By Rob Miller and Kerryn Williams
With students around the country facing course closures and cut backs, extra fees and charges, and less support services, there is an urgent need for a campaign to end these particular attacks and reverse the federal government's cuts to higher education and drive towards up-front undergraduate fees.
Such a campaign must be national if it is to end the whole program of higher education restructuring and restore full government funding.
In 1997, the introduction of undergraduate fees provided an immediate focus for the campaign against the government's withdrawal of funding from higher education. However, with most universities deciding not to introduce full fees, and lower enrolments at those institutions which did introduce them, this issue can no longer be the main agitational focus of the campaign.
The issues most likely to mobilise students are those which directly affect them (such as cut backs to their courses). We need to run campaigns demanding that university managements stop or reverse such cuts.
These campaigns must incorporate the whole university, (not just the particular course or department affected) and concentrate on those courses and departments which are likely to face cuts in the future.
They should also aim to strengthen solidarity between students and staff in different areas.
We need to document all of the effects of the funding cuts in a "catalogue of cuts" on each campus. This information (including jobs lost, courses closed and cut back, subjects no longer offered, unsafe classrooms, outdated equipment and inadequate library resources) can then be compiled into state and national lists. Such lists would be useful for broadening the campaign beyond those courses being cut right now, and would give us a propaganda weapon against university managements and the government.
As well as demanding that university management stop or reverse particular cuts, we should also demand that they:
- agree not to cut another course or department instead, unless it's management salaries or a corporate prestige or revenue raising project;
- make a public statement that: the proposal to cut the course or department was a direct result of government funding cuts; they are no longer willing to keep cutting courses and departments; and calls on the federal government restore full funding.
Only by taking this approach can we unite the anger expressed in each separate campaign into a single, national movement. The alternative is fragmentation into many different, unconnected campaigns.
Even when united, however, campaigns against individual cuts are not enough. We also have to lay the blame squarely on the federal government. Even in cases where the university management is able to stop or reverse a cut, pointing to the role of the government is important because unless the government's whole restructuring agenda is blocked, a victory against one cut (while important) only delays the inevitable or shifts the pain to elsewhere in the university.
All courses will be safe from cuts only when we win the political battle to restore full government funding to higher education.
The campaign has to clearly outline the central choice facing the higher education system — return to full funding or extend full fees to all students.
To end the current war of attrition against students and public education, we must polarise each university, the education sector as a whole and the community around the issue of education funding. A nationally focused movement which can do that and which mobilises large numbers of people for full funding can stop the destruction of higher education.
[Kerryn Williams is the Melbourne organiser of Resistance. Rob Miller is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party. Both are student movement activists.]