As of this week, there will no longer be a friendly porter man-ning the lodges in Vanbrugh

and Derwent overnight. The Univer-sity has scrapped the services in these bases, instead using one porter in Lang-with to look after all three colleges.

Heslington Hall top dogs reckon that it “makes sense” to merge the service of the three smaller colleges.

With this in mind, I spent the evening with one Derwent porter on his night shift, to find out exactly what we will be miss-ing now that the service has been axed.

The shift starts at 8pm. The porters lodge is still really busy, with plenty of students coming and going. Terry* is clearly popular and well known to many of them, they call his name and give him the thumbs up as they head out to town.

There are quite a few lost freshers too, who approach the desk nervously to ask for directions to a room in Derwent where it seems a so-ciety is holding their welcome meeting.

“I think it’s so important that there is someone here,” says Terry. “You get all kinds of problems when there’s not."

He explains that before Freshers’ Week kicked off properly there was not a porter in the college every night. One morning Terry arrived at the lodge to find a Chinese student surounded by piles of luggage, waiting to be let into her room. She had been on her own not knowing what to do for 6 hours.

“This poor little student, did not one person see her? It’s outrageous,” says Terry. “Security are meant to be keeping an eye on the college when there is no porter there, but clearly this is not hap-pening. They just said that she should have used the red phone to call for help but for her it was a culture shock, she needed someone here to be a friendly face, someone who could tell her what to do.”

On a typical night, especially at the be-ginning of the academic year, Terry reck-ons he lets in about 5 or 6 students who have locked themselves out or lost their keys.

He is called out frequently to deal with noise complaints about students play-ing their music too loud or smokers get-ting too noisy outside bedroom windows.

Smokers are also often guilty of wedging block doors open so that they can come and go easily, but then forget to close up when they go to bed. Terry ends up trailing around shutting all the doors, making sure that students can sleep safe from the threat of intruders.

I begin to wonder when the new sys-tem kicks in, how all these little jobs will be managed by just one porter, who will be dealing with a much bigger area

and much more students. Surely he will be rush-ing around so much that there will never be any-one in the porters lodge?

In a statement the Uni-versity have said: “Por-ters are not part of the formal student welfare system. There is an ex-tensive welfare network in place to support stu-dents and many of the members of that system are resident on campus.”

It’s 1.30am and this “extensive welfare sys-

tem” is just about to be put to the test. Terry gets a call from security, who

have themselves just been phoned by an anxious parent. The parent has been un-able to get hold of her son and she is wor-ried about him because he has been very stressed over the last few days. She wants someone to go and check that he is ok.

So Terry looks at the list of wel-fare officials that he has been given, and tries to call the Langwith Dean. The number is not recognised. Terry does not find out until the following night that the person listed as Langwith Dean left University some months ago.

“The people they tell us are meant to deal with welfare just don’t exist!” he tells me, outraged.

In the end Terry himself had to go

over to the Langwith block with a secu-rity officer and the student turned out to be fine. But with such an unreliable welfare system in place Terry says he “dreads to think” what will happen when Vanbrugh and Derwent night porters are no longer there to fill in for them.

In fact, porters sometimes even make the difference between life and death. Terry tells me of one freezing cold win-ter night when a student dressed in only his underpants was spotted on CCTV stumbling around the college.

Fearing that the student was locked out and would be put at risk if he stayed out in the cold for too long, Terry set out on a frantic search for him. But when he finally found the student amongst the trees between Derwent and Langwith, Terry realised the situation was much worse than he had first thought. The student was brandishing a knife and had cut himself all over his body; blood was pouring from multiple wounds.

Terry immediately recognised the boy, who was known to the porters as a bit of a loner. He was able to call him by his name, which calmed the fren-zied student a little. Terry then managed to coax the boy inside and called Secu-rity. Terry angri-ly recalls that it took Security 25 minutes to reach them, during which time he could not take his eyes of the boy for one second, for fear of what he might do to him-self.

“That guy would have lost his life if no-one was here,” says Terry. “He

even said so himself a few days later.”Such extreme instances are rare,

but Terry says that porters deal with distressed students fre-quently. Twice last term girls thought they had been followed home by strange men. Terry remembers hav-ing to call an ambulance for a student who had cracked his head open whilst leap-frogging over a bollard whilst drunk, and knows one porter who has had to deal with two instances of resi-dents having heart attacks.

Other times students are just upset and need some-one to talk to. “We normally will sit them down, make them a cup of coffee and

talk to them about it until they feel bet-ter,” says Terry. “God knows how they will feel when they get back here, scared

or hurt and just see a sign.”The very same night that

I talk to Terry, he hears that at Vanbrugh a female student has collapsed under the influ-ence of alcohol. Luckily there is a porter on hand to deal with the situation. Had this happened just a week later, no-one would have been there.

“How long would it have taken for someone to walk from Wentworth to Vanbrugh to have dealt with this incident, how long would it have been for someone to even have no-ticed we had a collapsed student if Vanbrugh had been shut?”

Terry is disgusted that the University has axed the 24/7 service, and is fearful about what their next plans might be.

He and other porters that I talk to are all worried that the new service is just the lat-est step in a scheme to get rid of night portering entirely.

“The people at Heslington Hall, they don’t listen to us and they don’t tell us what is going on. They are not interested in students and they are not inter-ested in porters,” explains Terry.

“They want to turn us into glorified reception-ists,” he says gloomily.

Vanbrugh and Derwent porters lodges will only open now from 8.30am-6.30pm Mon-day to Friday, even though stu-dents arguably need the porters the most at unsociable hours when less people are around.

“The bosses have forgot-ten that this is a university,” sighs Terry. “It’s getting to a stage where students won’t be welcome here at all!”

* Names have been changed to protect the identity of the porter. (He's not the guy in the photo).

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The people they tell us are meant

to deal with welfare just don't exist!

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LILLEY WHITE?

Porters and students have been upset by a University statement that said that porters are “not part of formal welfare system.” How would you answer these concerns?

Two things – it depends on the defini-tion of ‘welfare’ and the use of the word “formal”. We have a well-founded profes-sional Student Support Service that is the backbone of our ‘formal’ welfare provision. But every responsible member of society provides welfare help if they are there, and porters are around at night so end up tack-ling the first stages of a lot of welfare situ-ations.

So how will students be affected by the changed system?

There will actually be more people on duty during the night than there are already. Including security there will be 11 people altogether on duty, so we haven’t reduced cover, but rather reorganised it. Obviously college welfare teams will not be patrolling and I know that students’ concerns are that there won’t be anyone physically there, but there is a 24/7 provost service on call for all welfare issues. They have had an extra 3-day training session this year.

Can three days training match the 20+ years of experience that some of the porters have?

Well you’re matching rather different things, so a straight comparison is invidi-ous. But we wouldn’t put college teams in to do welfare if we weren’t confident about their training. And twenty years experience is obviously great, but not everyone has that. I think our porters are wonderful, and I have huge admiration for what they do.

Porters have said that they feel like they are not listened to and that they don’t know what is going on. How would you explain that?

There are some changes in training to the management of the porters, because we’ve moved them from Security to Campus Services, but these are matters to discuss with the porters face to face, not through the newspapers.

That guy would have lost his life

if no-one had been here... he said so him-self...

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EMILY FAIRBAIRN INVESTIGATES CAMPUS' MOST IM-PORTER-NT JOB

Jane Grenville, Pro-vice Chan-cellor for Students, talks wel-fare...

WE understand that the reasons behind the decision to cut the por-tering service are financial. Why are porters seen as an expendable service?

We are spending more on porter-ing and security in 09-10 academic year than in 2008-9. There will be a greater security presence on campus at night in this year (11 compared with 10).

Students still pay more than £3000 tuition fees a year, but seem in-creasingly to be getting less for their money. How do you explain the cuts in services whilst tuition fees stand at an all time high?

Portering and security serv-ices are being re-organised and en-hanced, as the University makes the most effective use of its resources. Tuition fees support teaching and academic facilities and are uncon-nected to residential and catering which are managed completely sepa-rately.

No staff have lost their jobs in the changeover, but are not porters worse of anyway because they will be losing their night premiums?

There is no detriment to porters’ salaries as a result of the new ar-rangements.

Some porters have complained of becoming "glorified reception-ists". How would you answer this accusation?

This is not a concern which has been raised by porters with manage-ment. Porters’ duties have always covered a range of skills.

Do you believe that emergencies are less likely to happen at night and over the weekend than during the day?

We have appropriate levels of staff, including more staff at night.

Both students and porters were upset by the Uni saying that por-ters play no formal welfare role. Would you agree that to say that porters play "no welfare role" was not quite right?

We stated that porters were not part of the University’s formal wel-fare system. Clearly they strive, as do all staff, to ensure the well-being of students. They and other mem-bers of staff, who are also not part of the formal welfare system, can and do help students with welfare issues from time to time.

If there is only one night-time porter based at Langwith, do you think that he may be overworked? And if he is away from his desk dealing with one problem, what will happen in the case of an emer-gency with another student?

There will still be porters’ lodges operational in Derwent and Vanbrugh for restricted periods. But the Langwith porter's lodge will still be responsible for fewer beds than other 24-hour lodges on campus. There are also mobile security staff available at night.

Vanbrugh porters currently offer to escort Vanbrugh students back to Fairfax House at night. Will this service no longer be offered?

There is no formal withdrawal of services in this instance. These discretionary services are provided based on the availability of staff.

How will societies get the keys to their rooms if there is no porter based in the relevant college?

They will have to walk a short distance to the 24-hour lodge if the relevant lodge is not staffed.

Is the next step to get rid of night porters altogether?

No.

We gave Keith Lilley, the man behind the cuts, a grilling over the axing of night-time porters in Vanbrugh and Derwent.

15YORK VISION YORK VISION

A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF A PORTERPLAIN JANE?