Uni activism back with a bang

The occupation of Warwick Arts Centre’s conference room came almost as an anomaly. As news of occupations and walkouts filtered in from around the country over the last couple of days, I could hardly have imagined the energy that I had seen at the NUS London demonstration earlier in the month bursting into something like this. During my time here, the University has seemed too settled, too sedate to give rise to that kind of thing: Warwick is a place where any classroom discussion gone political would be swiftly punctured by the needle of capitalist realism – “Well that’s not how it works in real life, is it?” – where the swagger of Business School students provides a permanent reminder of the economic ideology on whose sufferance you’re still in education.

Warwick was one of the UK’s major hotspots for student activism in what Alain Badiou has called the ‘Interregnum’ of the late 60s to the mid-70s, but has since become defined by its status as one of the pioneers of the monetisation of the academy, a mission in which Richard Lambert and Nigel Thrift have found its latest and least shakeable champions. It was appropriate that the tactic of the university occupation, following the model of factory occupations, should arrive at the point, at the end of the 60s, when higher education was first being reoriented towards a role of serving the market and that has found its logical conclusion in the Browne Report’s proposals: to almost completely axe the teaching block grant, and allow universities to charge triple the current top fees.

The coalition’s moves are not simply ‘cuts’ and ‘fee rises’, but an attempt to wholly change the way we conceive higher education: not as a public good – one of the crucial spheres of civil society – but solely as “a motor of the economy”, a means of improving the value of one’s labour power for sale at a later date. The media misrepresentation of student activists as “vandals”, as solely and selfishly defending their own interests, are necessary to naturalise the government’s own ideological violence. It is to distract the public away from the possibility that there might be another conception of education – not, in that awful phrase, “learning for its own sake”, but for the sake of a value not posited in terms of the endless accumulation of cash. It is the notion, so difficult to imagine after 30 years of neo-liberalism, that the society we owe to ourselves might be one that doesn’t alienate the majority from the fruits of its wealth and knowledge.

The resurgence of student activism at Warwick is testament to a renewal of our political imagination. Against the monotone of ‘there is no alternative’, they’re helping, as their predecessors did, to posit the idea that we might one day control our own lives. We are all in it together now, but not in the way the coalition thinks.