By Alison Dellit
Over the last 18 months, unprecedented attacks on the higher education system have struck at the very core of publicly funded education and have propelled many students into action. The RMIT occupation is but the latest example of such action.
Successful small campaigns against these attacks this year include the fight at Newcastle University against library closures, the campaign against exam changes at the University of Tasmania, the UTS campaign against up-front fees and the ANU campaign against the closure of the classics department.
But these have not yet spread into a wider national campaign against government changes to education. The last national week of action, for instance, was small, and in some places didn't happen at all.
In particular, what the student movement against fees and cuts lacks is a plan for how to win its demands.
The RMIT occupation has lasted 16 days as I write, and seems set to last until the council meeting on September 8. The occupation and other actions associated with it have had some success in reaching out to students. The twice weekly demonstrations have mobilised 200-300 students, and RMIT students have been drawn into the running of the vigil and the occupation support team.
Support from the staff has been even more striking. The RMIT branch of the NTEU has called a two-hour stop-work for September 8 in support of the student campaign, and donations from the staff have flowed in.
These successes have even forced the RMIT administration into conceding a staff and student ballot on up-front fees. This ballot is to be paid for the administration, and the results made publicly available.
While this won't abolish fees at RMIT, it will provide a good basis to continue the campaign, and a strong argument later to bind the vice-chancellor to the decision of this ballot.
However, the numbers at the demonstrations have been weak in comparison with other student demonstrations in Melbourne. This is mostly due to the lack of mobilisation of students from other campuses, and indicates that the movement as a whole is weak. In particular, it is due to the decline at Melbourne University.
Some say that the solution to this decline in the movement is to increase the number of direct actions— occupations, sit-ins, graffiti runs. Others have been arguing that the way forward lies in focusing more of our attention on wooing the Australian Democrats, fax campaigns and so on.
But tactics alone don't make a campaign. No matter how appropriate our actions may be at a particular time, people must understand why we are doing them and how we seek to reach our goal — what the overall strategy is.
The RMIT campaign has been successful not just because 200 students gained control of a finance department, but because of a patient building of sentiment amongst students and staff in opposition to the RMIT council introducing fees. The occupation provided a spur to many students who had already been convinced.
One thing which has been crucial to the RMIT campaign has been its clear, concrete and well-publicised demands, oriented to mobilising students with the clear aim of forcing the council to recommit the decision to introduce up-front fees.
This contrasts sharply with the Melbourne Uni occupation and subsequent campaign. Here too, there were thousands of students mobilised into action around fees, but as the focus remained on the occupation itself (demands focused on lights and power; no negotiations with management regarding fees were followed up) many of the students drifted away, seeing the action as simply a protest and not a serious attempt to reverse the decision to introduce fees.
The RMIT occupation holds some very useful lessons for the student movement: the need for clear demands from the beginning, the necessity of making particular tactics (in this case the occupation) part of an overall campaign and not an end in themselves, the importance of strengthening the alliance with academic and general staff, the crucial focus on convincing students of the demands of the campaign.
But the major lesson is the need for the student movement to be clearer on what its strategy is for defeating fees — based on mobilising and organising the mass of students first and foremost.