Also, hilarious quote… this is exactly the point. Of course it’s easier for the VC to only have to deal with one voice. So much more convenient to ignore everyone else’s:

“But much has changed since Gould departed Waikato: the union returned to compulsory membership in 2002 and current vice-chancellor Roy Crawford describes its relationship with the university as “extremely positive”. As a one-stop shop for gauging student opinion, he says, it’s critical: “If you’re knee-deep in 25 students who wanted to come and see you on a particular issue, with 25 different opinions, it’d be very hard to cope with that.”

You published factually inaccurate claims. There was no default on any loan to repay the building of the student association building, the WSU never had any such loan to pay! The building was built by Campus Services Limited, a joint venture company 50-50 owned by the WSU and the Uni. CSL was responsible for paying the loan, not the students association and it had its own separate levy for income which the Uni continued to charge the students whilst the WSU was voluntary. If it defaulted, which I do not believe it did – certainly never in my time – it had nothing whatsoever to do with the WSU or VSM.

Had you bothered to interview the other side you might have found this out. (This is but one of Gould’s fabrications/senile moments in the above – others would be false accusations of asset stripping and service collapse. I have a copy of the audited accounts from that time which show this is rubbish – no loan to the Uni anywhere in sight).

You state that those who spoke to you only said good things – well then what do you call this?

“Gould was also confronted with student representatives he believed were no longer truly representative: “a rather right-wing, fundamentalist Christian group”, as he describes them. The rise of such extreme views in the student union, Gould says, deterred others from involvement,”

He is talking about me and the executive I was on. His statements about me and the people I was on exec with are denigrating and derogatory and untrue. If you get a quote like this and you are going to use it this is the sort of thing that screams for a right of reply.

Further there are factual errors, fundamentalism is a specific type of Christianity; I don’t hold to it, neither did anyone else who was on the WSU with me. Used in the manner he used it, it was simply meant to denigrate and demonise, to label and conjure up stereotypes to avoid having to actually to actually come up with anything concrete. Gould makes no mention of the Mormon president from the following year to us who participated in trying to censor a lecturer who was critical of Mormon views – wonder if that is because this Mormon president campaigned for compulsory membership, a view Gould supported so, of course, was willing to overlook.

The comments about us putting of participation are also untrue. Following our work on the WSU, and the efforts we put into a membership drive, and out lobbying to get membership packs into every student’s Uni pack – something we had to fight Gould on every step of the way – membership levels picked up to 3000 students as a direct result of our term. Given the campus EFTS at that point were 10,000 that’s not bad at all, especially when you think about how many people actively support their student association on compulsory campuses.

“..and in 1998 the academic board went so far as to recommend the student president be barred from council unless she could claim at least a one-third constituency.”

The second the WSU went voluntary Gould and the other pro-compulsory members of the Uni council went to lengths to make like difficult. The move to bar the student president from council was just one example and talk about selective standards – name one student president or student rep on a uni council currently or historically who holds their position with a 1/3 campus majority.

As to your claim that giving me the opportunity to write my response here will suffice for your lack of balance and integrity are you telling me that you just wrote this piece solely for this blog, that you have not submitted it to any student media? Where do my comments fit in in those publications? Is it up to me to chase every instance of its publication and make sure my side is told? That is crap. If this site was part of the press council you’d be in deep water. Rest assured if that article gets printed in any publication that is I will make a formal complaint.

If you want an interview, more than happy. If you want audited accounts from when WSU was voluntary, more than happy. Just please stop publishing unsubstantiated, false facts and derogatory comments about other people without getting their response.

And are you familiar with the concept of balance? You knew where to find the other side of the story, you have left a comment on my blog previously in a blog post on this topic, but no contact…. none at all…. you just published material complete with stereotypical labels, identified us by implication, completely missing our side, not to mention several facts.

If you are planning on writing any more articles on VSM and Waikato our contact details are on our blog.

Although truth be told, I was disappointed that Victoria and Otago declined to comment. Those two probably get the most negative media coverage, so I was naturally curious about whether they felt the flack was more than student unions were worth.