover after the Battle of the Bogside in 1969 with the banner headline NO BOTTLES NO RIGHTS. The mag folded some months after Browne paid lots of lolly for the right to print grim photos of the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam. Soon after he went on to found Magill, with money from different sources. Browne's juvenile enthusiasm was for the FG Young Tigers, never for SFWP.

Magill mag carried articles on the stickies in the eighties in which the USI dimension to WP influence was mentioned.

by Graduate Sun Oct 14, 2007 10:25

Just remembered the title of the mag Vincent Browne cut his teeth on - Nusight. It was a lively read until it folded.

by Blah Girl Sun Oct 14, 2007 13:19

Well so Richie and Steve are gone to be replaced by Hamid and some other careerist, nothing changes in USI. They will continue to slowly move forward and do nothing on issues that directly effect students in this country.

USI is like the Titanic, no point in rearranging the deck chairs

by old hack Sun Oct 14, 2007 19:52

USI is just a reflection of what is happening on the ground with SUs. If USI is waisting time on infighting than it is just a reflection on what is happening in colleges. Remeber the real exec of USI is the National Council which every member college president attends and votes. If USI is not working SUs on the ground are not working, that is the real worry!

by Turps Mon Oct 15, 2007 10:28

Is that what you mean? Pure aggro for its own sake is mindless and amounts to a superior attitude to everyday pedestrian campaigning tactics such as meetings, letters to the press and individuals of influence, legal action and artistic/literary satire etc.
Some agit-proppers have psychological suppressed traumatic childhood experiences they need to get out of their systems. Other individuals have no patience, and no sense of change being a piecemeal process because human personality and accumulated social attitudes are so complicated i.e. humanity is not entirely pliable to scientific analysis and reconstruction. Scientific social theorists tried it out in the Soviet Union, North Korea and a few other places and it didn't work. One Marxist ruler who understood things that other rulers underestimated was Tito of Yugoslavia. He knew that religious, ethnic and language differences ultimately were stronger than class differences, and he devised a complicated federal system to deal with it. It lasted as long as he was alive, but then the ultra nationalists like Milosevitch pulled it asunder with religious and ethnic hate mongering leading to genocide. Left wing and right wing differences today post-marxism might be along the lines of culture. But who knows? Right/Left just might not explain the complexity of our world.