I tried to write this for over three weeks. Yet every time I got back to it something unsettled me. Questions spun around in my mind: what do I really want to say about the student protests? Why am I so interested in them? Is it because these students and their issues are relatively close to me – in age, ambition, class, and fury?
My starting point: the coalition governments’ proposal to increase university tuition fees to £9000 a year. Not only is this causing a dramatic rift within the inter-party dynamic, but has caused mass student protest on university campuses and other public spaces across England.
During an antagonistic and wine-induced debate I had recently, I was informed that there was no point in a government that did not have ‘realistic’ policies with respect to our education system. ‘Why’, my date fumed, ‘should the government support a young person who wants to do Media Studies at Middlesex University?’ It was only during my attendance at the organised protest on Milbank on 10th November did I realise how ridiculous his incredulity really was. It isn’t about what one studies, but about having the right to study in the first place. Simply put: if the government supports an increase in student fees, a class divide in Britain based on the rich and educated versus the poor and undereducated will inevitably expand. It will add fuel to an archaic class system that is both unique to the UK and out of control. Not only will young people from less fortunate economic backgrounds be forced to enter the workforce rather than have an opportunity to learn for learning’s sake, but those who do have the resources to go to university will be alienated more than ever from achieving a harmonious engagement with the rest of society. The future implications of this: a country less able to communicate, and a society more fractious and disillusioned with its parts, lacking solidarity within its whole.
My ‘attendance’ at the student protest was entirely accidental. I had arranged to meet a friend at Tate Britain in order to see the Turner Prize. Having imagined us sitting on the gallery steps supping Americano in the cold sunshine, we were instead ambushed by thousands of spotty students waving placards. Some of these same students were to make the front pages of every newspaper in the country the next day, accompanied by the headlines: “Biggest riot seen in the capital since 1990”. The media, ever present to document and escalate a furore, have pandered to the notion of a load of students drunkenly chucking fire extinguishers about. I felt reminded of Simone de Beauvoir’s words on the students protesting in Paris in May 1968, designated by the media “as enrages, hotheads, from an early date”. But the difference with the international student uprising of ’68, if it can be helpful to look back, is the alliance then shared with the working classes. “The students, grown more and more numerous and seeing no future ahead of them, formed the focus at which the contradictions of neo-capitalism exploded: this explosion meant that the entire system was at stake and this directly involved the proletariat”. Our situation is different. We suffer collectively from a general disbelief in our power to effect political change, and at the same time we are restrained collectively, by our social and economic differences, to share a common goal. There is no longer any such thing as the working classes, to paraphrase sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s words, it is “freedom to mobility” that defines our class system. Figures such as the tourist and the vagabond/refugee are the new class categories of our era. Similar to the issue of who has the right to traverse geographical frontiers, socio-economic factors affect who has the right to cross intellectual ones. Who is entitled to the option of going to university, to spend time studying, gaining knowledge? For too long our obsession with economic and social status have bound us to choosing certain life paths. Our differences should be used in our fight for free education for all. And to be clear on this: it is not that I believe that everyone should go to university, but that everyone should have the option to go.
My friend and I concluded at the time that it was better to go and check out the Turner Prize than get too involved in the general revelry of protest. Surely it couldn’t be genuinely productive, we concurred. But of course it was! Even if only to both engineer and reinforce a mutual anger, a sense of injustice, and to realise the communal capacity for creating disorder in somewhere as ordinarily ‘orderly’ as Milbank! As Elie Wiesel said “there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest”.
Here’s a vision: free universities cropping up everywhere. Lecturers and pedagogues teaching on the sly, for free, at the back of cafes, libraries, art galleries. More discussion and argument across the board about our right to free university. Knowledge sharing seen as a human right, not as a privilege to those who can afford it. A more creative and lateral thinking coalition!
In the meantime, I’ve a good mind to put on an art exhibition with only half of each artwork on display. The other halves were left unfinished but I couldn’t afford to put them in the gallery space anyway. A queue of artists can stand in the corner next to a make-shift Jobseekers' booth. I might join them.
