UKH

The Collegiate Council of the University of London are meeting this Thursday (tomorrow!) to vote on the dissolution of UoL student clubs and societies, including the University of London Mountaineering Club!

Founded in 1945, ULMC is one of the oldest student mountaineering clubs in London, and to this day has a reputation for safely providing access to climbing and mountaineering activities to students from across all University of London member institutions and from a diverse range of backgrounds. In particular, we are recognised as one of the few London-based student clubs to regularly participate in trad climbing and alpine climbing. ULMC is currently under imminent threat of dissolution from our University. For more information about the club and our rich history, see this document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EtPMY1H_8mfOpbzAy3rtt5hM0x4IajZc/view?usp=...

How can you help:

1. Sign and share this petition, stating why you believe ULMC should not be dissolved: http://chng.it/22VdLmVj8d

2. If you are a member of or an alumnus of a University of London Institute, you can also contact your Student Union and let them know that you oppose these changes, as we are hoping to enlist the support of as many MI’s as possible. A draft letter can be found below and contact information for the relevant Collegiate Council representatives can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tkjtu5uscwb7gxr/List%20of%20Members%20of%20the%20...

3. Spread the word! Share this article to enlist the help of as many people as possible, especially if you have influential connections!

4. If you or your organisation are influential in any way, consider writing to the Chair of the Collegiate Council, Professor Wendy Thompson, stating your support for the UoL clubs and ULMC. 

Draft letter/email to Member Institute:
Dear [Head of Member Institution / Representative on Collegiate Council] I am writing to you regarding a proposal due to be discussed at Thursday's meeting of the University of London Collegiate Council, at which I understand you will represent [Member Institution]. This proposal involves the potential cessation of Student Central Clubs and Societies. As a student / alumnus of [Member Institution], I would like to express my concern for this proposal and ask that you seriously consider its implications. Representatives from clubs and societies have written a joint open letter to address this and I wish to lend my support on the matter. [Insert personal experience here on importance of club/society - if applicable] I am among many others who have benefited from [Member Institution]’s connection to UoL and the existence of UoL's Clubs and Societies. I implore you to dismiss this proposal and continue to support the survival of these clubs and societies, many of them decades old and full of tradition. Yours sincerely, [name]

Why do they want to dissolve the clubs and societies?

more info at https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/rock_talk/please_help_save_a_climbing_clu...

As has been pointed out, this is a duplicate topic (apologies, I didn't realise someone else from the club had already posted this) but I will leave it up for now as there are details in this post not mentioned in the other!

Student Central have not been clear about why they want to dissolve the clubs and societies, but my understanding is that it is financially motivated. They are looking to save themselves some cash and have jumped to the conclusion that this is the best way to do so, without regard for the long history of many of these clubs and their contributions to their sporting communities.

That's absolutely OK, I think

In response to a comment made on the other thread which was not addressed before it was archived:

While it is true that many UoL institutions have their own clubs and societies, this is certainly not true of all of them. Many of the smaller institutions do not have sufficient numbers of students to support any extra-curriciular clubs and societies, so the Student Central clubs and societies are the only ones these students have access too. Examples of such institutions would be the Institute of Cancer Research, the Courtauld Institute, the Royal Academy of Music, SOAS, the list goes on.

Additionally, ULMC has over the last few years attracted climbers from other UoL mountaineering clubs such as the UCL, King's, Queen Mary and LSE mountaineering clubs, who wanted to pursue more trad climbing and/or alpine and winter climbing, as ULMC is better equipped to facilitate these disciplines safely and more regularly participates in them than the majority of other UoL student clubs. 

EDIT: the Collegiate Council meeting has been pushed back until the morning of the 3rd of July, so keep signing the petition until then!

Re the other thread: > robhorton16:00 Wed The University of London is a federal university - the constituent institutions all have their own clubs & societies so students would still have access to those. It probably makes sense for some things to be done at the UoL level though - most individual institution clubs would struggle to keep a hut going for example.  I would be interested to hear what's actually behind this - I think some of the institutions are in a pretty dire financial situation. <

As Rob Horton says the University of London is more like a collection of Universities which run their own courses and societies. Its quite unlike the Oxford and Cambridge college system. In fact at least one major "college", Imperial College, has become independent since I was a student. My first climbing at university was with ULMC: a well organized coach meet from London to the Caseg Fraith University of London hut. However after that I did all my climbing with my college climbing club which was well outside London. I did attend some mountaineering lectures at Senate House which were organized by ULMC.

It would be sad to see the club's demise but please can you give more information of the current value, activities and costs to the university of ULMC? I imagine any ULMC meets would be of more value to centrally located colleges but also that most of the climbing is organized by individual colleges anyway. How are the two university huts funded and run, I think the Graduate MC plays a major role here?

  Edit.  Apologies. You have answered much of this while I was typing.

That's quite alright! 

I cannot directly answer the question about finances as I am not involved in this aspect of the club management. I believe it does acquire a fairly significant amount of funds from the university, which is spent mostly on equipment, training and organising trips for it's members.

I think that part of the problem is that the larger institutions like UCL are largely responsible for funding Student Central, yet benefit the least from it's existence due to them having the money and a large enough student body to fund and run their own sports clubs and societies, so Student Central is under pressure to cut down on it's costs due to this. 

With regard to the huts, they are held in trust for us by volunteers from the University of London Graduate Mountaineering Club. We are trying to establish what the exact repercussions of this would be for the huts, but it is unlikely it would lead to their closure, as in the event of the failure of ULMC, beneficiary status of the trust defaults to ULGMC. But there are legal complications with this that have not yet been fully ironed out, and I personally understand exactly none of it, so can't really answer the question fully. Sorry! 

Annual accounts below. Like all UK Universities they are being hit by a 'perfect storm' at present: USS pension increases (based on the dishonest valuation method I discussed on other threads); the impact of covid (especially overseas student income) the likely impact of what looks like a very hard brexit. 

https://london.ac.uk/sites/default/files/governance/university-of-london-fi...

Yet the ongoing cost of this important club seems almost irrelevant in the big picture and the decision is one likely to cause serious ructions amongst important alumni and young climbers looking to study in the Uni. This idiotic plan will lose them way more in future donations and bequests than they will save. It's a typical example of how out of touch many University senior management are at the moment.

There is some overlap in the activities between the college clubs and us, particularly in the case of regular indoor climbing sessions where some people decide to attend a weekly indoor wall session with their college club if available and others instead regularly climb with us. The big college clubs attract more members than we do, but we have a regular membership of a similar size to the LSE club for example. Often whether people end up climbing with us or their college club is down to which they come across first or the age make-up of the clubs, often the big college clubs are very undergrad dominated and so we pick up a lot of masters and PhDs and slightly older students. 

What we do provide that is less common in the college clubs is regular trips. Most college clubs have one trip per term, whereas we try to run one per month if we can. Apart from KCL, we're also the only club within the UoL that has a heritage of regularly trad climbing and winter mountaineering, as the other college clubs only really focus on sport climbing and bouldering. This means that we often attract students from the college clubs who are interested in learning the skills needed for trad and mountaineering. 

In terms of distribution, we certainly see few students from RHUL or Queen Mary's, but have had a number from goldsmiths which is also quite far out of the center and even quite a few as associate members from Imperial which is no longer part of the UoL and has its own very long established and active mountaineering club. But yeah, our membership principally comes from the more central colleges and smaller institutions such as Birckbeck, Lshtm, ucl, lse, soas, rvc, etc. 

To expand on what lizzie mentioned about the huts, the huts are funded entirely from their own proceeds I think. Caseg is fully booked most of the year and both hits are well managed by the trustees. 

Hope that gives an overview of the current way the clubs operate and answers your query  

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This is a poorly considered move and very short-term thinking. I hadn't read Offwidth's reply before writing to Prof Thomson but made similar points. Please excuse the jargon but you have to speak their language.

Dear Prof. Thomson,

I am writing to you regarding the proposal to disband a number of University of London Student Central Clubs and Societies. Most of my points pertain to all but I'll focus particularly on the Mountaineering Club as I know the great work they do.

As an alumnus and now lecturer at XXX  I would like to express my deep disappointment about this proposal.  I understand the financial pressures universities are under and but the cost-benefit analysis of this plan seems ill-considered. The savings are small; the loss to present and future students and potential to antagonise alumni are disproportionately large.  As I'm sure you know, University clubs and societies are the place where enduring friendships and networks are formed, particularly when the activity is life-long like Mountaineering. I'm convinced these networks do far more to cultivate a sense of continued connectedness to one's alma mater than any amount of alumni marketing. Most prospective students know the social benefits of University life are at least as great as the formal teaching and learning. As a former admissions tutor,  questions about clubs and societies are one of the most common asked on open days. Given the acute and probably longer-term pressure on student recruitment, removing the value added by student clubs and societies would seem like a risky and short-term strategy by the institution. Now should be a time to cultivate rather than damage the student experience.

Very eloquent. I'm optimistic as they can't escape the wrath of their 'customers' given the games they play.

I see our University managements as way too culpable in many of these financial troubles. Institutional atomised managerialism works when finance is healthy but we need a more collegiate and collaborative approach to HE in the terrible situation we face. Speaking truth to government power is a sad rarity from our VCs. There is some fat in the sector given huge centralised bureaucracies and an estate that sometimes looks over generous in the  new semi virtual environment. The VC's could also show leadership and take the big pay cuts that leaders in other industries are taking.

Thank you so much for contacting Prof. Thomson about this, and also for posting your letter here, you have made some excellent points that I will also feed back via the student representative network to make sure they are reinforced at the meeting tomorrow morning! We really appreciate your help  

Just wanted to reiterate Lizzie's message of thanks as the current ULMC president. Your support is greatly appreciated and I'll make sure to feed your excellent points back to the group of UoL club officers organising our campaign.

The simple solution would be for the university to stop the financing and leave the club to self-finance like any other club does.  OK, so things will change and become more expensive for it's members, but the club will survive. Closing the club is a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Indeed. I suspect there are other factors at play that we are not party to.

As a general update and to expand on the answer to questions relating to why this is happening: Yesterday a representative from the collegiate council quoted "governance and perceived risk" as the reason behind the closure. It seems SC are under pressure to implement a new "regulatory framework" and believe that this will require additional staff which they do not have and cannot afford to hire. 

As a UoL graduate, the college club was tiny, unequipped and on occasions distinctly unsafe. I joined the NLMC rather than ULU for geographical reasons, but this is definitely a good cause. London has long been blessed and cursed by its collegiate system

For anyone interested, the outcome of yesterday's meeting was to delay the decision to close down clubs and societies until Dec 2020. Part of their statement reads "Postponing this decision will provide time for a working group comprising the University, member institutions, and student and alumni representatives to explore options for continuing the provision of intercollegiate student activities". So we are pretty optimistic that from here we have time to find a more reasonable solution, and the amount of support we received over the last few days will definitely have made the university think twice about this decision.

Thanks SO much to everyone who supported us and signed the petition

Thanks for the update.

And you've also just got another member as I've just sent in my application!

Great news, was this for ULMC or ULGMC? If it's ULMC you are thinking of joining you should wait till September otherwise you won't get much for your first membership fee payment, since we're unlikely to run any trips between now and membership renewals at the start of Sept (thanks to COVID-19)!

Can't speak for ULGMC, they have a different set-up and I'm not sure when they are planning to run trips again.

Graduate - it's a very long time since I was a student :-D

Hope you're up and running with the ULMC soon - I was on the chatlines for our university open day yesterday and though it was primarily for applicants for 2021 entry, there were still plenty of questions from people starting this year about student societies. There's clearly still a huge appetite for the full student experience which is great.