Since the beginning of the year, student activists have been struggling to stop university administrations from increasing student fees. Stuart Munckton, national co-ordinator of Resistance and a member of the Socialist Alliance, takes up the debate about how to build a mass-on campus movement that can do this.
University senates and councils have met across the country this year to vote up a full 25% increase in the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), and often to increase the number of full-fee paying undergraduate places to the maximum allowed by the Coalition's Higher Education Bill passed by the Senate last year.
These senate and council meetings have provoked some of the largest on-campus protests in years. Students have attempted to prevent such meetings going ahead via blockades and occupations, forcing university administrations to either carry out the vote in secret, or use heavy-handed police tactics to keep students at bay.
There are those in the student movement who, encouraged by the energy and militancy of the protests, have fallen into the trap of thinking that the specific form the protest takes (in this case, direct action, especially occupations) has been key to inspiring students, divorced from the politics and context of such actions.
In the May edition of Socialist Alternative magazine, Heidi Clause expressed this view in an article entitled "No justice, no peace for uni admins". Arguing for a strategy aimed to "disrupt 'business as usual'", she claims it is "the fact that activists have been using disruptive tactics, occupying and confronting lines of police and hired security guards [that] has been inspiring more students to get involved"
The conclusion from this approach was drawn by Lisa Farrance in an otherwise excellent article in last week's Green Left Weekly (issue 580). She wrote: "a mass student campaign of occupations ... united with staff industrial action, is the only sort of campaign that can win."
There is nothing automatic about "occupying and confronting police" that draws people in. If most of the protesting students do not see the point of such tactics, they can be counterproductive — isolating and demoralising the activists and opening them up to police repression.
To really challenge the government and administrations' control of campuses requires the involvement of the mass of students. This is the point missed by most student officials, who are trying to focus the movement on electing an ALP government — making it even more important that the left has a united strategy.
The biggest weakness of the student movement is that the activist layer is far too small — every protest we organise has to be aimed at turning this around. This will involve a range of tactics, including occupations and blockades, "peaceful rallies", speak-outs, student general meetings and petitions.
The occupations and blockades of senate and council meetings have helped where they had a clear focus, demands that students relate to, and were built to involve as many students as possible.
The point is not that they "disrupted business as usual". None of these actions have achieved any meaningful disruption of administration functioning. The victory is in the symbolism of forcing senates and councils to make it clear that they would rather hide from students than accede to their demands.
The fact that just 30 students attended the most recent Melbourne University senate blockade is a clear indication that simply calling a militant protest is not enough to convince students to attend.
The recent protests outside the university senate meeting at the University of Western Australia (UWA), in contrast, were a great success. Not only did 80 students storm into the building and force the meeting to re-convene later, but the 200-strong protest was the largest rally in years on UWA.
Before the rally, activists had engaged with and convinced a broad layer of students. More than 2000 UWA students had signed letters opposing fee increases — making the demands of the protest their own. This has made it much harder for the conservative wing of the student movement to attack the storming of the building.
The occupation on April 19 against the university senate voting to increase fees at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) occurred in a very different context. The 60 students who gathered at 8am while the university senate was meeting in secret, voted to occupy a building no matter what, rather than using the time to inform students of what had happened and publicising the rally scheduled for later that day.
A heavy police presence meant only around 20 students ended up occupying the university's security office. With the rest of the student population completely unaware that the university had increased the fees — never mind that students were occupying a building — the activists were vulnerable to attack, and the NSW police pepper-sprayed the room. The only thing disrupted by the action was the campaign against fees.
The question of demands and political focus has been lost in the eagerness by some to take "direct action" regardless of the context.
We need to start talking less about whether a protest will be disruptive enough, and more about what political focus and demands can most successfully draw broader layers of students in. There is no magical demand that will automatically work. One that has been broadening active opposition to the fees, however, is to demand that students and staff should get to decide if the fees are introduced, through a referendum or a mass meeting.
On Newcastle University, in just one week, education activists collected the signatures of over 10% of the student population demanding a referendum on the fees issue. A similar campaign is being run by activists at Flinders University and the University of Queensland.
Whatever demands and actions students decide to organise, however, the key thing is that we are working to bring more students into opposing the fees and taking action to ensure they are defeated. Such campaigns have won their demands in the past, and can win again today.
From Green Left Weekly, May 5, 2004.
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