Check us out on Channel M:
http://www.channelm.co.uk/video_4×3.html?bcpid=1213934526&bctid=1517402038
(I will replace the link with an embed when one becomes available).
This was really exciting, much bigger and more radical than I expected. We broke through police lines several times, and several times stopped them breaking ours. We even resisted the attempt to flush us out of the building when the forces of order “accidentally” activateda horrendous alarm and were “unable” to turn it off for about a million years of sonic hell. This has raised the bar for student radicalism - now who’s up for raising it further?
If the question on your mind is “why, after seizing, en masse, a building that symbolises the neoliberalisation of the university, did we then abandon it and go home after a couple of hours?”, then the following statement from the Socialist Worker Student Society is for you. The organisers of the event deserve a lot of credit for making it happen in the first place, but elements of them were more concerned with keeping things under their own control than in really making the most of the situation. As we run up to the anniversary of May 1968, I have to say I was reminded of someone. Anyway, let’s not lose sight of the amazingness of it all.
On Tuesday over 200 people faced down police and made a circuit of our campus before finishing with the occupation of the Arthur Lewis building. The event, organised by the Reclaim the Uni group, was designed to show the University just how we students feel about the direction Manchester is taking. In a University that is fast becoming a business, where students are being downgraded to distant customers and where lecturers are forced to do more and more research for the sake of profit, the demonstration and temporary occupation offered a different vision of education: one where students and lecturers can join together in a democratically controlled, socially useful institution that is open to all – one that benefits the whole of society.
Once inside, a mass meeting of students debated and decided on a set of demands to issue to the University (printed at the end of this report). The demands encompass a wide-range of concerns that students at Manchester have with regards to our University and the direction of education generally. They include demands for more face-to-face teaching and pastoral care, alongside a commitment to divesting from the Arms Trade and for a Free Education.
At the mass meeting, SWSS members and others argued that we should collectively stay in the building until we had a public commitment from the University to meet our demands – with so many students finally taking control of their education and their Uni, we could have acted as a beacon of resistance for the majority of students across the country who share our vision that Another Education Is Possible. An Occupation at Manchester should have been the spark for movements on campuses across the country that could challenge reactionary Vice-Chancellors like Gilbert and build the national movement that we need to force the government to change its education policies. An ongoing Occupation would have undoubtedly allowed many more students to get involved with the action over the following days, it would have made the national press, it could have been the catalyst for a French or Greek style student movement and it would certainly have forced the University to immediately take notice of our demands. Unfortunately, the disempowering and tightly controlled debate meant that many students drifted off home and a real occupation never materialised.
We have, however, put down a marker. On the 15th October we occupied the Martin Harris centre during the University’s Foundation lecture and on the 22nd April we gave Arthur Lewis the same treatment. The movement against the commercialisation of our Universities – demanding an Education for People not Profit – is going from strength to strength in Manchester: this is our chance to drive home our victories here and to build a movement in campuses across the country. Another Education Is Possible!
The demands set out were as follows; during the very long mass meeting that followed, it was agreed that the fight for a free education be added, although I can’t find the exact wording online.
1: We oppose the move towards the business model at universities: knowledge is not a commodity, education should not be commercialised, businesses should not be calling the shots at out departments and the worth of a study should not be judged according to how much money it creates.
2: Universities exist as part of a community including students, lecturers, researchers, other staff and those outside of the institution itself and should not compete with other universities in the pursuit of the absurd concept of ‘excellence’. Universities are not brands vying for market shares.
3: We oppose the centralised, hierarchical and exclusionary model of management that accompanies the move towards a business style approach to university education. We oppose consultation exercises that do not alter this imbalance of power. Universities must be governed collectively and consensually. Democracy must not be sacrificed for the sake of ‘efficiency’.
4: We oppose the staff cuts, reductions in teaching hours, contact time and study resources that make the experience of university at Manchester so uninspiring for both staff and pupils.
5: We oppose a university that invests money in unethical enterprises, such as the £1.014 million currently invested in the arms trade.
6: We oppose our university’s persistent lobbying for an increase in top-up fee’s. It is likely that this will result in a two-tier higher education system in which top universities are placed further out of reach of students of poor economic background. Education is not the preserve of the privileged and students are not cash cows.
7: We want a decent wage and inclusion in decision making processes for all staff: cleaners, kitchen staff and administration assistants are a part of this university just as much as students and lecturers.
8: We acknowledge that the problems we face at Manchester University are inseparable from wider problems with Neo-liberal capitalism and the unrepresentative political system of present day Britain. We see our actions on campus as part of a wider struggle.
Very interesting and exciting stuff. We organised a protest today in Bangor, but it was much smaller than yours - however, we got some good press coverage out of it and some more people involved in our campaigning (although don’t expect 300 string occupations yet!).
However, I wonder as to how much a sustained occupation would have been a spark for future demos. Not that there isn’t the anger out there but I don’t think at this stage sufficient preparatory work has been done at most unis to enable this - perhaps at more left universities - especially ones with strong socialist/left groups there.
Legendary!
Good stuff! Did you get the sense that most people there were seasoned radicals/activists, or were there quite a few newbies as well?
This definitely brought a lot of new people into activism. Even in the last few hours of the meeting when a lot of the drifters had gone home, I would say about a third were people I’d never seen before. And, speaking to people who weren’t there (like my brother at Salford Uni, where nothing remotely political has ever happened … yet) I think that it’s gonna inspire a lot of people to start thinking about what they can do.
LWC, I really don’t share your pessimism. What sort of preparations?
Why am I pessimistic? I’m not pessimistic in the long run - but please see the report i’ve posted on my blog of our report of our protest the day after the occupation. Unfortunately, most students won’t hear about it unless we tell them, there seems to be little press coverage of it (but no doubt there should be good coverage in various socialist nespapers next week).
Consciousness Is certainly much sharper in Manchester than pretty much elsewhere in the country at the moment - the events there are the vanguard of student activism - maybe London and Sussex maybe be near, from what I’ve hear have quite radical student unions too. But lets be clear we have a big obstacle of a lack of tradition of activity in many places. The political situation is changing this and we shoudl do whatever we can to speed this up - but to expect this to be copied everywhere at the moment is unlikely.
Okay I agree with you more than I disagree. But I do think a sustained occupation in Manchester would have sparked off protests elsewhere. TBH even as it is I hope we’ll have inspired others to up their game, this has to be a high water mark for student radicalism in recent years.
How much interest did the demands about admin and cleaning staff generate? We’ve had a go at trying to get people interested in that at Warwick, but it’s hard to get momentum.
There is a polemic around admin staff cuts, because we do miss them when they’re not there. In terms of staff wages, no, to be honest I don’t think students are all that engaged with those issues. If you have any success in that area, I’d appreciate a few pointers.
One positive step has been our “Education in a Neoliberal World” meeting, co-hosted by the students’ union and the unions with a presence in the uni (UCU, Unite and Unison, if memory serves). The branch secretary of UCU also made overtures for more and closer collaboration between the UCU branch and the SU. We’ll have to see what comes of it.
Even if a lot of teaching staff were present and enthusiastic at the meeting, there’s still a gap between the students and the service staff. I’ve tried starting conversations with the cleaner in my halls, but the language barrier gets in the way.
Certainly the publicity around a sustained occupation would have raised awareness, and like I said in the more politically organised university sparked off some kind of response.
As for the whole staffing question - I agree that it is easier to make links with lecturers but I think the biggest step forward we took in relation to admin staff was by supporting them when they went on strike over pensions in 2005 (unfortunately I could only stay for an hour or so before I had to head off to NUS conference - and this is when I was at Huddersfield Uni, not Bangor). That said most of the staff have been fairly supportive (both teaching and admin) around our anti-fees campaigning here in Bangor
Hi there - I left a note over on the Indymedia page about this too, but just to let you know briefly what the impression the demonstration created for a sympathetic bystander.
You need to be clearer about what your demands are. While I think it is fantastic that you organised this demonstration and succeeded in getting noticed, I am concerned that most people who were not already involved probably saw it as a mild irritation or at best as a bit of a joke. If you’re going to seize a platform, you need to use it.
In your post above, to your credit you do actually quote the statement with the demands. But the main body of your post is all about how you broke police lines, and how you set off an alarm. This sort of thing *in itself* is not impressive. It has to be a means to an end, not the end itself, which is how I have to say it begins to look to an outsider. Only adding to this impression is the report written on Indymedia which fails to mention even one of the demands, and even refers to the Arthur Lewis Declaration without linking to it or so much as attempting to summarise it in one sentence.
Come on, surely intelligent people can do better than this?
On second reading, this paragraph is unclear. It sounds like we set the alarm off, when what I meant was that the police set the alarm off to flush us out. Us setting off the alarm would have been quite pointless and annoying, I agree. I’ll change the wording in the post, I think.
As to demands, I think it’s been clear all along that we oppose the running of the university - and HE in general - as a business rather than as a socialised public service.
Demonstrations etc are means to the end of gettng the university to meet our demands. But they’re more than that. They’re part of building a mass, radical movement that can fight bigger battles afterwards. That’s why I don’t think the specific demands are the most important part of the story.
Thanks for this reply - and apologies for misreading the alarm story!
I suppose the point I was making is that it needs to be clear to bystanders, and that it wasn’t, at least to me and my classmates. As it happens, the demands look very sensible to me.
We may have to agree to differ on the demands not being the most important thing. To be taken seriously and therefore have influence, you need to have clear objectives. And as for bigger battles, the ones on that list are not exactly going to be a picnic.
If the focus on the bigger battles means you don’t achieve these, you have to ask why bother making the demands in the first place. I think they are important goals in themselves and they will not be met if they are not clearly articulated and communicated to a wider group than 300 people who enjoy marching and dancing.
Best of luck with it all.
I actually agree that the “carnival atmosphere” watered down the political statement made by the march, to its detriment, and that’s an argument that will continue to be had within the activist community for some time I think. Nevertheless, I do think it reached out to people who would never have thought of themselves as activists before.
Also: be realistic, demand the impossible. If you frame your demands in terms of what is politically acheivable, you will never threaten the establishment enough to really make a difference. You have to create a new framework of feasibility; you have to shift the debate onto your terms rather than working on theirs. Thinking big is what gets results.
Again, thanks for the thoughtful reply, particularly on the carnival atmosphere. We will probably still have to differ on achievability, though. “Be realistic, demand the impossible” is a nice slogan, but it is not clear how it will work here. I am left with the sense that the reasons your demands were not clear is that they are not important to you. Which is a shame for future generations of Manchester students, since if they were taken seriously rather than as a means to achieve something “impossible”, they stand to benefit a lot.
Don’t be surprised if your arguments are dismissed if they are not seen as sincere. You will probably accuse me of being insufficiently optimistic - not so, I think you could make a real difference if you targeted your arguments to where they will make a difference. I think you will find most people in this country agree with your complaints about education - by broadening your base, rather than narrowing it by alienating people with vague slogans and impossible dreams (that are shared by a small number of people), you could achieve great things. But you clearly don’t want to. If you dismiss your own demands as “politically achievable” and therefore not valuable, you should not be surprised if people dismiss you as a bunch of undergraduates having a laugh. Not such a big idea, that.
No, bystander, I don’t think you’re being too pessimistic, I think you’re being too optimistic about reform. Asking for the powers that be to change the way they do things is a good enough start, but do it without challenging the logic that leads them to do things that way and you will surely lose.
There’s a recurring argument about whether the NUS should drop its commitment to a Free Education, and focus on keeping fees down to “acceptable” levels. But this allows the government, and not us, to frame the debate. By this logic the fees that shocked us a few years ago (£3k/yr) become the ideal solution now, so who’s to say that we won’t stop being shocked by the proposed fees (£9k/yr) a few years in? Debate on the terms of your opponents, and this is the way things go; force them to debate on your terms and you’ll do a lot better.
I don’t think the immediate demands of the march were “unclear” or “vague”. I posted them above for all to see, basically, they oppose the changes that the university has been making to our education, and recognise the neoliberal logic behind those changes. Adding a commitment to a free education is hardly the same as adding a commitment to a glorious revolution: before 1997 a free education was the norm, and even now it remains practically possible (it would cost a lot less to pay the fees and living costs for half the country’s youth than it would to keep investing in wars and nuclear weapons), and where this argument has been had a lot of people do come around to feel strongly about it.
Again, thanks for the reply. I agree with the vast majority of what you say - I certainly think money would be better spent on education than on ill-advised and illegal wars, and on replacing our very own weapons of mass destruction (which remarkably manage to be both impotent and appallingly dangerous at the same time).
I’m not sure I ever suggested that adding a commitment to a free education is the same as adding a commitment to a glorious revolution - in fact, my point was that it is not. So again, we agree.
Anyway.
I’m sorry I said the demands seemed a little unclear - I was just reporting the sense I got from everyone I spoke to who was not directly involved but was interested.
Best of luck with your campaign - I very much hope you manage to avert some of the worst damage people would like to do to our university.
I thought that’s what you meant was “alienating people with vague slogans and impossible dreams (that are shared by a small number of people)“. I don’t think a call for a free education is an impossible, ultraleft, unnecessarily divisive dream. Anyway I’m glad we’re more or less in agreement.
I’ve obviously not been clear - that was exactly the point I was making - I don’t think that is impossible or unnecessarily divisive at all.
You seemed to be suggesting that such demands are just means to the end of achieving a radical reorganisation of our political system to the way you want it to look (and quite possibly, I do too - I’m still not clear exactly what it would look like, but that’s for another day!). If that happens, great.
The only bit I am uncomfortable with (if I understand you right), is the word “just”. I wanted to point out such demands are incredibly important in themselves. That’s the sense in which I think we agree.