The Drury Diaries: The CUSU General Manager should resign

On Caesarian Sunday with finances in disarray, CUSU has had its day

| UPDATED affiliation CUSU CUSU incompetence debt Deficit financial mismanagement NUS Publications

Diary

I have never been to Caesarian Sunday; it doesn’t really seem like my scene and some things are better kept as mysteries.  That said, I did end up rather happy on Sunday morning as the Dean of Caius somewhat over-consecrated and it fell to me as Chapel Clerk to consume the excess wine, so I felt a little like I was participating in spirit.

Although I shy away from Caesarian Sunday, ‘Caesarian Monday’ is quite a treat, bringing the superb fun of looking for people I know in the Daily Mail; I give myself bonus points if I recognise somebody who is throwing up, assaulting a Police Officer or self-immolating.  The Daily Mail were really scraping the barrel this year, though, putting up photos of young adults in a mostly-empty park and writing about historic transgressions.  We’ve all heard a lot about fake news, but this is more like non-news.

Understandably not Jack’s scene

Non-news is precisely the term I’d use for the recent Farron storm; poor chap.  The only remarkable bit for me is that a major news anchor, Cathy Newman, is religiously illiterate and ignorant enough to suggest that a man who calls himself a Christian is bound to take the Old Testament literally, which was the premise of her original question.  Utter and genuine idiocy.  She had all the information available about his voting record, but chose to ignore it in favour of sticking the boot in.

CUSU

Life has been pretty boring over the last week, and I was struggling for something to write on, but thank goodness, CUSU has been revealed to be even more incompetent than we all thought!  The draft budget proposes running a £75,000 budget deficit, fundamentally because they can’t control their outgoings (NUS affiliation cost lie; new unaffordable Sabb) and can’t write contracts well enough to guarantee incomings.  Of course, CUSU being shit is just a bit funny, and nobody means it being shit on its own, but we should all mind CUSU being infectiously shit; draining more money from the University and our JCRs and MCRs to piss away is intolerable.

Remember these days? Jack looks so full of life

It seems to be the prevailing opinion that the real problem this time is CUSU not guaranteeing income from its publishing contracts.  Day to day this sort of stuff is worked out by staff members, who members of CUSU (that’s all of us) are not allowed to name, comment on, identify or otherwise essentially bring to account.  It seems unbelievable, but the person responsible for CUSU’s contracts and responsible for a budget deficit that will unavoidably result in a restriction on services like welfare is meant to be anonymous.  That isn’t good enough.

So on Monday night, in accordance with the University Ordinances, I wrote to the Registry and resigned my membership of CUSU.  This means I no longer get to bug you with referendums or stand for office, but it does mean I can freely say that serious questions need to be put to CUSU General Manager, Mark McCormack, whose LinkedIn page describes him as being responsible for contracts.

If it’s true that he is responsible for pissing away enormous streams of income, then McCormack should do the honourable thing and resign.  His tenure seems to have been something of a disaster from a financial point of view for CUSU, and we all (or you all, now I’m no longer a member!) deserve much better. Hiding behind CUSU anonymity simply will not do this time: Mr McCormack come up with a bloody good defence or resign.