Editorial: The One Where I Get Self-Indulgent

I’m very sad. This is the last issue of Critic for 2018. I will be moving on next year, appointing a new editor, and leaving this beautiful city and all you wonderful people. That makes me sad.  I love this magazine. I really do, despite all the 4am nights and 60+ hour weeks, I love it. Former editors keep telling me it was the best job they ever had, which I think was meant to make me feel good but honestly just makes me very...

The Best Unpublished OUSA Exec Quotes

Critic has to sit through all the OUSA Exec meetings, which are mostly either horrendously boring or absurdly tense. However, in between there are some ok moments.  So Critic presents: the best quotes from Exec meetings that never made it into articles.      “It feels kind of culty” - Caitlin Barlow-Groome, OUSA President, on the OUSA Exec.   “We love environment stuff” -...

Re-Creation Officer Josh Smythe’s Pay Re-duced by 20%

Josh Smythe, OUSA Re-Creation Officer, has been in the centre of a debate around whether honorarium payments should be linked to an Exec Officer’s performance after his pay was cut by 20% at a recent OUSA Exec meeting for not fulfilling his role to the satisfaction of the exec.  According to OUSA protocol, every quarter every member of the exec has to submit a report detailing what they’ve done up to that point and the rest of...

Consent Workshops in Colleges Fail Due To “Lack of Interest”

Te Whare Tāwharau’s consent workshops in colleges did not go ahead this semester. Melanie Beres, Academic Leader for Te Whare Tāwharau, said that although college leadership were supportive of consent workshops, pick-up from students was “very limited”.  OUSA Colleges Officer Norhan El Sanjak said this “lack of interest” was to do with timing and poor advertising.  “Advertising is...

Proctor Protest Was the Biggest Otago Student Protest Since the ‘90s

The 1990s hold a weird place of reverence in campus politics at Otago. Grainy black & white photos of students seizing control of the Clocktower or marching in their thousands alongside the Leith are impossible to surpass. It’s pretty easy when you’re on a march across campus today to have those pictures in the back of your mind and wonder what it’d take for the campus to go into that level of upheaval again. While the...

Critic Breaks Down the Second OUSA Referendum

As winter passes to spring and Mole crawls out of his hole in the ground (casual Wind in the Willows reference for all my peeps out there) the student population gradually come out of hibernation and...

Selwyn 4 Sale

The Anglican Church has placed Selwyn College, one of the four independent colleges left (St Margs, Knox, and Salmond being the others), up for sale. As the oldest college at Otago, being in the possession of the Anglican Church since 1893, this is a historic...

OPINION: Half of the OUSA Exec Positions Are a Complete Waste of Time

OUSA just went an entire year without the Campaigns Officer running a campaign, despite it being in their job title. The closest...

Is This the Sexiest OUSA Budget Yet?

Every year your student union has to lobby the University for funding (which is fucked, we know) and then has to decide where that money will go. A lot of the time these budgets look like a copy and...

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