Thursday 03-10-2024 - 00:00

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. My name is Dan, and I have the privilege of being President of the Students' Union. I'd like to welcome you to Durham and to the University.

I hope you've managed to get settled in during your first days here. I'd also like to thank everyone across the University, particularly student volunteers, who've worked hard to prepare such an incredible welcome week.

University can be a daunting prospect. There are so many firsts. Leaving home, navigating a new city and learning to live independently. Then there are the bigger things. Maybe, like me, you are the first person in your family to go to university. That is a huge step.

Coming to Durham, with the weight of the institution, the history, and the stories, can be incredibly intimidating. That is why it is important to articulate something very important right here, right now: you got here, so you belong here. This university needs your experience just as much as it needs your knowledge. Share both and do so knowing you have something unique and important to bring to the table.
 

At the Students' Union, it is our job to defend and advance your interests across campus. Our advice service, ASK, also offers independent advice on all manner of issues, such as academic appeals and housing contracts.

We are independent of the University, and often hold them to account in your name, but we also work together to fight for students in the region and across the nation. Last year, we:

• Worked to tackle the cost of living crisis, securing a £500,000 investment in financial support for students,
• Acquired the Rate Your Landlord platform to empower students against their landlords as part of our wider efforts to tackle the housing crisis.
• Alongside the University we co-produced the Access and Participation Plan to break down barriers underrepresented students face when applying to and succeeding at Durham.
• We helped our Estranged and Care Experienced Association to secure a support package for estranged and care-experienced students, including a £3,000 bursary and guaranteed 52-week accommodation.
• We also worked hard to uplift students' voices and empower them to act in their communities and have a say in the running of their university, securing a review of the University's ethical investment policy in the process, a testament to the students' tireless campaigning.

 

You might also encounter us without even realising it!

In your time here, over two-thirds of you will join at least one of our 300 student groups, which cater to a wide range of interests. From Spaceflight, who recently launched a rocket in the Mojave Desert – as you do – or, if you prefer something more down to earth, you could join our Crochet Society. Maybe you'd be interested in joining our Intersectional Feminist Society, Student Action for Refugees, Curry Club or the Welsh Society. We also support the largest charity fundraising event in Europe, DUCFS, which raised over £190,000 last year for the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM). All of which is to say: you name it, we have it and if we don't, you can start it.

At Durham you join an academic community, but you also join a local community in a city with a proud working-class history and people with a background that might be vastly different to your own. I encourage you to embrace it, immerse yourself in it, and I promise you that you won't be disappointed.

The Vice-Chancellor and I have worked hard over the last year to ensure that our relationship as a university community with the wider Durham community is not transactional, but built on a sense of citizenship and shared love of people and place.

As students, you are responsible for standing up for these principles, and taking them with you wherever you go, as many before you have. A few months ago, when the far-right came to this region intent on violence, destruction and hate, it was not the government or the police who stopped them. It was students, staff and residents, the people, who stood side by side and ensured that they did not prevail. It is now your duty, our duty, to ensure they do not return, that they do not dare to return. It is our duty build a community defined by solidarity and mutual aid, by internationalism and diversity, by the harnessing of the transformative power of education - our city of sanctuary - and in doing so strive to show what it truly means to be a university city.

 

Congratulations once again on getting this far, I wish you the very best of luck and can't wait to see what you all get up to in your time here.