That Petition

Entering my second year at Aberystwyth University in 2013, I could feel the institution slowly unravelling around us. The university that had once been a proud Welsh institution, consistently ranking in the top 50, was beginning to show serious cracks. Staff morale was low, student numbers were dropping, and there was a palpable sense that the place was on its last legs.

The situation became acute when rumours started swirling about the future of Pantycelyn, the university’s historic Welsh-language halls of residence. Whilst the university was busy constructing the shiny new Fferm Penglais accommodation complex, there were genuine concerns that the promised “refurbishments” to Pantycelyn would result in the building being sold off entirely. The timing felt deliberate - why invest in expensive renovations when you could simply relocate Welsh-speaking students to the new development and dispose of a much older building that needed serious work?

This wasn’t just about accommodation; it was about the soul of Welsh-medium education at Aberystwyth. Pantycelyn wasn’t just a place to sleep - it was where generations of Welsh speakers had formed lifelong friendships, where the language thrived in an informal setting, where culture was preserved and transmitted. The threat of its closure felt like another step in the slow erosion of everything that made Aberystwyth special.

The Welsh Students Union organised several protests, and I found myself attending sit-ins at the Visualisation Centre. The Pantycelyn crisis erupted in October and continued through to January, with each sit-in getting bigger and bigger. It felt like the protests weren’t really about specific meetings or decisions - they were more about a general angst around the university about the direction things were heading.

As we approached the January exam period, the atmosphere became even more toxic. I remember overhearing conversations between teaching staff about what they’d do if the proposed redundancies to teaching and support staff went through - some were already updating their CVs, others talking about early retirement. What had initially been whispered concerns began to be discussed more openly, with the teaching unions threatening to strike over the cuts. The irony wasn’t lost on us students - we were supposed to be focusing on our exams whilst the very people teaching us were wondering if they’d still have jobs come the new academic year.

There was a feeling of desperation amongst students - we were watching our university being slowly dismantled by management that seemed more interested in balance sheets than educational mission.

The final straw came when news broke that the university was falling even further down the rankings. I was living in Pentre Jane Morgan at the time, and in a moment of financial incompetence that would characterise much of my university career, I’d had to sell my computer because I was rubbish at managing my money. So when I decided to create a petition calling for McMahon’s resignation, I had to make the short walk from my halls to Hugh Owen Library to hastily write it up on one of the public computers.

The spell checker wasn’t working properly, and what emerged was an incoherent rambling - a frustrated student’s angry manifesto typed out in a rush between library sessions. I posted it on my personal Facebook page, not really expecting much. Before I knew it, the post had been shared over 200 times - not quite viral, but a mild cough perhaps. It seemed I wasn’t the only one feeling this way about the direction the university was heading.

Media Interest

The unexpected traction caught the attention of local media. The Cambrian News wanted to speak to me, and I gave them a quick interview that I think made it to their website, though not the printed newspaper. I talked about the general dismay amongst students about the university’s decline - the falling rankings, the atmosphere of uncertainty, the sense that the institution we’d chosen to attend was crumbling around us.

During the interview, they asked me about cuts that were happening at the Arts Centre. I wasn’t aware of those specific cuts at the time - my focus had been on the broader institutional problems rather than departmental details. It was a reminder of how much was happening across the university that individual students weren’t fully aware of, but which all contributed to the general sense of malaise. I’d learn more about the Arts Centre situation later, as it became another flashpoint in the ongoing tensions between management and staff.

Then Aberystwyth Student Media contacted me, wanting to do their own piece. In that interview, I was open to negotiation - I’d spoken to students beforehand, and this is where most people who were willing to engage felt we should be. I stated that we’d be open to her staying if things improved. We wanted dialogue, improvement, accountability, but not necessarily an outright dismissal if real change could be achieved. Shortly after, some guy from The Tab reached out as well. It was all quite weird - I hadn’t expected any of this attention when I’d hastily typed up that petition in the library. I wasn’t enjoying it at all, to be honest. What had started as a frustrated rant was suddenly being treated as serious journalism, and I felt out of my depth dealing with media requests as a second-year student who’d just wanted to vent about the state of the university.

The Meeting

I was contacted on Facebook by someone who purported to work at the Arts Centre who wanted to have a chat. I thought why not, hoping to get them to support the petition - stupidly, I thought they’d let us put banners around the building with links to the petition. I was met at the side door, where the car park to the Media Studies building is, and ushered into the back where there were around 10 people waiting for me.

I wasn’t ready for this. I’d thought it was more a cuppa and a chat. The conversation wasn’t cordial - people had righteous anger. Jobs were being lost after the university pulled back some of its financial support to the Arts Centre. These weren’t abstract cuts or distant management decisions; these were real people losing their livelihoods.

They wanted her gone. Their line was clear: McMahon’s departure, and anything short of that wasn’t sufficient. I told them that I was unsure about having a hard line on her resignation - my comments about wanting the VC to see students eye to eye showed that I was willing to see her stay if improvements were made and jobs were maintained. It was made known to me that they didn’t think much of this position. I wasn’t ready for the intensity of their frustration, or for the realisation that my moderate stance was seen as inadequate by people whose jobs were actually on the line. It was a sobering reminder that behind every budget cut and restructuring decision were actual human consequences that I, as a student focused on broader university politics, hadn’t fully grasped.

This unease about myself and whether I was the right person to ‘do this’ started to sit in, but nothing could prepare me for what happened next.

Meeting the VC

The petition hit 500 signatures, and I felt like I needed to act. Questions about my suitability were being raised, and I felt like I had to prove to people that I was ‘up for the fight’. I printed the pages (3p a page - the stupid bloody university printing system bankrupted many students in its time) and walked into the Vice Chancellor’s office, demanding to meet her.

I was told to go away - “She’s busy” - and I just walked past where I was shouted at by a suited bald man (who was the Pro Vice Chancellor, but I wasn’t aware of that at the time). After explaining the urgency, they agreed that I could talk to her in 15 minutes. I sat and waited.

Going in there, I was met by her, the aforementioned bald man, and a director of communications and marketing. They offered their hands and I refused, duly taking my seat opposite April - ready to go to war.

The only issue was, they agreed with me on every single point I made.

I brought up Pantycelyn, expecting pushback, but they told me that money had been made available for the refurbishment and that it was in good hands - Welsh medium education was important to them, they assured me. They said they hated having to make redundancies, acknowledged that the university was sliding down the league tables, and insisted they were fighting ’tooth and nail’ to improve things.

When I explained that staff were genuinely concerned about losing their jobs, they categorically told me there’d be no job losses to teaching staff - cost savings were being made elsewhere. I genuinely didn’t know how to respond to this reassurance.

Then came the charm offensive. They showed me glossy plans for campus developments - how Fferm Penglais was going to bring in more students, generate more revenue, how they were planning to extend Welsh medium accommodation there to give students more opportunities to live amongst their language. There were detailed proposals for library improvements, renovations to B23 (if you know, you know), ambitious expansion plans that painted a picture of a university on the rise rather than in decline.

I was completely taken aback. This wasn’t the conversation I’d prepared for. They positioned April as the architect of all this amazing transformation, warning me that if we did get rid of her, someone worse would inevitably take over and scrap these progressive plans.

I didn’t know how to respond. Everything I’d prepared to argue against had been preemptively addressed. It felt like they were on my side - or at least, like they understood exactly what I cared about and had solutions for all of it.

At the end of the meeting, they talked about closing the petition. The director of communications gave me assurances that they’d publicise all of this - the development plans, the commitments to Welsh medium education, the promise of no teaching job losses. That was a main reason for me agreeing to close it. Stupidly, I thought they’d actually do it, but in hindsight I should have kept the petition open and only closed it after the communications went out, maintaining leverage. Of course, no such communications ever materialised.

I walked out of the room and went back home, and it was a miserable night. Although the walk from the Visualisation Centre to Pentre Jane Morgan wasn’t too far, the rain hit like a tonne of bricks and I was drenched. I confided with my flatmates about feeling incapable and went to bed. I closed the petition after tearfully confiding with my flatmates.

The Phone Call

One or two days later, I was dosing off when I received a telephone call from someone reporting to be from The Times Higher Education. Those couple of days had been hellish - people were harassing me about the closure of the petition, and I’d been reading comments on the ASU page about me stabbing people in the back. A second petition had been created by someone who I now know worked for the Arts Centre, or was a close relative to someone who worked there. It quickly got 500 signatories, but as far as I was aware, the communications pieces were about to come out and people would feel the same way I did. They said they wanted to have a chat, and I said sure, as long as it was off the record. I was told it wasn’t being recorded. It’s naive in hindsight - a journalist isn’t going to ‘want a chat’ - but I was much younger then.

It was a standard line of questioning, and I think I’d got good at it by then. I had a standard response that I’d memorised, and nothing really changed from interview to interview. I was actually pleased that something as large as The Times Higher Education was contacting me, as it meant that we as students had some elements of control in this situation.

As the conversation was wrapping up, the journalist said “oh, just one more thing.” I remember thinking that it was just going to be asking if I was okay with them printing this, and I didn’t think much of it since everything I’d said was consistent with what I’d said up to that point.

The question came: “So we’ve heard about an £800 payment that went into your bank account last week.” My heart sunk.

The implications were obvious - they were suggesting I’d been bought off, that my petition was some kind of performance funded by unknown benefactors. The timing couldn’t have looked worse, and they knew it.

As I mentioned earlier, I was rubbish at managing my student grant, and had run out of money. It was nearing the end of term and I wasn’t going to get any money soon. I was on my arse, surviving on whatever loose change I could find and the occasional meal from sympathetic friends. The university had a support scheme wherein if you divulged your bank account information, someone in the support offices would look through it, and if you weren’t being too stupid with your money they’d give you enough to last until the end of term.

I had put the application in many weeks before - long before the petition was even a thought in my head. Either the day before or after I had put the petition online (I can’t remember which), I’d received an email saying they were fine with giving me a small amount of money. It wasn’t £800 - it was closer to £400 - but it was massively needed at the time. The fact that it had arrived so close to the petition going live was pure coincidence, but try explaining that to a journalist who’d clearly been tipped off.

I was genuinely shook and stammered “Yes? I got a grant because I ran out of money??” The person on the other end went “Hm, very good - thank you” and hung up. That was it. No follow-up questions, no chance to explain the timing, no opportunity to provide context.

I was in a corner. Someone close to me or within the university must have leaked this - someone with access to confidential student financial information had deliberately fed this to a national publication to discredit me. The violation felt as significant as the accusation itself. Who could I trust? How far up did this go? Was this the university’s way of fighting back?

The Sleepless Nights

The anguish was overwhelming. If The Times Higher Education published this allegation, it would spread through Aberystwyth like fire through dry wood. The thought of being branded as corrupt, of having my integrity questioned by everyone I knew, was paralysing. I spent two nights without sleep, genuinely terrified that this mistruth would be shared and ruin my life.

By the second day, desperation drove me to action. I wrote an open letter explaining why I had closed the petition, laying out what I had witnessed in that meeting and promising that the university’s commitments would soon be public knowledge. I tried to get ahead of the rumours, explaining that false allegations were circulating and that they were categorically incorrect.

Using the last of my printing credit that year - those precious pennies that every skint student hoards - I printed off as many copies as I could manage and distributed them around campus. It felt futile, like trying to stop a tsunami with a bucket, but I had to do something.

The Anticlimax

On 22nd May, The Times Higher Education published their piece. I held my breath as I read through it, searching for any mention of financial impropriety, any hint of the accusation that had kept me awake for days.

Nothing. Not a word about the grant.

It was all for nothing. The sleepless nights, the desperate letter, the last-ditch campus flyering campaign - all to counter an attack that never came. In hindsight, they would have had to prove their allegation, which would have been impossible because it wasn’t true and I had emails to demonstrate the timeline. But young me didn’t think like that. Young me just panicked.

Meanwhile, the second petition continued to gather momentum, run by hardliners who wanted nothing short of McMahon’s removal. But ultimately, nothing came from that either. The university weathered the storm, and life moved on.

Looking Back

Over a decade later, the story looks rather different. Pantycelyn did eventually reopen in 2020 following £12 million of investment, and continues to provide Welsh-language accommodation for those who want it. The university began to recover in the rankings. The Arts Centre remains open. April would later step back from her role to work elsewhere.

The irony isn’t lost on me that many of the things I was fighting for actually happened - just not in the way I expected, and certainly not because of my hastily written petition. The protests worked, in their own way, though perhaps more through persistence and collective action than through any single dramatic intervention.

What I learned about institutional politics was sobering. Universities are complex beasts where good intentions can clash with financial realities, where passionate students can be outmanoeuvred by experienced administrators, and where the line between consultation and manipulation can be razor-thin. The university didn’t lie to me in that meeting - they showed me real plans and made genuine commitments - but they also knew exactly which buttons to push to neutralise a troublesome student activist.

I learned about the media too - how a casual phone call can be anything but casual, how information can be weaponised, and how young people without media training can find themselves completely out of their depth when dealing with national publications. The violation of having my financial information leaked felt as significant as any political disagreement.

Despite all of this - the manipulation, the stress, the sleepless nights - I stayed in Aberystwyth to do my PhD. I still love the place and would always recommend it to prospective students. Sometimes the most important lessons come from the most difficult experiences, and sometimes fighting for something you believe in is worthwhile even when you don’t win in the way you expected.

The broader lesson about how universities were changing - becoming more corporate, more focussed on metrics than mission, more willing to sacrifice tradition for short-term financial considerations - has only become more relevant in the years since. But institutions are still made up of people, and people can still be influenced by passionate voices, even young and inexperienced ones wielding nothing more than a petition and a stubborn refusal to accept that things can’t be better.

And if you’re thinking about doing a petition, do it - because you’ll be able to write about it in a couple of years’ time when you’re bored with a sinus infection.