Cutting to the Point: Michael Chessum

By the time you read this, the Browne Review will have reported, or will be days away from doing so. He is likely to recommend a rise in fees to £7000 or even £10,000. That would amount to a market in fees – the beginning of the end (in earnest) of university education as a public sector service. These moves threaten to subject our education to the logic not of students or staff, but to the abstract wrangling of a market mechanism – unaccountable in any meaningful way to us; education run as a profitable enterprise. Just a year or so after the total collapse of the financial sector, the political sphere has returned to the neo-liberal dogmas. It’s as if nothing ever happened.

Simultaneously, the government will attempt to drive through the most brutal cuts we have ever seen. In the name of the national interest, you understand. Rather than ask wealthier members of society to take the strain, or the bankers, or cut expenditure on wars, or tax breaks for private schools and corporations, it wants us – and the rest of the majority population – to be content will the slashing and burning of our education, healthcare and jobs. That means that if you’re at a small or less wealthy university, you might not have one next year. At UCL it’s the comparatively little things – second year Spanish students no longer get grammar lessons, for example. You would think that students might be a bit miffed about all of this, and you might well be right.

There are signs that that wave of resistance might be beginning to appear and I mean in earnest, not just in the way that hacks and organisers like to pretend about. We may well see tens of thousands on the streets on the NUS Demo on November 10th. And last Wednesday, about 200 people turned out at (the supposedly apathetic) UCL to hear Tony Benn talk about resisting the cuts. At that meeting, one American student made an insightful comment: he reminded us that in the US, where fees are huge and he had to work a fulltime job at a chain store, you don’t have time to resist, or to talk or to think. “Never let it get to that point,” he said.

Look closer to home, and this pattern can be observed here, too. The history of the recent student movement in Britain is a history of tipping points. Every material defeat – fees, higher fees, cuts, debt – means a shift in consciousness: students-as-consumers, universities-as-businesses, sometimes infringing into the commercialisation of our student unions themselves. We seem to have been losing for a long time: many students already work jobs; many already see university as a consumable commodity on a market. In the ‘fast-moving’ world of higher education, the spirit of the welfare state is being melted down and packed off for export. There is an emerging generation of people who do not, by default, understand its points of reference. The conclusion is clear: we have to grasp this moment. The rewards for doing so are clear for all to see – a wave of youth and indignation could rip the walls of injustice – here and abroad – down around it. There are many more students than in the 1960s and 1970s, and our ability to trigger resistance amongst organised (and informally organised) workers must match our strength in numbers.

And the dangers of failure are just as stark: the immediate catastrophes of the cuts for the lives of everyone in education and across the public sector, for the poor, for the NHS, for the social scapegoats that will emerge from the tabloids in times of austerity. Finally, there is a broader political issue at stake. When we activists shout angry slogans, we are in truth frightened as well – frightened of a future determined solely and unaccountably by market pressures and dull men without opinions, wearing smug grins and smart suites. It doesn’t have to be that way. Stop the War was a good start. Now we have to convince a generation that they are capable of changing the world. Quickly.
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