Protect the Public University

Students occupying Senate House continued their protest against the ‘marketisation and privatisation’ of university over the weekend, and have vowed to remain there indefinitely.

The building’s Council Chamber has been occupied by a group of around twenty student protesters calling themselves ‘Protect the Public University – Warwick’ since last Friday.

The group published a list of seven objectives on Saturday afternoon, which includes the objective that vice-chancellor Nigel Thrift “relinquishes his unjustifiable pay increase” and uses it to fund a bursary for students from the local community.

A spokesperson for the group told the Boar that morale in the room is “very high” and that they have been holding meetings three or four times a day.

He said the group hoped the University would “publicly affirm” the objectives released on Saturday.

“We want this to be a space of dialogue and the University should recognise this and publicly affirm it by lifting restrictions into this building,” he said.

“This doesn’t just affect people in this room; it affects us all. We are all touched by the government’s higher education policy.

“The Government are actually considering raising the interest rate on the existing [student] loan which would affect us all.”

He said relations between the protesters and security have been friendly.

“We’ve been giving tea and coffee to [them] and actually had quite a nice chat,” he said, noting that the issues the group are addressing concern both students and staff.

The group received a visit from an as yet unnamed Warwick History professor on Saturday who came to show her support.

The spokesperson said the group has seen “an enormous amount of interest” from people outside the occupation, with the group’s blog receiving around 12,000 hits in its first 24 hours.

He wished to stress that the group is not committing a criminal offence and that “occupation doesn’t have to be an extraordinary form of political protest”.

“We are committing civil trespass,” he said. “We are not risking at this stage a criminal record.

“We don’t feel in any way that the student body is being represented. We took the space for as many people as possible to be involved in this dialogue.”

First-year PPE student Miguel Costa Matos, who has been assisting the group by handing out flyers outside Senate House, said: “I fully support the occupation. The intention is to open the space and the University.

“The University is spending more money on private interest and less on our education and the staff that form the backbone of it. They need to remember: we are here.”

But not all students are showing solidarity with the protestors.

Second-year Economics student Sam Fry said: “This protest represents little more than a bunch of bored, attention-seeking, left-wing students with a political motivation to inflict socialist misery on everyone else.”

The Students’ Union is reserving comment until it has had time to hold discussions with the protesters.

The University declined to comment further on the occupation or to address any of the objectives released by the protesters, nor would it say whether any legal action would be taken against them.