Student comments from meetings frequently overreacted to by senior 'management' I've worked at several UK institutions over the past 10 years and one aspect that consistently raises my eyebrows is the reaction to student-staff liaison meetings* from senior members of the team. Often, these meetings are merely an opportunity for the 'representative' to voice their own concerns and are clearly, obviously, not representative. Yet, time after time, when a far fetched and often untrue complaint/comment is made in one of these meetings, senior staff go into full meltdown and start firing off perplexing and demotivating e-mails asking for things to be fixed because the students are unhappy. The simple matter is, as previously stated, these are often not representative views and the sample size is one: the person who said it. 

In any other context, a sample size of one would be immediately disregarded by those with only rudimentary scientific knowledge. No sound conclusion could ever be drawn from that sample. Yet, if this sample happens to be one student in the context of a 'staff-student liaison' meeting then it appears to be absolute fact to senior 'management'.

My question is for fellow academics from across the world, do you have this nonsense to deal with? What do you tell 'management' if they ask you to change based on comments from a single source? Am I being too touchy about it?

I am a lecturer at a UK institution.

*These meetings are usually bi-yearly where student 'representatives' voice any matters arising on their degree



For the those thinking "Jeez, this guy gets a lot of bad comments". I have not once been on the receiving end of this but I know good colleagues lose sleep over it.

I also see the benefits of these meetings, I do not wish for them to be scrapped.
[Converting a comment to an answer at the invitation of @hueblue...]

I feel you are focussing on the wrong part of the issue here. It does not make sense to encourage 'management' to ignore the student representative's views; inevitably this will just create problems and bad feeling in the future, when students get the impression that their input is ignored. 

The real issue is that (at least in your perception) the student representatives are not doing their job properly: they are using their position as a platform for their personal views, rather than those of the student body at large. It seems to me that this is what you should aim to address. Some things to consider:


How well do the student body understand the role played by their representative(s)? 
How are elections handled? Are they treated as important, or an annoyance to be dispatched as quickly as possible in the first lecture of the year? 
Is the student body aware of the issues that are being discussed in meetings attended by their representative(s)? Do they know when meetings are due to take place? 
Are students reminded to send comments to their representative(s) in advance of relevant meetings?
Is there a clear, well-advertised, equitable opportunity for the student body to get together and discuss any issues and concerns they have with the representative(s)?
Do students have any way of knowing what their representative(s) said in meetings? Are minutes or summaries circulated to the student body at large?


I suspect that at present, the answer to most of the above questions is 'No' - certainly that was the case when I was a student. If you can change some of them to 'Yes', you will probably see a marked improvement in the quality of representation.