Students seem to be more attracted to the University Council

 Students and staff can vote for the university's representative councils from Monday, May 12, to Wednesday, May 14. Most people can vote twice: once for the University Council and once for their faculty or employee consultative body. Elections for the staff section of the UU Council are held every two years, while student representatives are elected every year.

Students have more options when voting for the University Council this year. In the past 15 years, students could choose between two, three or four parties. This year, however, students were more eager to put themselves forward as candidates for the University Council and several faculty councils. That's a very different scenario from recent years, when student parties had difficulty finding candidates due to a lack of interest and enthusiasm.

Five student parties are participating this time, two of which are newcomers: Rups and Student Coalition Utrecht. They are running against long-standing parties like Vuur, but also against last year's newcomer, Vrijmoedige Studenten Partij (VSP). Both parties have also presented candidates for several faculty councils. Partij voor de Utrechtse Student (PvdUS) is only participating in the University Council elections.

Faculties
In addition to the University Council, Rups is looking to represent the Department of Governance & Organisation (Dutch acronym: B&O) of the Faculty of Law, Economics & Governance. Student Coalition Utrecht is participating in the University Council elections as well as in the elections in the Department of Law and the Faculty Council of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

In the previous elections, VSP won a seat on the Faculty Council of Science. This year, the party is already assured of a seat in the Faculty of Science because there are no opposing candidates for the district. VSP is also running for reelection in the Law and Governance districts. This year, the party is running for the Faculty of Humanities for the first time.

Vuur has also been active at the faculty level for many years. This year, the party is running for the Law and Governance district within the Faculty of Law, Economics & Governance, for the Faculty of Humanities, and two districts of the Faculty of Science.

Candidates
This year, Vuur had ‘no trouble finding candidates at all’, says member Saban Caliskan. “These past few years, finding candidates was often a challenge. We had either just enough or too few candidates.”

Saban believes that the political context has compelled students to get involved in student representation. “Many students are dissatisfied with the right-wing rhetoric coming from The Hague and VSP, the new party in the University Council. I've heard many students say that VSP doesn't represent them. In addition, I think both the budget cuts and the threat of fines for students who take too long to graduate have led students to get more involved. Students want to resist.” According to Caliskan, Vuur has been “very visible” in the council as well as in the protests held this council year, which may have helped them find candidates.

Staff representation on the University Council
This newfound enthusiasm for participation in the decision-making process has failed to hit staff members as much as it did students. Only twelve candidates have put themselves forward for the twelve seats in the staff section of the University Council, which means the composition of the council has already been determined, but elections will be held nevertheless. That's because one more candidate has registered for the Humanities district than there are seats available. However, only two candidates have registered for the three seats in the Science/Veterinary Medicine district. As a result, the candidate from Humanities with the fewest votes will still get a seat. There are two staff lists: one from List Vlam and one from the Utrecht PhD Party (UPP).

Staff member Frank van der Salm notes that the amount of work to do is making it harder and harder for staff members to run for the University Council. “This time around, we have as many candidates as there are seats, which is a rather sad ratio for a representation based on votes. We hear this a lot, especially from PhD students, who say that their supervisors discourage them from wasting ‘precious research time’ on representative work. I don't want to blame managers for our recruitment problem, but I think it's reasonable to assume that many colleagues expect the workload to increase and competition to be more fierce, so they are less inclined to spend their time on representative work.”

University Corporate Offices
This year, elections will be held for the employees' consultative body of the University Corporate Offices (UBD). There are eleven candidates for nine seats.

Constituencies
Some faculties work with constituencies for students and staff. For some of those constituencies, there are either too few or no candidates at all. For example, no students are running for the Social Geography & Planning constituency in the Faculty of Geosciences, and the same goes for the Clinical Medicine constituency in the Faculty of Medicine, which means that these relevant programmes are not represented on the faculty council. Most of the vacant seats will be filled by candidates from other constituencies.

Little or no choice
In several constituencies, the number of candidates who have registered is equal to the number of seats available. These candidates are automatically allocated seats, so no elections will be held. This happened at the Faculty of Science, where the vast majority of seats on the faculty council were automatically allocated: six of the seven staff members and five of the seven student members have already secured their seats. As for staff members, elections will only be held for one seat in the Information & Computing Sciences district. Student elections will be held for the General Student and the Biology districts.

In addition, there will be no elections for staff members for the employees' consultative body of the Library, University College Utrecht (UCU) and the Philosophy & Religious Studies constituency of the Faculty of Humanities.

No election will be held for students of Economics at the Faculty of Law, Economics & Governance, either, as there are exactly enough candidates for the number of seats.

Finally, there will be no elections next week for the student council of University College Utrecht (UCU), as these were already held in April. Thy too had just enough candidates for the staff section. 

There will be no elections this year for the staff section of the Education & Research Council of the Faculty Council of Medicine. They are elected every three years.

Studentenunie Vidius organiseert op de avond van 12 mei een verkiezingsavond in de Aula van het Academiegebouw.

Iedereen die dat wil, kan daar pleiten voor een student die zich verkiesbaar heeft gesteld voor een van de raden. Dit kan bijvoorbeeld door pitches voor kandidaten, maar ook voor onderwerpen die het komende jaar in de medezeggenschap aan de orde zouden moeten komen.

Wie wil spreken op de avond kan zich aanmelden via: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/5Epsi9CE8X Andere geïnteresseerden zijn vanaf half 7 welkom. Er zullen gratis hapjes en drankjes zijn.

De avond zal worden opgenomen en gelivestreamd. Kijken kan via de volgende link:
 https://video.uu.nl/lives/academiegebouw-aula-2025-2026/.