Education

University of Leicester Students’ Union Threatens Its Own Members – Vote Or Services Won’t Open: Move Backfires

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Written by Faizan Patankar

If there is something failing on social media it’s usually corporate fails or an agency mucking up somewhere. In what I can see as a first, University of Leicester Student’s Union posted this message below at about 8pm UK time.

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I am not sure what they were expecting after this. But the already disengaged students didn’t take to this kindly. We all know what University elections are like – mostly noise and visual pollution. I am all for elections and student democracy but not the way candidates go about thrusting their leaflets and faces into pictures and clubs everywhere.

And University of Leicester Students’ Union holding what one commentator called a “holding gun” to students’ heads was clearly a step too far. Some of the comments are shown below:

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A link to the post is below. I am not sure how long this will remain before it gets deleted.

The idea was that until there were 200 votes cast, the union wouldn’t open its services. And after 400 votes were cast – the first couple of services to open would be Ryman and Starbucks. This further infuriated students who simply wanted to have their union services back.
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And how do you think students will respond to this?
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2 hours after the original fiasco, University of Leicester Students’ Union finally rectifies its “terrible” campaign.

And finally, defending the candidates, stating that they were not involved in this, to which some commentators looked at suspiciously.

No sign of apology from the University of Leicester Students’ Union. Whoever came up with the terrible idea needs to have a crash course in social media and also planning elections. With this terrible stunt the University of Leicester Students’ Union managed to disengage a lot of students and generally left a very bad taste.

And now here’s hoping that the newly-elected candidates don’t go into office thinking that bad publicity is better than no publicity, as it clearly isn’t.

This is a developing story and the post will be updated as we know more.

Source: University of Leicester Students’ Union

About the author

Faizan Patankar

I started Career Geek Blog in 2011 to share my experience in job-hunting. I now focus on careers industry and blogging is just a tool to share that info. Love hacking careers. During the day I focus on my hobby - Engineering.