Students’ unions occupy a crucial position within UK higher education, having existed in some capacity since the middle of the 19th century. Students’ Union UCL was founded in a recognisable form at the end of the 19th century, with what is now the UK’s largest students’ union coming to fruition in September 1893 (despite attempts by students at University College to try and facilitate a similar institution from as early as the 1850s). Students’ unions carry out numerous functions, all of which have fluctuated in importance over the last century and a half. They are primarily concerned with organising social activity, providing academic and welfare support, representing students on both the individual and collective level and participating in campaigns on issues of local and national importance. In most universities students’ unions are the central linchpin to student life but, as Rachel Brooks and others have shown, their role has remained largely unexplored within academic research, particularly with regards to archival management and collection.
This post reveals issues that currently impact archival collecting at UCL, with particular focus on student publications and student commentary in the digital realm. It was inspired by the round table discussions led by Beth Astridge, University Archivist at the University of Kent, at the ‘Valuing students’ union records and archives’ event in June 2024, organised by the Higher Education Archives Programme in partnership with UCL and supported by the British Academy Research Project ‘Archiving the Mixed Economy of Welfare’.
As Georgina Brewis (the Director of the Generation UCL project) has shown, by virtue of their existence as ‘hybrid bodies that don’t fit into neat organisational categories, students’ union records have… rarely been discussed in archival studies literature’. Alongside the lack of discourse in scholarship around students’ unions archives, records have often been ‘preserved in haphazard ways and students’ unions face many challenges in caring for records today, complicated by often complex relationships with their associated Higher Education Institution’. This has posed numerous issues for research into, and the collection of, materials created by students and constituents of students’ unions.
A core issue is the increasing shift of student publications to social media and other online formats. This is particularly true in the case of UCL, where Pi and The Cheese Grater, the key publications of Students’ Union UCL since 1946 and 2004 respectively, now report on student life via online mediums, such as Instagram infographics and web pages, as opposed to print formats. As has been seen in recent scholarship, the history of students’ unions, and of universities themselves, often relies on what students were writing at critical periods of institutional tumult or development. The articles penned by students are also crucial in writing institutional histories from the bottom-up, with many pieces being highly critical of institutions and thus fitting well into such frameworks. Using such sources shows what those not in charge of universities, but nonetheless highly invested and entrenched within university life, thought of their institutions. Pi, for example, features frequently in Sam Blaxland’s recent pamphlet Students’ Union UCL: A Short History. The fact that webpages and Instagram posts from Pi, The Cheese Grater, and similar publications are not collected by archivists poses issues for future research into student life. As physical copies of papers die out, and web pages become the foremost way of publishing for students, many websites will be lost to the passage of time, be this due to technical errors, funding issues or the general proliferation of content on such platforms. In spite of this, there is positive work being done to make sure that digitised formats of publications are kept in UCL’s online archive of College Periodicals. In recent weeks, I have worked with Colin Penman of UCL Special Collections to fully digitise The Cheese Grater, and have discussed the importance of updating the archival process for the digital age.
However, online memes and other formats of satirical critiques relating to university life are generally not collected by archival teams. The core medium through which most undergraduates satirise, provide commentary and generally interact with their institutions is no longer via physical publications, but rather through memes directed at appealing to common experiences amongst the student population. In trying to appeal to common experience, social media page admins wish not only to garner a large following (which, via sponsorship, can supplement their income), but also to expose some type of surface-level zeitgeist amongst the student body, which otherwise would go unseen.
One particularly interesting case study is MemesOfUCL, an Instagram page with over 23,200 followers as of July 2024. In posting content-light, funny, memes such as a ‘UCL Exam Season Starter Pack’, or a photograph of King’s College Strand Campus next to UCL’s Portico with the title ‘every masterpiece has its cheap copy’, MemesOfUCL, and its King’s College counterpart KCLUniMemes02, supply a digital form of satirical commentary on the student experience and universities themselves. Such pages elucidate the humour, concerns and general disposition of students at any given time in the same way as joke books or satirical columns of papers once did. Some pages, like Imperial Incellectuals (of Imperial College), tap into absurdist and very blunt forms of humour to demonstrate frustrations with the university. Such pages present student stereotypes, such as the supposed activities and opinions of middle class girls at UCL, or the trope that all UCL students are Oxford rejects. These Instagram pages are highly engaged with, as noted by the follower count of MemesOfUCL above. In this regard KCLUniMemes02 is particularly impressive, with one video satirising the use of ChatGPT in essay writing reaching over 4.3 million views. This not only points to the commonality of student experience within KCL, but also across higher education institutions more generally.
It is crucial for special collections services to begin collecting digital pieces, such as memes or short form videos, because Instagram pages and society websites are rather impermanent. Such pages rely on active student engagement, handover between student leaders, and funds to keep website servers and Instagram accounts running. Student social media and web pages can fall victim to inactivity, be this is due to the over-reliance on individual students to master the ever-growing demands of online presence, funding issues or other more general problems. This will hamper future historians in assessing the true nature of student life today, since most events are advertised on social media accounts. Instagram pages and memes will prove a rich source for future historians of higher education. The fact that the numerical interaction with posts and webpages can be accurately recorded, and their evident resonance beyond just the realm of individual institutions, will be extremely important for future generations of social historians seeking to elucidate the nature of student experience.
Collecting digital expressions of student opinion and activity, be they magazine articles or memes, is important in recording the lives of today’s students. UCL is at the forefront of historical research into student life, and the Generation UCL project has prompted discussion in the field of higher education archives regarding the changing nature of student life and the ways in which students express themselves. This must continue, and extend across institutions, to ensure that the rich tapestry of student-made online sources is kept for the future.