Welcome to your brief recap on USI Congress day 2. Swiftly kicking off at 9 o’clock sharp, Congress began with half an hour alloted time to finish off the remaining policies due to expire- which was successful. No motion was left to fall due to the time running out. Afterwards it was straight into Acamedic Affairs and Quality Assurance.
A motion was proposed to turn STEM into STEAM, essentially including Art & Humanities into STEM as well. While the proposer of this motion was very passionate about this motion, there was a lot of debate around this motion. The side for the motion mainly argued for the importance of arts and humanities to be valued more as it is just as important as the sciences. People from these degrees are often undervalued and not appreciated. Therefore rather than pitting the arts and sciences together, they should be viewed and treated equally.
The side against the motion argued that while each speaker against agreed with the importance of arts and humanities courses, they did not feel that this motion was the way to do it as it did not correctly address the issue. Some speakers against the motion felt that this was not the way to address this issue; this is an example of where we need to focus on hitting the organizations instead. Mainy speakers on both sides came from arts/humanities courses. In the end, this motion was defeated.
The session ended punctually and moved on to motions around Welfare, where delegates debate on difficult motion dealing with issues such as mental health and drug awareness.
After a lunch break, it came to Union Organisation motions. Your DITSU delegates were highly vocal; proposing motions, arguing for motions, arguing against motions. We even had motions where DITSU delegates themselves stood on different sides.
Multiple motions were returned to when alloted session time for other sessions finished early. This was the case with DITSU’s motion on Teaching Qualification for Lecturers, which was proposed Pierre Yimbog. Unfortunately the motion was not put to a vote due to the fact that a procedural motion 9B was put through.
The final session of the day, around Equality/Citizenship, was a tough session; there were a lot of emotions from speakers as a lot of these motions touched people personally. Due to just emotional debates, many 9As were proposed (most of which fell, so the debate continued). It is here that DITSU’s motion, Transgender Health Care, was put forward by Grace Collins; she spoke extremely well when proposing the motion, even mentioning harsh statistics of transgender people who have unfortunately attempted suicide, many of them nurmerous times. But this, amongst everything else she said, highlighted the importance of supporting this motion.
DITSU, ITT SU, ITB SU have all continued in supporting each other during the motions that they were putting forward throughout Congress today. You can follow the #USI18 on Twitter to keep up to date, live, with the happenings at Congress!
Visual Artist, student at DIT, and writer for DITSU.tv
I've been writing for DITSU.tv for 2+ years now, still ongoing
I mainly cover events but also like to write a few helpful, lifestyle pieces and here and there
