Student Power - What Is To Be Done - Anthony Barnett
Student Power - What Is To Be Done - Anthony Barnett
Student Power - What Is To Be Done - Anthony Barnett
Anthony Barnett
Tom Wengraf
Until this year, Britain, perhaps uniquely, has lacked any significant student
movement. During the past 15 years sections of British students have played an
active, if not predominant role in the agitation over Suez, campaigns against
racism and colonialism, and, most auspiciously, CND. But none of this political
activity reflected anything that could be termed, a specific student consciousness.
Traditionally the ideal self-image of the student was the ‘undergraduate’—a
debased version of the renaissance polymath, a gentleman taught by gentlemen,
freed from prejudice by the austere pleasures of socratic debate. Collective student
consciousness was precluded by such a schema. The liberal philosophy of acade-
mic freedom and the non-vocational university fused both teacher and taught in
3
the abstract and unfettered quest for wisdom. Even the concept
‘student union’ was confiscated by liberal academic terminology to
mean either nursery training in the rhetorical skills of parliamentary
repartee or cheap passes to foreign museums and youth hostelling in
southern climes.
The events at the LSE have at last signalled the beginnings of the
demystification of the undergraduate complex. For the first time stu-
dents have shown unprecedented collective solidarity in their role as
students. The LSE affair was the first occasion in Britain in which a
student union has been used as a corporate instrument against the
arbitrary powers of academic staff. The British student, belatedly, has
become part of the international typology of militant student action.
Structural Change
Since 1954 important structural changes have taken place in the British
university system, without which the complete and militant solidarity
of students at the LSE would hardly have been conceivable. The greatest
single factor has been the increased number of students engaged in
higher education. Before the second World War the number of stu-
dents never rose above 70,000, but the pace of expansion began to
increase after the war by 1954-55 the number had risen to 122,000.
This was still insignificant beside the acceleration of expansion in the
late 1950’s and early 1960’s. By 1962-63 the numbers had risen to
216,000. Only three years later (1965-66) the numbers had gone above
300,000, and according to the annual report of the ministry of Educa-
tion for 1966, all targets for student numbers set in the Robbins Report
had so far been exceeded.
Such dramatic increases can only be seen in their proper perspective
when set in counterpoint to a consistent record of government parsi-
mony. Successive governments whilst sanctioning university expan-
sion, have not been prepared to allocate proportionate increases in
expenditure. The result has been a growing ratio of students to teachers
and the physical overcrowding of students in university buildings. At
the LSE for instance a library built to accommodate 900 students is
now supposed to house 3,500. Even more scandalous has been the un-
willingness of governments to raise student grants in proportion to the
rise of prices. The difference is supposed to be met by parents but there
is no legal means of forcing them to do so. Nor is it ever made really
clear whether student grants are intended simply for the term time or
for the whole year—thus many parents claim to have fulfilled their
obligations simply by providing room and keep for students in vaca-
tions. The result is that students who wish to avoid financial blackmail
by their parents, even those paid the maximum grant, can now, most
accurately be included in the phenomenon of ‘new poverty’ discussed
by Robin Blackburn (NLR 42). Many students live on £6 per week, of
which £3 goes on rent—by no stretch of the imagination can they be
called ‘the pampered products of the welfare state.’ This situation is
aggravated by many other anomalies: the highest grants tend not to
go to people in London or other large cities without residential universi-
ties, but to Oxford and Cambridge where costs are marginally lower
4
and credit facilities are much greater. Again for some unexplained
reason many students in training colleges, art schools and CATS get
lower grants than those reading for degrees.
But public condemnation had one happy result. It fortified the students’
consciousness of their corporate identity. The LSE ‘affair’ began as a
traditional issue of liberal morality, similar to the type of consciousness
aroused by CND and Suez. It was almost contingent that student feelings
on racialism and colonialism should have been crystallized in the ap-
pointment of Adams as the new Director. But in the course of the
struggle the issues became transformed into a controversy that con-
cerns all students, as students, i.e. 1. student power; 2. the status of the
union; 3. the in loco parentis system of discipline.
5
The contest highlighted problems that will be vital in any student
strategy. These were firstly how to link concrete mobilizing issues (in
this case the suspension of Adelstein and Bloom) with the more
abstract ‘institutional’ issues (i.e. student power). Secondly, how was
militancy to be maintained, in the absence of a ‘total victory’? In other
words, how was a student consciousness to be made permanent?
To summarize, the basic issue that confronted the students at LSE, was
how to construct an ideology of student action out of nothing except a
useless mythology of ‘undergraduate’ behaviour.
Strategy
But within its mystical shell, it contains a rational kernel: that is the
demand for control over the content of education. This was a demand,
absent from the other main form of solution proposed by the students
—the Union proposals for the reform of the University structure. Any
serious student strategy must integrate both the demand for control
over the content of education, and the demand for union power.
Practical forms
What practical forms should such a strategy take? By and large it can
be said that there are six principal demands for Student Union activities
in all institutions of further education.
1. The status of the union. Here there is a wide disparity among dif-
ferent universities. The crucial issue is the control over the acquisition
and the disposal of union funds. In particular many unions, including
the LSE, are not allowed to choose to subsidise political clubs or activi-
ties. The removal of all such external prohibitions should be a priority
demand.
2. The destruction of the in loco parentis system. In the long run the
6
student aim should not be representation on disciplinary committees,
but their abolition. There is no justification for oppression and in-
trusion in the private lives of students. Students should be held re-
sponsible for their actions in the civil courts alone, and not doubly
punished by the university administration, as happened in a recent
case at Oxford.
3. Student unions should immediately constitute their own elective
non-faculty lectureships, using their own funds.
4. Control over the content of education. Students, through the Union,
should aim to open up a liberated zone of critical knowledge in the
dead body of institutional learning. This will involve negotiation with
staff, with the aim (as far as possible) of control over syllabuses, re-
quired reading, examinations, and in addition the demand for a
number of lecturers and professors to be appointed by the
students.
Three inferences
There are three further inferences to be drawn from the LSE affair, all of
which will be vital if student militancy is to make further headway. The
first concerns the task of student socialists. Socialists have always tended
to bypass the union. But the events at LSE show clearly that where
feasible socialist students should work within the union as the only
institution that can act as the permanent embodiment of corporate
consciousness. As the LSE showed, union militancy can to some extent
transcend political differences. In particular the socialist student should
concern himself with the struggle to attain control over the content of
the education offered, in other words, in the creation of the critical
university. Socialist students should make it their ‘theoretical’ task to
comprehend the nature of the university, its ideology, and its place in
society. This should involve a critique both of the administrative
structure and the curriculum. Tactically this entails active participation
on union committees, in student journalism, and in official seminars
or discussion with the staff. Of course this does not mean the absence
of concern with external problems, any more than it would for socialist
trade unionists. It does, however, mean, that in the present political
situation at least, the socialist student should make control over the
university his first concern.
7
Secondly, the LSE affair was instrumental in revealing the disunity and
fragmentation of the university staff. Indeed the staff became more and
more fissiparous, as the student body became more solid. It is essential
that such splits should be widened and deepened. It is unlikely that the
students would have been so successful, if it had been confronted by
monolithic hostility from the staff. In fact this is unlikely to happen.
The latent contradictions among the staff are very great, both in terms
of power and ideology, between senior and junior staff, between de-
partments and between different political commitments. Students
should try as far as possible to bring these differences into the open,
preferably in the form of open debate. On the other hand, vague
alliances with parts of the staff are to be avoided. The LSE events show
that individual, ‘friendly’, ‘mediating’ members of staff only tend to
confuse issues. Alliances should only be formed where both staff and
student positions are clear. In some cases, especially like that of the
Gervasi dismissal, some form of specific joint strategy could be made in
conjunction with the AUT.
Thirdly it is instructive how the existence of the Radical Student
Alliance strengthened the positions of the student leaders in LSE, and
how this in turn buttressed the power and influence of the RSA. The
connection between RSA and LSE could have overturned the tired and
compromised leadership of the NUS at the last annual conference. The
new student corporate consciousness and militancy must clearly ex-
tend beyond the framework of individual schools and universities.
The RSA is at present the ideal medium by which such specific ex-
periences can be compared and generalized, and thus strengthen both
analysis and strategy of student action. Ultimately, of course, the goal
is the capture of the NUS. This is now definitely realizable.
A new stage