Meet your candidate: Bjørk K. Olsen

I’m running for the university election because it in my opinion that is important to seek influence on your surroundings – and because I simply can’t help it. To me it is very exciting to participate in a creating process and I believe that I have the necessary capabilities, ambitions and visions to be a part of this process.

I represent Conservative Students (Konservative Studerende) as this is the only centre-right student organisation. I don’t believe that an organisation such as Studenterrådet is able to represent all students and act on behalf of everybody.

Furthermore, Conservative Students has a direct influence on national politics where the real decisions are made on and the framework is set for our university. So while Studenterrådet are running around in the streets and occupying buildings, Conservative Students is in dialog with the political parties.

Three main goals

Conservative Students has the political view that all students are adults old enough to organize their own education. We believe that the academic competence should be a first priority, and that the university administration should have the students and not the effective management of the system as their main object.

Conservative Students has three main goals in the upcoming election:

1) Real student democracy – we need to break the student political monopoly
2) A world class university – academic competence as a first priority
3) Less bureaucracy – freedom and responsibility for own learning

Student political monopoly

At the moment the party Student Council (Studenterrådet) has the seats on the university board. With the highest number of votes SR is almost certain to get both seats as only one seat is up for election each year. You can say that this is how the game works, but that is not the whole story:

In corporation with the leadership of the university the Student Council has all the seats in Strategic Education Council (Uddannselsesstrategisk Råd). This is a council that Conservative Students has never been invited to participate in, although we have existed for many years.

Moreover Conservative Students only just got a part of the university funds a few years ago, even though the Student Council has had access to it for a longer period of time.
As you can see the Student Council has had a great head start in comparison with the other student organisations. Conservative Students wants to change this inequality, but to do that we need the support from the student voters.

Big political demands

As you all probably know by now, the university has been given very comprehensive demands with very short deadlines by the government. As an example, the university has to reduce the number of students that spent more time on their education than required.

Some faculties are already close to meeting the requirements, but some are far from this goal. This means that some students will experience very big change in their faculty’s traditions and many of the changes will seem excessive and unfair. Therefore the university leadership has to think through their decisions on implementing these strategies so that they will correspond to the unique composition of each single education and it’s traditions.

First of all, I will make my decisions on a centre-right political basis – this alone distinguish me from all the other candidates. It’s my opinion that the individual student should be the main political object and that the decisions shouldn’t always be made on the basis of the lowest common denominator – or on the basis of effective administration.

I’ve been involved in youth politics for many years and I have the experience, the will and the interest to be the best possible candidate. I will at all times prioritize my responsibility as a student political representative.

universitypost@adm.ku.dk

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