Cambridge Students’ Union

Membership

All Corpus students are automatically members and have and have access to their services: including the Students’ Union’s Advice Service and access to free sexual health supplies.

Corpus JCR had a long history of being disaffiliated from CSU’s predecessor, CUSU, largely due to financial aspects of affiliation. Being disaffiliated became part of Corpus’s as CUSU-sceptic college however, with the creation of the new CSU, affiliation as a mechanism by which JCRs and MCRs are linked with the Union has been removed.

CSU emphasise that the new union is representative of individual students who are ‘affiliated’ rather than their common/combination rooms through Colleges. This means that, under the new system, the relevant JCR and MCR officers are automatically entitled to a vote in CSU Council matters and they cannot formally be disaffiliated.

Information on the new SU and the JCR’s new relationship can be found here as well as on their website.

Referendum

The Constitution dictates that we must have a referendum on affiliation to CUSU every Michaelmas term, however, as CUSU no longer exists the Constitution will be updated to reflect the new relationship with CSU. Until a referendum procedure has been passed, the JCR will not be attending any SU coucil meetings following the mandate from the 2019 referendum to remain disaffiliated (67.9% of votes cast being in favour of remaining disaffiliated) from CUSU and its successor organisation.

It seems likely there will be a referendum of some kind to decide this relationship but the details are yet to be confirmed subject to both open meeting, college wide ballot and review by Governing Body.

Minutes of last year’s CUSU referendum can be found here.