A Fresh Take on Freshers Week Bans.

 

It’s the time of year when the nights begin drawing in and the annual mass migration of Ikea furniture, dodgy fashion and textbooks begins as students around the country begin the academic year anew. From ancient colleges to modern city universities, fresh faced students will be sitting in rooms wondering how on earth they’ll meet people, how to make friends and eventually ‘how on earth will I get a job to pay off all these tuition fees’?  Thankfully the answer to some of these questions can be found in the ‘Freshers Fair’, a traditional start of year event where every major university society and organisation tries to encourage people to sign up to take part and try something new. Practically every society under the sun can be found here, but on a surprisingly regular basis the armed forces find themselves turned away.

It may come as a surprise to learn that all three services maintain a strong link to universities. There are University Royal Naval Unit (URNU), Officer Training Corps (OTC) and University Air Squadrons (UAS) run across the UK providing an insight into life in the armed forces and giving training and experience to students. These units are emphatically NOT a recruiting organisation, should you join them you have no obligation to enter into a long-term career with the armed forces (unlike in the US equivalent system, ROTC which functions as a commissioning route into regular service). Instead, they are designed to provide life skills and an understanding of what the armed forces do without any expectation of you joining afterwards.

Each Service approaches things differently. The Royal Navy send students to sea, usually onboard P2000 patrol vessels to spend their weekends and holidays navigating off the coast, participating in practical seamanship exercises and experiencing the challenges and joys of cramped communal living.  The Army teaches people the basic infantry syllabus, learning to shoot, take part in exercises and understand about the complexity of the teeth and support arms. The RAF focuses heavily on initial flying training and learning about the work of the Service. All three systems rely on a combination of weeknight, weekend, and holiday training, all of which is paid. The author is an ex URNU member and fondly remembers participating in major exercises off Scotland, sailing the Irish Sea and participating in port visits to Southern Ireland, hosting cocktail parties and encountering the challenges of defence diplomacy when Sinn Fein protested the British ‘invasion’ off the ships bow – all heady stuff for a 19yr old. Later opportunities included training at BRNC Dartmouth, adventure training in the lake district, time at sea on HMS OCEAN and SHEFFIELD. A highlight occurred during a study abroad period in Canada, when the author secured a secondment into the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve including spending his 20^th birthday at sea on watch on the bridge of HMCS KINGSTON – not many students outside the University units get that sort of experience.

The University military presence is a powerful way to provide students with genuinely different life experience. It puts people into environments that they are unfamiliar with, helps them meet an entirely new range of people who they’d never otherwise encounter and learn to get along in challenging situations. Telling a group of 19yr old, just a few months out of school to work together at 3am to help get a Royal Navy warship to sea in foul weather is a great opportunity to help people grow and develop. The system is designed to teach people they can achieve more than they ever thought possible at a critical point in their development. Through access to good quality training, instruction and advice, the university units help grow individual confidence and significantly increase an individual’s employability. If you look at the profiles of former university unit personnel, the vast majority will never go anywhere near the armed forces again in their lives, but they will do very well in their careers. The University units excel at taking people, untapping their potential and giving them confidence to be their true selves and excel in the process.

More widely the units provide a good chance to let the military reach and inform decision makers of the future. As noted, most members do not pursue a career in the armed forces, but as they go through their careers, they will potentially be in positions of influence and authority. If they understand the military, even in a small way, they may be more disposed to supporting better reserve forces leave policies, recruiting service leavers, adopting policies that support the armed forces covenant and think positively about the military in society. As the pool of ‘veterans’ diminishes, the need for there to be people in society who have had some kind of lived experience of the military increases – without this, there is a real danger that the armed forces will be become ever more isolated from the society they serve.

This applies as much to the University units as it does to the Cadet forces more widely – both types of organisations provide life changing positive experiences for youth and help build a deeper understanding of the military lifestyle. Driven by dedicated volunteers who give so freely of their time, there are tens of thousands of teenagers and young adults today gaining the benefit of membership to an organisation where inclusion, support and a sense of belonging comes with the role. You can always tell a current or ex-cadet – they stand out from their peers as being someone with a bit more about them than the others and generally they do very well in their careers too. These movements provide fantastic opportunities for relatively little investment in resources.

It is understandable that in a time of constrained resources we want to ensure that the MOD gets the best possible value for its money. The footprint of almost 60 units and detachments across the UK is not inconsiderable, nor is the pay bill for thousands of cadets and their training staff, and the allocation of uniforms, resources, airframes, sea time and ammunition to support them. But this is a price worth paying – the longer-term value generated by these organisations more than repays the relatively small investment in them. It also functions as a good opportunity for command opportunities early in the career for regular personnel (e.g. OIC of an URNU), which helps bring benefits to the regular services too.  It is also understandable that others would want to see the units converted to function as pure recruiting tools where only individuals interested in a military career are recruited. This would be a backwards step as the whole appeal of the University unit system is that it helps tap into people who are unlikely to join the armed forces, and who may then decide later to join up. The author knows several people in this situation, who joined out of curiosity and many decades are still going strong!

Its against this backdrop that Bristol OTC is in the news due to the Students Union barring them from the Freshers Fair as they’re apparently in competition with other student societies and are not affiliated with the Students Union. Some people are upset by this, seeing it as an overreaction by the Union who are reportedly ‘snowflakes’ and intolerant of the military. To be honest its probably not worth getting worked up over. One of the constants of British university life is of terribly earnest highly politicised activists getting worked up about the military and banning them from site. If you go back over the last 50 years, there have been lots of occasions where Students Unions have banned the armed forces from recruiting at Freshers fairs or careers fairs. The practical impact has been minimal as all these units do is recruit off site, often in more prominent places.  Ultimately Students Unions can invite or block who they want from their fairs. There is no automatic right to permit the armed forces to attend, and we should be cautious of demanding that this exists. If a Students Union wants to block the Army, then that is their call. It is perhaps a curious irony that the armed forces tend to be more open of debate and listening to opposing views, for example inviting guest speakers from causes like CND to Staff College, than these Unions are.

While it makes for easy headlines to get worked up about, there is little point in being upset by this decision. Part of the joy of being a student is the ability to make very stupid mistakes and try out different philosophies and lifestyles. The student leaders of the 1960s and 70s are today almost certainly middle-class bulwarks of society, while the student leaders of today will doubtless abandon most of their principals the moment a good graduate job is offered and the real world beckons. In the same way as we rightly praise those who join the University units for gaining skills and experience, we should recognise that plenty of other students gain this experience in different ways. No one way is right. If a university union whose freshers week consists of most new students asking each other which Oxbridge college they failed to get into prior to choosing Bristol wants to ban the military then that is entirely their decision.  The trick is to look at this not as a source of outrage but as proof that the university experience remains unchanging, and be quietly proud that the students of today, grandchildren of the 1960s generation of protesters continue to rail against the same evils, admire the same totalitarian Russian regime and want to stop democracies like Ukraine defending themselves against Russia while also holding views that are intolerant of anything that they disagree with. The armed forces exist to enable people like this to make stupid statements, hold views that many would disagree with and learn the hard way that their efforts will change nothing, and that principles can easily be abandoned when it comes to paying the rent.  It is in a way tremendously reassuring that some things never change!