Student’s Stand Up by Sitting Down
March 15, 2009
2009 has seen the largest wave of Student activism for a generation. Occupations by students have occurred at 25 universities across the country , including; Oxford, Kings College London, Manchester, with even Queen Mary, University of London getting involved. Student Activism has seemed dead for the past few decades but look not very long ago, and the student spirit was alive and able to achieve great change, for example when “busloads descended on the capital in the late 1980s in a wave of anti-apartheid rage.” Why though, in a time when a univeristy education is increasingly available to all, regardless of social, economic or political position do students feel they have a right to complain?
The majority of students today have grown up with a predominantly Labour government, headed by Tony Blair, and more recently Gordon Brown. We have seen the Government wage extremely unpopular wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and now we see the same Government doing nothing to prevent the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza. It seems Gaza has been the last straw for many students and has led them to organise rallys, marches and sit-ins.
On the home front, meanwhile, students are subjected to having to pay more and more for a university education through the introduction of top-up fees, which may soon have their cap removed, allowing universities to charge whatever they like. To add insult to injury, the degrees for which we pay so much money for are no longer even worth much, which thousands of graduates are currently finding out the hard way as they desperately search for jobs. Many young people, graduating with good degrees from prestigious universities are finding that there are no jobs available, and that to get anywhere they must first either pay another few thousand pounds for a Masters Degree or work for free for several months in an internship.
With a mountain of debt piling up, no prospect of any job at the end of their degree, and our educational institutions remaining silent on issues such as the conflict in Gaza, it is any wonder that students feel the need to express their anger and frustration through occupations in their universities.
March 15, 2009 at 10:42 pm
It’s about time we rekindled the spirit of ’68 when students from Paris, to Berkeley, and from Japan to Italy took part in politically motivated protests. I really should have gone along to the sit in at Queen Mary. Apparently some really good speakers such as Lindsey German came in to speak.
Students and society at large is so politically apathetic compared to those times. The remarkably influential New Left movement grew out of ’68 and maybe some of the idealists who took part in this wave of protests were trying to do something similar. It was a shame that it received such negative reporting in QMessenger and not an encouraging response either from the head of the SU.