Congrats to Clare
As I was leaving a poker game at the School of African and Oriental Studies a week ago I saw some bloke removing a flyer from one of the trees outside. It was a manifesto for Clare Solomon’s election campaign for presidency of the University of London Union. Upon my questioning him he said something along the lines of “I wouldn’t want that fucking awful woman imposed on anyone.” I’ll be totally honest, I was rather too stoned to coherently convince him otherwise, but the fact that Clare inspires such hatred amongst right-wing cunts is an absolute credit to her, which is why I am writing this piece to congratulate her on her election last Thursday.
I work in the University of London, and across the board (along with the higher education sector nationally) we are facing massive cuts. In my institution, £1m of staff cuts are expected, and similar is happening elsewhere. With the policy of the current Blairites in charge of NUS to be to condemn strikes by university staff, it is only through the election of more radical student representatives that we will be able to effectively fight what is happening. We need the unity of students, support staff, and academics.
We are consistently told by management that Higher Education is “going through a tough time at the moment.” What they fail to say is that what we are seeing in the HE sector is far more permanent than the recession. For years we have been building up to the end of affordable higher education, the end of education without taking on massive debt, the end of the possibility of people from low-income backgrounds attending university. We are seeing the end of small specialised courses, an increase in the division of intellectual labour when interdisciplinary courses cannot receive proper funding, and in all likelihood the absorption of many smaller specialised centres of study into larger universities to the detriment of their academic work.
It is times like this that we need a properly radical student union movement (to compliment a hopefully radical UCU and Unison.) Clare’s election is a promising sign that students are recognising this, and let us hope that it brings us a year of campaigning, fighting, protesting, and unity. We’ll sure as hell need it. Already we are seeing the beginning of the cross-London struggle with the formation of the London Education Activist Network, which has begun to produce bulletins on ongoing struggles in the universities.
As a little extra I thought I’d just put a little shout out to counterfire, who have recently returned to the left blogosphere. They look to be a good addition to left-wing online literature regardless of the difficult and much-debated situation from which they have been reborn.
Reader Comments
Absolutely, congrats to Clare, and to Ian Drummond. Also to James Heywood at Goldsmiths. Here at Essex the left just won a full slate of non sabbatical positions too. As Jacob says, we need unions that are willing to stand up for education.
Yes, but student union leaders must remember that they represent students of a variety of political backgrounds and they mustn’t use unions purely as a basis for left-wing crusading – only for campaigning on issues that directly affect students. Witness the recent backlash here at Durham against the NUS when two NUS officers managed to alienate about half the student population with their heavy handed interference in a society debate involving two BNP members. Their overtly partizan and irresponsible actions have led to Durham disaffiliating (and giving the BNP a lovely amount of idiotic publicity and sour grapes).
Radical campaigning is often great, and campaigning for free education (in the long run) is great too, but SU leaders, especially the NUS, need to be careful if they want to truly represent their members.
David, the dispute at Durham had nothing to do with the remit of student unions. The on-campus activities of student societies are most definitely within the remit of student unions. The dispute is rather over:
1) Ideological disagreements concerning the principle of ‘no platform’ policy.
2) The arrogance of the NUS in interfering in a top-down manner where a member union has chosen not to have a no platform policy.
3) An incredibly poorly worded letter from 2 NUS officers which (almost certainly inadvertently) appeared to threaten violence.
Unions do indeed have a duty to represent their members, but this does not mean never offending any of them. You represent a diverse constituency by having democratically elected officers and democratically established policy. Past this, any attempt to impose vague, unfounded impressions of the ideologies of the general student body is inappropriate.
(Of course, this should not be read as a defence of the NUS. The problem with the NUS is that its “democratic” structures are anything but – elections of representatives are pretty poor, the conference is a joke, and policy is not even followed if the exec dislikes it.)
I should have specified – when referring to student union remits I meant the NUS specifically. What I quite like about Durham SU is that we try to keep the ‘ideology’ (wish I could think of a better way to put it) out, but I think this is something which the NUS fails to do, hence the tension. It’s especially important given the problems you mentioned above, when student democracy and the accountablity of student representatives is so flakey. I’m one myself and since my term will run into my third year I could if I wanted fuck everything up and walk away with limited recriminations. Perish the thought though.
What made the Durham situation more unique is that although it is the SU that have disaffiliated, it was the Union Society who were holding the debate and they are entirely independent of DSU. It seems to demonstrate further peculiarities about simultaneous memberships of DSU and DUS and NUS – got a lot of people in a hell of a tailspin.