Lambert protest

A group of students met last Friday to plan the anti-Richard Lambert protest in response to his calls for higher tuition fees.

Despite the fact that more than 50 people were expected to turn up for the protest-planning meeting on Friday, the actual turnout of around 15 people came as a shock to the organisers of the coalition.

The event, arranged by the Facebook group ‘Warwick students embarrassed to have Richard Lambert as their Chancellor’ had been planned as a precursor to Wednesday 14th’s protest against Warwick’s chancellor which will be held between 8.30am and 10.30am in the Digital Laboratory on campus.

Lambert’s recent comments on raising tuition fees and introducing harsher means testing through the Student Finance company has been vastly opposed by students all over the University.

A protest has therefore been organised for Wednesday morning when the Chancellor will make a rare visit to campus to meet with BBC Business News reporter Torin Douglas for a conference entitled ‘Does Business news make good Business?’

Although the initial protest plan was a fairly passive arrangement – waving banners as the Chancellor exited the conference – one member of the coalition group suggested that such a display would not be overly effective, saying, “If we just stand there with placards, nothing’s going to happen… It will look pathetic.”

The organisers of the Facebook event ‘No To Lambert! No To Higher Fees!’ agreed that a more active form of protest would be more appropriate.

The group is planning to put posters up all over the University on Monday to attract the interest of higher numbers of students. They want to keep the cap on tuition fees and arrange a meeting with University bosses, possibly with a view to force Richard Lambert to resign his post.