Campaign with students — not just on their behalf

In the spring of 1968, a small group of students and intellectuals occupied the University of Paris at Nanterre to protest against university administrators and debate the malaise ailing contemporary French society. What began that day in March continued into May, culminating in the largest general strike in history and almost toppling the conservative De Gaulle-Pompidou government.

The Parisian playbook is open and well-thumbed in Scotland today. Since The Journal last reached your campus a fortnight ago, there have been student occupations at three Scottish universities. In that time, five more institutions have announced vastly increased tuition fees for Rest-of-UK students. As the situation currently stands, at no Scottish university will an English, Welsh or Northern Irish member of the class of 2016 pay less than £20,000 for their degree.

With each announcement has come a stern press release from NUS Scotland and the respective campus unions condemning the increase. But there has been no mass protest like that which brought London to a halt a year ago. The protests on Scotland’s campuses have been small, sporadic and dominated by a cadre of vocal left-wing and students’ union activists — indeed, many of the same faces are to be seen atop the barricades all the way from Edinburgh University to Strathclyde.

This is not to criticise the student activists of today: their ongoing campaign — against policies that may prove detrimental to the diversity and accessibility of the UK’s higher education institutions — is both valid and well-intentioned. But they must be wary of forgetting or leaving behind those for whom they fight. High-visibility protests are useful in helping to keep the debate over education prominent in the the public discourse, but if a wider student movement cannot be galvanised, what hope can there be for success? If, for example, occupations of university buildings are seen by most students as an inconvenience and nothing more, then the action has at least partially failed. The vocal minority must act as a catalyst; a lightning rod around which the majority eventually rally. If they are in fact the sum of all the voices raised against prohibitively high fees, they can be swatted away like a fly buzzing at the head of government: annoying, but unlikely to effect any real change.

Too little has yet been done to engage the student community at large. This campaign started in the students' union, and at this point it suffers from the same sickness ailing those representative organisations: a lack of popular engagement which leaves a few committed campaigners acting not with students but on their behalf. The challenge now is to talk to students, not policymakers: to explain the dangers of allowing these policies — whether rising tuition fees, failures in widening access or cuts to teaching — to pass by unchallenged, and to illuminate unquestionably the need for action.

The massed student populations of either Scotland or the UK are not as assuredly apathetic as some would have you believe, but perhaps it is the case that no-one — and we include in this The Journal and other campus media organisations — has yet made a convincing enough case. Witty placards and impassioned editorials are not sufficient. There needs to be a proper conversation.

May 1968, in as much as it was a vast outpouring of left-wing rage against the French state, is not generally seen as a political victory for the students’ movement or the trades unions who came out in solidarity with them. But it left an indelible mark on the contemporary political discourse in France. If the student movement of today cannot reach beyond sloganeering and carry with them the wider student voice, can they possibly say the same?