Students are Workers

by George Severs 

In 1967 the Conservative MP Kenneth Lewis published a pamphlet entitled ‘Students in Revolt’, in which he recognised both the rising number of students, but more importantly their increasing desire for representation. “As the number of students rise”, he wrote “so does their wish for influence”. This was, of course, prompted by the prelude to what we now think of as the May ’68 student uprisings, less pronounced in Britain, but which still saw the occupation of various university campuses as well as renewed articulation by students demanding political and social change.

Fast forward to today. The fifth anniversary of the storming of Milbank has just passed, seen by some in a purely historical vein, and by others as the beginning of a student struggle which remains ongoing.

Clearly that struggle is still being fought. Thousands of students recently marched in London to demand free education and living grants for all, among them a contingent from Royal Holloway. This protest was met with hostility by the police, as many of us were kettled and several arrests were made. Yet it would be hard to deny that the students’ case was not made.

However, if ever we are to win the fight for free education and against the marketisation of higher education, we need to fundamentally rethink how we conceive of ourselves as a group, and there are things we can learn from the students with whom Mr Lewis was so alarmed in the late 1960s.

Lewis’ major course for alarm was the fact that “students see themselves as worker-students rather than as pupil-students”, and this remains an endemic problem. Only now, the problem is ours. We have ceased to see ourselves as part of a wider struggle, and started thinking of ourselves as a separate group of pupil-consumers. When our lecturers go on strike to defend the pensions they have worked for 30 years for, why do so few of us support them? Quite simply, because we have been duped into believing that we have entered university to purchase a commodity: a degree. Who cares of what intellectual value, and what becomes of those who taught us, as long as we leave with ‘value for money’ having had a service provided for us.

It is this frame of mind which needs to change. The students of May ’68 were successful in almost toppling a government, and why? Because they saw themselves as part of a wider struggle, resulting in the workers of France coming out to support them in their millions.

Lewis believed that “the ‘student-worker’ is a new concept but it is here to stay”. How wrong he was. If ever we are to stand a chance of making education free, of opening up higher education to all, and of making our institutions and syllabi reflective of the students, then we must rekindle this idea of a ‘student class’ which Lewis so feared, and whose absence his successors are currently revelling in.

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Mr Sam Pickering of the NCAFC Executive Committee for generously allowing this essay to be republished here. 

http://anticuts.com/2015/12/10/students-are-workers/