Rector’s Election: the Sexy, the Idealist, the Realist AND the Insider
Disclaimer: Author’s view does not represent the opinion of Polis Media and we are not endorsing candidates as a publication.
I always thought of the Rector as a handsome (and assumedly benevolent) version of the murderous clown in It. (My allusions are to Stephen King’s It, and the Facebook page of our Rector’s Committee. Cover photo: our current rector, Srdja Popovic, posing in his stately calm amidst a parade of red balloons–except the one in his hand–blue.) I liked him so much and so baselessly; I was discouraged to learn that we must replace him tomorrow (by voting: it opens tomorrow, so make note), and that I must substantiate my epistemic relation with “the Rector” (this was when the founders of this publication requested that I write this piece before tomorrow, not some awakening of voter duty. Thankfully, there is a Julia in this team, who has been selfless in making arrangements to get interviews and our questions answered by the candidates, while I sink in lazy inaction with this project until an hour ago.)
Rector! Replaced! The fact is that he has been replaced many times over the drawn-out history of our university, forty-nine times, and indeed, by yet another “he”, one of the two K/Catherines, or one of the two Marquesses. (Other observations: non-white names, and plenty of what Bertrand Russell would have classified as descriptions rather than names, like “the eleventh earl” and “the twenty-eighth lord” etc.) Matriculated reader, this election will be special. Our new rector will be unprecedented, not just on account of being a 2020-elected, but by virtue of being a woman that is unapologetic, vocal, and active in representing change. We will come to Mr Ken Cochran, a worthy candidate, in just a second.
Both our female candidates are admirable leaders in giving voice. Leyla Hussein is a psychotherapist and campaigner on gender rights, a “disruptor” of spaces. This intuition for spaces and one’s action on it is inherent in her language: St Andrews is “a bubble that needs to be burst”, safe spaces where people “feel actually included in everything” needs to be created, and “being uncomfortable” in our sofas cushioned by habituated prejudice is “the best thing to do” by “[lifting] the shame around this conversation”. Leyla knows what she wants perpetuated: the perpetuators protected by ignorance and prejudice. She knows how to say it, too. “Mind my language,” she says on bringing about change, “but I don’t fuck with that.”
Fiona Hill was a witness in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and also “speaks truth to power”. She speaks it without shouting (as I might in any room with President Trump), backed by fine reasoning and plenty of evidence. When asked her favourite way of getting to know someone she is trying to help, she quotes a procedure of “a lot of questions about their personal and family background, what they have been doing at St Andrews, what they are most interested in or thinking about” before “working through all the possible options and opportunities” with them. A foreign policy expert, she transfers the analytic mindset to bringing about change, describing “a combination of analysing the situation and then figuring out what’s possible given the larger context and conditions along with people from the communities themselves”.
Change is something emphasised by both Fiona and Leyla. Both talk about it as something concrete in their potential rectorship. “They are not a ‘project’ for the university,” Leyla said in response to her plans in amplifying the underrepresented of the St Andrews community. “It’s not having a specific strategy, it’s reminding people they have the right to be there and to be represented.” To the same question, Fiona took a starkly different approach. “The first thing,” she instructed in her written reply, “would obviously be to reach out and ask people to get in touch through the Rector’s office, to then spend some time figuring out why they are not breaking through, and then to confer with other students and University representatives.” In the tangibility of both approaches, something evades our grasp: is the plan to “not strategise” a good strategy to bring about change? Or are we better off getting lost in the verbose and tireless mechanisms of the Rector’s office and hundreds of University representatives? The truth is that the change on the scale we want to see, demanded by the emergence of Survivors within the university, and the Black Lives Matter movement nationally and globally, is always more demanding than signing petitions and attending protests (though those are very important contributions). The kind of (more) direct causal power a rector in office has over the change to be seen, is composed by more concrete and structured action. That structure may be a highly personalised one, without a broad and generalised mechanism as pointed to by Leyla, or an institutionalised, procedural and patient unfolding of a case at hand, as championed by Fiona.
What should our rector be like? That is a question I cannot answer for you, but we did get our potential rectors to answer the flip question, “What should the St Andrews student community be like?” We are a generation of students in a climate of crisis: the climate crisis themself, the revelation of systemic injustice, the tipping edge of a politics half-driven by social media. Fiona was not “walking along the beaches” of St Andrews under a pandemic (the quote comes from talking about her favourite memories as a student), but she empathises and wants to be part of the force to fight back. “We need multi-generational coalitions to get things done,” she said. “I would urge students to get involved at an individual and group level in the issues that matter most to them, and I will stand ready to help connect people and help out.” When I read out the same question to Leyla in our Teams meeting, she tilted her head in contemplation. “That’s a good question,” she said, before suddenly lighting up. “Kindness!” she exclaimed. “People aren’t kind anymore! We need to change the culture of being ‘mean’.” She then referred to the ’60s Hippie Movement, that era in faded photographs where youths in the United States walked the streets in peace signs and weed-smelling tattoos. It’s a thing of the past but she likes it: she likes the shameless vote for peace and love and kindness.
Distance. A distance between generations, between space, between the idea and the act, between the slogan and the change. These are some of the themes we touched upon when finally coming to the challenges each anticipate for the next rector. “Given the fact that I live in the US, and dealing with the consequences of COVID-19, which will make it hard to travel,” said Fiona. She put her hope in the assistance of new technology. It will take more than one Zoom call for Leyla to overcome the obstacle she identifies: to “actually deliver what I promise”. It is a sobering awareness that there will be unanticipated difficulties to construct the safe space of respect and no-hatred zone she envisions, simply for the practicalities if not more deep-rooted problems.
I promised to come back to Mr Ken Cochran, and I’ll do so now if not tentatively. I haven’t had the chance to ask him questions yet, and I didn’t understand his Facebook post referring to Ordinance 132: “I resigned my post in the university when, despite the Principal’s promise to graduating students (28th June 2019) that this would ‘always continue to be your university’, I knew the University Court was working behind the scenes to disenfranchise every one of them, […] from your historic right to choose who speaks for you at the heart of University governance. I believe that was a violation of University ordinances (Ordinance 132), the rules by which the University operates. I could not support that and resigned.” What’s this about? Another: “Of critical importance is that your voice does not get drowned by a sea of red ink, when the multi-million pound deficit begins to bite.” Was that a biblical reference? Anyway, I might have a chance to speak with him soon, if the godsend Julia succeeds in bridging our communication. Meanwhile I would encourage you to visit Tesco, where he seems to hang out in a lot, or his Facebook page @YourRector to understand some of his views. They are, to his credit, quite specific (concrete), including his complaint about inertia towards solar panels; and the hand-sanitizer dispensers (without sanitizer in them, supposedly. I cannot verify that claim, though I think it is important to the student experience that we get what we want when we want it.)
Stay tuned, if I do get to morning coffee with Mr Ken Cochran, I’ll update you.
The Update
I did get to speak to Mr Ken Cochran this morning, and I have rushed here to give you The Update. As hinted at the start, I do get easily confused and derive some emotional pleasure from not-knowing. But my clear-eyed readers are not as susceptible to confusion. We now have more information from Ken and I hope to present it below in a representative manner.
What distinguishes Ken from his competitors is not his gender and race (we will get to that in a second), but his intimate relation with St Andrews itself. For that I have nominated him as “the Insider”. Ken was in a student of St Andrews in the ‘70s and went on to take up a career in telecommunication, public health and higher education. He has served in the University Court and it shows: he spoke ferociously about the abuse of power when they decided that graduated students could no longer vote in the Rector Election. (Is that a fact? I am googling this and cannot find a relevant verification on any University/Union site.) It speaks to the lack of openness and transparency of the University governance, a deficiency which Ken resisted in writing at least three times. It came to no avail, going “over like a lead balloon” with the Senior Governor.
“Listen.” Ken has apparently moved this call from Bell Telephone Labs where he worked in, to the very heart of his campaign. To listen is what he is calling out to the University Court, and it is what he promises us. Living just outside St Andrews, Ken is “in town everyday” and he plans to use that presence in “befriending people without expecting immediate engagement”. He wants to be friends with those who do not naturally articulate: “even if they aren’t activists”, he said of their rights. He champions personal relationships, and friendship is the defining component of St Andrews community in his rectorship. “As trust builds over many months, people gradually open up.” Ken will be right here at St Andrews (in Tesco, perhaps) to catch us those afraid to use their voices when they finally open up. “It may be a bit patronising to make policies on behalf of other people,” he confessed. He plans to make it his “full time job” to listen and reach out to individuals of the student community and translate that into policies. “Don’t force people out their shells, entice them.” It is true that Ken is the only candidate who can offer that.
Other things Ken is the only candidate for is being-a-white-male. When asked to respond to his symbolic representation compared to the other candidates, Ken admitted that he is “a boy” and there is nothing he “can do about it”. But he does not plan to compromise on pushing gender equality in the community at large. “The University Court has a gender bias in its appointing system,” he testified. He pointed out that only 20% appointed behind the scenes were women and it is his intention to support change in this regard. He added that there are “four incredibly strong women at the heart of University governance” (referring to the principal, the proctor, the senior lay member and the deputy principal) and that adding a man will not distort the symbolic representation of female power.
We noticed other things that Ken offers which Leyla and Fiona do not, including his attention to the climate crisis (he ardently pushes for the wider installation of solar panels). Though I have doubts about potential conflicts of interest in his call for solar panels (he personally owns and operates four), his familiarity and insight to this University is an asset that can be hugely important to manifesting change. After all, you need to know where the eggs are (in St Andrew’s Tesco) to break it.
