Whatever happened to student protest? By Karl Whitney Trinity News, Tuesday 20th February 2007 - - - - Call me old fashioned, but the recent news from the Union of Students in Ireland that it is supporting a campaign to retain free car-parking spaces for students at the Dundalk Institute of Technology doesn't strike me as particularly interesting or daring. In fact, it doesn't strike me as the sort of thing students should be campaigning for at all. This is probably the point at which you tell me I'm old fashioned. But it seems to me, that students' unions have become little more than lobbyists, chasing whatever angle they can get. So far, so banal. What with prosperity high, what are students to do except cut a better deal for themselves? But this is not necessarily the whole story: universities have traditionally provided a venue for student protests that encouraged students to reach out to the world rather than withdrawing into their own individual bubbles. These protests showed student awareness of pressing contemporary issues worldwide, and a willingness to take action to raise awareness of those issues. Protests like these happened in the sixties. The sixties: if you weren't there you're either sick of hearing about them or obsessed with them to the degree that you think that nothing like it will ever happen again. But you can't argue with the fact that the widespread student engagement in that decade casts a long shadow over the political awareness of the present day. Students aren't what they used to be, it's said, and when you read about seemingly piffling local non-issues made national by a students' union, you begin to think that they may have a point. In the sixties, rather than small local issues being made national by students, the local was seen as a place where national and international issues were explored and addressed. In America, there were grassroots campaigns by students to politically educate army conscripts who would have gone on to serve in Vietnam. Many of these students belonged to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a nationwide protest movement that had its roots in the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s. In France, students forged links with workers, and the events of May 1968 illustrated this unity: workers joined students in their struggle, leading to a general strike which saw over 10 million people – about two thirds of the French workforce – go out on strike. The legacy of the student action in the late 1960s doesn't only cast its shadow on subsequent generations, but also on the generation that lived through that time. The idealistic year of 1968 haunts both left and right in French politics, with right-wing presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy invoking it as a bogeyman in one of his early campaign speeches. The recent anti-CPE events in France in early 2006 resurrected something of the spirit and drama of 1968, with the left desperately wishing for a return to those heady days, and the right attempting a security lockdown of the major sites of protest: the whole of the Sorbonne was cordoned off by a 15 foot tall metal fence, and police were stationed at all times in the Latin Quarter. One high-ranking civil servant, who had been a student in 1968, remarked to me that these events were in no way identical to 68 – the events back then had been fun. This was different, motivated more by hate than by love. But another of the legacies of the sixties is an ambiguity to violence, one that has begun to be addressed by those who took part in student protests of the 1960s. Last November, Mark Rudd, one of the leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, was talking to an audience of students and locals in the small town of Madison, New Jersey. In his speech, he advocated a non-violent participation in protests, reviewing his own involvement, first with the broadly non-violent SDS, then with the Weathermen, a radical offshoot of the SDS that bombed government buildings, and which Rudd resigned from in the early 1970s. Rudd's words were being carefully noted by members of the New SDS present in the audience, among them Pat Korte, a Connecticut High School student who re-formed the SDS in January 2006. While listening to the counsel of older members of the original SDS, Korte's group wants in no way to repeat the history of the original group, which dissolved into factionalism and violence at the end of the 1960s. Since its founding, the New SDS has taken on a life of its own, and expanded to campuses around the USA. The new SDS takes the current war in Iraq as a rallying point, articulating an oppositional stance that is still largely lacking in everyday American life. It has organised marches and protests against the war. It has forged links with international protest movements, such as the anti-CPE movement in France. On-campus, anti-war demonstrations have come under pressure from universities, particularly in Pace University on the South tip of Manhattan, which has effectively criminalised SDS on-campus protest. The SDS's counter-argument is that, as students of the university, they are exercising free speech. This tendency towards the criminalisation of non-violent protest can be seen in another recent case, in the University of Sussex in England, where 50 students have been threatened with legal action as a result of their occupation of the library at the end of November of last year. The university has also threatened to sue the students involved to cover the legal costs involved in their prosecution. University of Sussex has spent the last couple of years undergoing major restructuring in the face of the by now-overfamiliar twin pressures of competitiveness and accountability. This restructuring included a proposal for the closing down of their highly-ranked Chemistry Department, and numerous other cages have been rattled in the administration's attempt to balance the books. This has resulted in an upsurge in protests from both staff and students. It seems, though, that increasingly universities are dividing protest into good and bad, and are arbitrarily choosing which is which. The protests in Sussex were non-violent and peaceful and didn't result in the destruction of any property. The crime committed by the students was at most trespass, but that charge has been compounded by a costly court order procured by the administration just before the occupation. The actions of the New SDS illustrate that there is valid student movement in the offing. Issues have been identified, and links have been forged between these groups, nationally and internationally. The example of the New SDS shows that basic concrete oppositional political organising can yield results, if only the spreading of an awareness of the issues to other campuses. Grassroots movements are primarily about getting people talking to each other, and then keeping those lines of communication open. At Pace and Sussex Universities, efforts to organise on campus have been opposed by university administrations that, at best, deal awkwardly with protest movements and at worst are actively hostile to this form of political expression. And, most of all, these struggles seem a long way from jostling for car spaces in Dundalk. To read this piece on the Trinity News site click here -------- Journalism | Stories | Home | About