Student unions at Lund University

Student unions at Lund University organize students on a faculty and department levels and monitors education quality and fairness at the university. The umbrella organization Lund University Student Union Association (Lunds universitets studentkårer; LUS) represents the unions nationally (such as in the Swedish National Union of Students), and in turn, the collective representation of the university's more than 40,000 students in relation to the university and others.

Student unions monitor and participate in the planning of education provided at their respective institutions, usually divided into a block covering educational issues (quality of education, focus, pedagogy, content, coordination, etc.) and a block covering social issues related to studies (study infrastructure—housing, healthcare, library and computer resources, working environment, etc.).

Other common areas of responsibility within the unions concern labor market issues, internationalization, and gender equality and diversity issues. In other parts of the country, a great deal of energy is devoted to organising social events for students, often in the form of pub and party activities, but also sports activities, student media and reception activities for new students. In Lund and Uppsala, this is formally considered to be the responsibility of the nations - as is their main focus - although the unions do spend significant resources on arranging their own balls and initiation periods for new students. The guilds of TLTH are very much an alternative to the student nations for engineering students in terms of the social activities that they provide. Before the university was given responsibility for student health, many unions were responsible for student healthcare.

Lund students were historically all organized under the banner of the Lund Students' Union (Lunds Studentkår; LS), which was officially founded in 1867. By the 1960s, the union had become a party-political organization ruled by indirect democracy. In 1984, the engineering students seceded from the union, and formed their own union, TLTH. Ten years later, it was decided that the unions should be organized on a faculty-level. By 1996, the LS had become obsolete and was ultimately liquidated as an organization in 1998. The succeeding LUS would form the new cooperation organ of the unions, and would also take over the ceremonial functions of the former LS - such as the Rektorsuppvaktning ceremony on May 1st.

Prior to 2010, it was obligatory to be a member of a student union, and where applicable, a student nation.^[1] The so-called Kårobligatoriet was abolished in the Summer of that year, which led to the creation of the Studentlund cooperation.

There are nine student unions at Lund University that are supposed to represent and support students on the faculty and department levels. Oftentimes, the unions are organized into sections or guilds to better support students studying at larger departments, with some sections and guilds representing students at the programme-level.

• LUS - Official website

• Tersmeden, Fredrik (2016). "Studentliv". In Magnusson Staaf, Björn; Tersmeden, Fredrik; Francke, Petra (eds.). Lunds universitet under 350 år – Historia och historier.