As reported by The Ubyssey, the Graduate Student Society’s executives have decided to close down Koerner’s Pub for the summer after losing over 200,000 dollars due to a long string of poor decisions. This marks a low point in the already questioned legitimacy of the GSS Council and its executive to make decisions on behalf of UBC students and everyone who benefited from Koerner’s activities, including its staff, which will be fired.
The GSS has continuously failed since 2008 to even bring together issues of its popular “The Graduate” magazine, and to communicate its relevance to graduate students and alumni. Basically, they provide services for renting space in the building, and entertainment to graduate students, and not much else. They also help the university to organize orientation ceremonies and their executives ‘sit-in’ during graduation ceremonies in order to ‘represent students’. However, a chronic problem of the past seems to be growing exponentially – an ever weaker communication strategy and the ultimate inability to consult with students and produce relevant work.
The executive is relinquished to a menial administrative task that actually detracts them from their studies. In addition, because graduate students are expected to undergo a lot of stress in order to conform to their study regime and graduate, they have no time to actually concentrate on the usually ineffective activities of an executive body which basically does as the university administration tells it for personal gain – a trend that has been perpetuated and accepted without any resistance from graduate students.
The problem is that graduate students are too busy to spend their time getting involved in the game played in council. The result is that those who are more personally invested in reaching out for some sort of authoritarian privilege find the motivation necessary for campaigning and getting people to elect them. Once, as the GSS services department was trying to publish a critical handbook that included satire and information, some members of the executive, fearing a university backlash that never came acted illegally to block the delivery of the books and were defeated in council after the story hit the press. That was back in the day when some excitement was expected from the GSS. As of now, we can be inspired to write only because of a ‘depressing’ fact – the closing down of Koerner’s pub, which is a major historical destination for professors, students, visiting lecturers, open-mic musicians, and those who used to enjoy its beautiful patio and atmosphere for a beer among friends after a long day at work.
Koerner’s always suffered from having either weak or authoritarian administrators in the past, and the GSS failed to provide proper security to keep people from ‘jumping the fence’ and a system for screening minors – the result was an accident that lead to their license being revoked. There were a host of appropriate solutions suggested, but because council itself is like a theater for egocentric posturing, people would oppose a good idea simply because it did not come from their ‘friend’. Moreover, disciplinary boundaries and the need to fill up council quickly at the expense valuing the expert advice of older councilors leads to a system where someone speaks out and their friends raise their arms – it is not about strong argumentation, but rather about picking a side quickly. The result is a flawed and largely irrelevant organization that takes student money and is clueless about what to do with it except wasting it by eating and drinking it away.
One of the most active councilors of the past suggested that the GSS be abolished because the fees students are paying are not turning out in their benefit and could be used better otherwise. It has been continuously noticed that executives have abused their share of committee food ordered ‘for free’ (on the students’ expense) from Koerner’s – it happens also because most people directly lower their heads and agree with anything a president may say, regardless of their incoherence and incompetence – a systemic problem that will very unlikely be properly addressed in the future.
The best advice seems to be ‘take care of your career, study and graduate, and ignore the GSS because it can take up your time – if you have interesting and creative ideas, you will suffer in trying to get them through the executive and the council, simply because their main directive is to make sure they please the bureaucrats of the administration and receive some sort of professional recognition for their conformity services. However, when they take away the pub that seems to be their only legitimate practical reason for existing, and do so by disrespecting and affronting CUPE and taking jobs away from students, one can just hope someone will try to ‘so something about it’. However, given the record of irrelevance and lip-service to the administration, the slowness of council, lack of experience, and the demands of graduate student life, the issue is likely to be resolved in the ‘traditional’ unsatisfying manner.
