LSESU defunds e Beaver a er 74 years

Aarti Malhotra

Bora Bayram

What is the problem?

e SU has informed us that starting next year, e Beaver will receive no guaranteed funding. is was a result of changes made to the SU byelaws last year when entire sections governing e Beaver were removed. ese included provisions which set funding guidelines, foundational principles, and disciplinary procedures. Even though the paper hasn’t received that level of funding in years, the existence of these provisions pressured successive administrations to consider e Beaver’s funding and to take action. However, there is currently no provision guaranteeing any amount of funding to e Beaver ese bye-laws were removed during the Democracy Review that took place over Lent and Summer Term last year. In a series of workshops run by the non-pro t Democratic Society, a group of students were consulted on proposed changes to the bye-laws, with their recommendations being approved by the student body in the is is not a new problem. e Beaver used to publish every single week: now, it’s only every 3 weeks. As of now, we don’t even have enough money to publish our planned 4 issues this term, with costs being expended even on things we did not previously have to pay for. For instance, the SU now obliges us to pay for libel checkers out of our operational budget whereas, in previous years, this was funded directly by the SU. is not only re ects our urgent need for funding but also how e Beaver’s situation will deteriorate in future years if we do not have guaranteed funding. Vani Kant, Managing Editor, has noted how “our primary job has now become lobbying, and the paper’s su ering for it.”

Summer Term. In the course of the dra ing of these byelaws, e Beaver was forgotten: contrary to repeated claims, sections were removed without any consultation with the previous committee. Whether arising out of inattention or apathy, this was a blunder that ultimately calls to question the initiative’s true commitment to ‘democracy’.

In either case, this issue is existential: with funding gone, it becomes impossible for us to publish anything. Printing costs, website and digital platform, and so ware are our only expenditures. And these costs are growing by the day: just earlier this year, our printer instituted a new energy surcharge upwards of £125 per issue. We spend no money on socials — every single penny goes towards achieving our central goal: to make sure students remain well-informed about their Union and university. ere used to be a time when advertising brought in thousands of pounds per issue. However, times have changed, and advertising revenue has become more scarce. Consequently, e Beaver cannot survive without funding from the SU.

When did this start?

A er nding out about the removal of the Media Grant, we spoke to multiple ex-editors of e Beaver. From our conversations, one thing became increasingly clear: the removal of e Beaver’s Media Grant is not an isolated development. On the contrary, it represented a pattern of increasing funding cuts and other issues that the paper has faced in the past decade.

According to members of e Beaver’s previous committees, tensions between the paper and the Union began to emerge in the year 2017. Jacob Stokes, Executive Editor of e Beaver between 2017-2018, recalls two primary causes for the strained relations: nancial and political. Jacob said, “First, it was made clear that e Beaver’s budget should be scoped down over time, with LSESU funding covering something like print and digital hosting costs only. Anything else was expected to be funded via advertising revenue procured by e Beaver’s student team.” e second source of tensions, according to Jacob, were attempts by the Union to wield more managerial in uence over the paper. He said, “An impression was given that LSESU would prefer the executive management of e Beaver be delegated to LSESU sta , with students managing lower-down operations. We were suspicious of such ide- as. Whilst e Beaver is not, should not, and arguably cannot ever be wholly independent of LSESU, there nonetheless remains a state close to maximum independence that can only be ensured if all aspects of the publication are ultimately under student control.”

“ e di culty here though is that ’99 per cent inpendence’ is as good as ‘0 per cent independence’, if that last 1 per cent allows for existential control.”

In the following academic year, e Beaver saw its funds slashed from approximately £20,000* to £12,000. Adam Solomons, Executive Editor at the time, recalls how this budget cut presented a fundamental turning point in e Beaver’s trajectory by forcing the paper to publish fortnightly as opposed to weekly.

Adam explained, “We had to go from printing 32-40 pages each week to around 24 every other week. Digital became the focus and that was that. We pleaded for more money and they adjusted a little, but not much. We saw that as existential — [we] had no idea it would get so much worse [in the coming years].”

By 2021, when Angbeen Abbas took over as Executive Editor, e Beavers media grant had been reduced to £8,000. Given the new budget, e Beaverwas forced to further reduce publishing to every three weeks, limiting output to only eight issues per academic year. It is noteworthy that such consistent cuts in the paper’s funding explicitly violated the LSESU bye-laws at the time, which stated the paper was entitled to enough funds to “produce 21 issues of e Beaver newspaper per academic year.”

Why is this happening?

From our multiple conversations with sta at the Union, this pattern of consistent cuts to e Beaver’s budget and the removal of the Media Grant has been attributed to a rapid decline in the LSE administration’s funding of the Students’ Union. is has also been used to justify policies such as charging societies high fees for using SU venues and a vast reduction in the funding of Athletics Union clubs. However, nancial data about the Union from the Charity Commission seems to paint a di erent story.

LSE’s grant to the Union increases by approximately 2 per cent each year and therefore; it is decreasing in real terms. However, the primary reason for the Union’s tight nancial situation is not LSE, but falling revenues from the Union’s businesses, as illustrated by the closure of Denning Cafe, which was losing money.

While the Union’s income from its trading activities has been falling since 2016, the drop in revenue is particularly large in the 2019-20 nancial year, where income fell by 70 per cent from £1,970,000 to £589,930 compared to the year before, attributed to the economic impact of the pandemic.

e SU’s commercial failings are seriously a ecting its nancial prospects. However, it is unclear why e Beaver should be defunded. e Beaver’s role is ever more relevant as Union members need independent and rigorous reporting on these challenges. Previously, the Union recognised that in 1973 as it was ghting its own existential funding battle with LSE: it allocated almost 10% of its grant to ensure e Beaver could continue informing students. Now, as we ask for the bare minimum to continue this legacy, the SU should look to its past. Given how e Beaver in recent years has taken up a mere 0.2 per cent of the overall SU budget, guaranteeing the paper a secure annual budget is not a di cult nancial commitment for the Union to make.

What are the alternatives?

e SU has given three suggestions as to how e Beavercan solve its funding problem. However, they are all inadequate and impractical.

We have heard the rst suggestion too many times: ‘Just run ads.’ Unfortunately, it is not as simple as that. Running ads is not a small feat and it does not happen overnight. Under the old bye-laws, the SU was responsible for selling advertising, not editors. is not only re ects the time constraints faced by editors but also the challenge of the task. If the Union is serious about these proposals, then it needs to signi cantly invest in e Beaver over a period of years to even think about advertising as a viable option for nancial independence. Otherwise, it would be throwing its newspaper in at the deep end with no chance of survival.

Second is the idea of charging membership fees or charging for readership. Charging members would mean students have to pay to make their voices heard. Charging readers would mean students have to pay to remain well informed. ese would not only introduce an unacceptable barrier to engagement but also mean the SU was abdicating its moral responsi- bility to ensure students have access to free and independent information about the Union. ird is for us to apply to the Students’ Union Fund (SUF), a fund which gives a maximum of £5000 to each society. Putting aside the fact that even if we received the maximum amount of funding from SUF there would only be enough money to publish 5 issues a year, we would be forced to reapply every year.

We have been assured by the Sabbatical O cers, especially General Secretary Tilly Mason, that they will not let e Beaver die. We appreciate their support; however, it is unfortunately not enough for only this year’s sabbatical team to commit to funding us (which, to be clear, we haven’t explicitly heard from the sabbs). In its current course, e Beaver would have to continuously lobby successive sabbatical o cers for essential

What are we proposing?

is is why we are proposing to bring about a more permanent solution: a change in the byelaws.

Our proposal is to restore provisions which used to guarantee e Beaver a certain amount of funding per academic year. Currently, with our tri-weekly publishing schedule, we need guaranteed funding for 8 issues, as well as money to maintain our website and other digital platforms.

In order to do this, we have called a Student Members Meeting with the support of over 600 students and alumni. ere, we will introduce a motion which details our funding requirements. Students will vote on our proposals, and, hopefully, the future of e Bea- ver will be more secure.

To be clear, it is not legally possible for the bye-laws to force the SU to give funding to a cause, as budgeting decisions are exclusively the purview of the Trustees. However, our proposals will do the next best thing: force every successive administration to consider e Beaver’s funding and make the students’ support of e Beaver known. Democratic mandates are powerful; any decision that goes contrary to the student body’s wishes would be vigorously scrutinised and hard to justify.

To further this democratic mandate, we will also submit a policy proposal. is is a separate process from the Student Members Meeting as it will include a panel of students and is only valid for two years. Combined with the mandate we hope will come out of the Student Members Meeting, the trustees will face a stark choice: to fund e Beaver or go against the will of the student body.

“SICK” LOOKS: why haute couture brands deserve criticism

Maria Vittoria Borghi Contributor

TW: mention of mental health disorders and suicide

Few people are unfamiliar with Yayoi Kusama and her fixation with mesmerizing patterns, splashing colours, and shapes of infinity. Subversive, immersive, and extravagant, her work feeds into the fantasies of the ultra-creative Generation Z. This is probably why, despite having been active for decades, Kusama’s career has made a strong comeback in recent years.

The success might also come from her personal life. The Japanese artist suffers from hallucinations and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and the so-called “Kusamaification” of objects and spaces is a vivid portrayal of these life experiences. Not only does Gen-Z report considerably higher rates of mental illness and distress, they are also more determined to talk about such experiences; it’s therefore understandable that some young people might view the artist as a role model. Kusama’s renewed success seems welldeserved, considering that she opened up about her condition as soon as she attained celebrity status, that is, in a time before our collective awakening on mental health stigma.

Regardless of natural charms and talents, every thriving artist needs regular promotions, and Kusama appears well aware of that. As a seasoned professional in the popularity game, the 93-year-old must have noticed that the real challenge is not short-term success, but staying relevant for a sustained period of time and collecting the monetary profits of fame. From this angle, it’s not difficult to see through her new partnership with Louis Vuitton, commemorated with statues and installations popping up in major world capitals overnight. The Kusama-ification of fashion is expected to be a lucrative endeavour for the Japanese creator and the French brand alike: according to the Fashion website Shift, the items of the new collection, which commemorates the 10th anniversary of their previous successful 2012 collaboration LV x Yayoi Kusama, is 'already a soldout phenomenon'.

While certainly not the first artist to use her mental health disorder as a source of inspiration, Kusama is one of the few among them to have cultivated an eminent career whilst enduring their condition – the fruits of which would later be reaped also through collaborating with fashion brands. Vincent Van Gogh, for instance, also experienced mental health episodes which he channeled into art. Both artists voluntarily entered a mental institution after a series of psychotic episodes: however, while Kusama has made the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo her permanent residence in 1995 – which she leaves regularly to work in an atelier across the street – Van Gogh ended his stay at the Saint-Paul asylum after a year, dying shortly after from a probably self-inflicted wound. It’s truly regrettable that the Dutch painter will never have a say in how his work, now worth millions, has been used by the champions of haute couture as inspiration material for decades.

However, not all attempts at capitalising on mental health struggles have been well received. Presenting Gucci’s Spring/Summer 2020 collection, for example, must have been a surprising experience for Alessandro Michele. I can only assume that the then-creative director expected Milan fashion week attendees to share his creative vision of reworked straitjackets. He was probably perplexed to learn that the public and even some of his models did not: following the show, the media reported on his insensitive choice (which overshadowed the whole collection) and on the silent protest of model Ayesha Tan Jones, who opened their palms on the runway, which read: ‘mental health is not fashion’. Journalists and bloggers seem to agree.

Is it not, though? Fashion is arguably the most successful industry to have instrumentalised sensitive issues and, despite occasional gaffes, designers must believe that the profits are worth walking the sensitivity tightrope. Recall the infamous 1980s ads by Calvin Klein featuring Brooke Shields and Kate Moss? 40 years later, sexual innuendos, a marketing trick that still pays off, are combined with hallucinationinspired prints to make products more attractive, as illustrated by the Louis Vuitton billboards showing a topless Bella Hadid (who is thankfully over 18, unlike Shields and Moss at the time of their respective shoots) covered by a Kusama tote bag. If Sex sells, perhaps “Sick” does too.

The last decades of runways and pop culture are real-world evidence that mental health is fashionable. The normative debate about what fashion can or should be is failing to address the practical concerns that should be discussed today: not so much whether there is a trend towards capitalisation of mental health and social malaise, but what we are to make of it. It’s time to start considering what the advantages and consequences are and for whom, and how to ensure that the benefits outweigh the risks.

We will have to accept that Haute Couture emulates and profits from Van Gogh’s and Claude Monet’s compositions; we can maybe even look past the comedian wearing a Hermès scarf while mimicking Edvard Munch’s The Scream on the cover of Vogue Korea. Still, we must claim something in return: social responsibility. The eagerness to exploit creative output that has undeniably emerged from suffering must be equally matched by donations and awareness campaigns. Kusama seems excited to work with Louis Vuitton, but to what extent are they giving back to the community?

Despite their outstanding commitment to environmental, cultural and social causes, a clear articulation of their support for mental health issues appears to be missing from their 2022 ESG report and Code of Conduct. Even their brilliant initiative 'WECAREFORMODELS', which was designed to create a safe working environment for models and set new standards in fashion, avoided words such as “mental health”, “depression” or “anxiety”, while offering tips for stress and food management. The same can be said about the LVMH Heart Fund, which celebrates its first anniversary in June 2023. This new scheme for employees facing “critical personal situations as well as challenging day-to-day issues” sounds impressive. However, it’s hard to ask for help when there’s reluctance to call a spade a spade: the fact that such an influential company shies away from employing the vocabulary which describes the reality of so many people points to the hesitancy of a whole industry to explicitly support affected communities.

This is what we should be calling haute couture out on: their ambiguous involvement in the fight to support people with mental disorders – a fight they should be openly and consistently spearheading, given that they benefit from their creativity. Not using Kusama’s success to do that feels like a missed opportunity. Brands should honour the hardships of the artists they are ‘inspired’ by in times of artistic or intellectual drought: if we can push them to publicly do that, maybe we can turn this trend into a collective educational and healing opportunity. Now, that would be sick!