Sofian Kourkzi

Hi! I’m Sofian, your current SU President, and I’m running for re-election. I’m looking forward to continuing building on collective knowledge and using my experiences in this role to strengthen student voice and power.

In my term as President, me and the rest of the sabbatical officer team have continued to:

• Build and defend student power through increasing visibility and support to student-led campaigns
• Defend academic freedom, the right to protest and Anti-Zionism as a protected belief
• Support the student movement, locally and nationally
• Support students through academic and housing issues
• Represent and fight for student interests in University governance structures ensuring that so-called high level visions do not ignore our everyday lived experience

If re-elected, I will be able to take the work that I’ve been doing further. To ensure the student voice is represented at every level of our university, and so that management is held to account when their choices affect our everyday lives. And to ensure the Students’ Union lives up to its name, and becomes a real place for all of us to make decisions about our futures collectively.

In the last 2 years, we’ve simultaneously seen the strongest student mobilisation in at least 2 decades, as well as a generalised crisis of Higher Education. Prompting our University to push through redundancies and suppress students rights to protest. All while the administrative and timetabling issues we face are used as justification for even further destructive cuts.

The state of the Higher Education sector, and management’s ill-advised decisionmaking over the last 10 years, cannot be used to justify the disconnect between what we were promised, and what we are provided with. We should be able to bring together our education, our commitments, and our values, without having to redefine ourselves within the confines of any institution. This is our student life, We can define it.

The only way to do this is to realise our collective power. This is how we get a university that isn’t complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, that embodies the will of its students, that respects its staff. 
Now, more than ever, we need a strong students’ union that can be a place of refuge for students, where student ideas and student life can flourish.
A Student Union that empowers and emboldens us to not accept what we’ve been told is the only way out of this current crisis. To demand an alternative that is created by and for all who contribute. From the students, through academic and admin workers, to the cafe workers and cleaners whose labour is made intentionally invisible.

As your President, I will continue to deliver on three fronts:
For Student Experience:

• Ensure all SU Student Staff get paid a Real Living Wage.
• Campaign to ensure quicker responses and more transparency to student records and issues.
• Campaign for improved access to ECs and RASAs, to reduce delay and misinformation which unfairly impacts students.

For The Community:

• Champion for an open forum where students’ concerns are publicly acknowledged and addressed, where the institution is held accountable.
• Campaign for a standard grant programme which student-led groups, liberation groups and projects, as well as societies and sports clubs can apply to year-round.
• Ensure we get timetables early and students always have time off for sports practice.

For Change:

• Continue to ensure commitments to student groups, including Goldsmiths for Palestine, are completed.
• Build on the university’s existing commitments to student groups by building partnerships, such as through education partnerships with Palestinian Higher Education.
• Build open community education and political learning space, bringing together students, staff and community members.