News

Craccum Editor Thomas Dykes may lose his position next week following a petition from 20 members of the Auckland University Student Association (AUSA) which calls for a motion of no confidence against him.

The petition claims that Craccum (Auckland University’s student magazine) has been overtly political, offensive, and unrepresentative of all students under Dykes’s editorship. The AUSA executive has accepted the petition and called a Special General Meeting of the association on April 26 to vote on the no confidence motion.

Editors of Craccum are elected each year, rather than hired, as is the practice at other student media outlets. AUSA president Arena Williams said in a statement, “The Auckland University Students’ Association has a proud history of electing the editor of the student magazine. It’s a democratic platform for expression of students’ views, and if students are unhappy about how it has been run this year, they’re entitled to have their say at a Special General Meeting.”

Kirk Jacinto, the student behind the petition, says that his move against Dykes was prompted by his disappointment with this year’s first few issues of Craccum. “One gets the impression that this isn’t a magazine that one picks up to forget about your stresses at university, but rather a magazine you pick up to feel a bit more depressed about things.”

Dykes claims that it is his attempt to make Craccum more attractive to the entire student body that has left some unimpressed with its new format. “What we have been trying to do is raise the intelligence, and there has been a bit of a backlash to that,” he told Critic. “However it ends up, it is a win-win. We’re making a magazine that we’re proud of and we’re not going to change that. If I lose, they want more cock jokes, they get more cock jokes.

Jacinto says that the problems have little to do with a lack of dick, saying, “I am aware that many [readers] miss dick jokes, but I don’t think that’s the issue. It’s the overall lack of comedy, relevance and focus on the students. I am not in this as a result of a lack of dick jokes.”

Jacinto, who unsuccessfully ran against Dykes for the editorship last year, says he will run in the resulting by-election if Dykes loses.

Craccum, which first began publication in 1914, has had a number of high-profile former editors, including Invercargill Mayor Tim Shadbolt and former Speaker of the House Jonathon Hunt. This is not the first time that Auckland students have exercised their democratic right to remove the editor, with the last vote taking place under similar circumstances in 1989.

Critic News Editor Charlotte Greenfield suggested that a similar ability to expel the Editor of Critic should be put in place at Otago University. In response to this clear attempt to undermine his authority, Critic Editor Joe Stockman challenged Greenfield to an “Arm wrestle/bake-off extravaganza, to once and for all end these needless leadership challenges”. The results were unknown at the time of print.