A WAVE of student activism in Ontario, Canada, focused on tuition increases linked to cuts on campus. In January 1995 and February 1996, tens of thousands of students mobilised for shutdowns and marches. In 1996-97, smaller numbers at various campuses occupied key sites to protest against tuition fee rises and spending cuts.
At Guelph, students occupied the President's office, sat in at the University Centre, and shut down a Board of Governors meeting.
The university management responded by bringing charges against 37 individuals, in an outrageous attack on students' right to protest, intended to set a precedent in stifling campus dissent not seen in Ontario since the early 1970s.
When Campus Resists: The Politics of Space, Power, and the Culture of Resistance in the Guelph Occupation is a collection of documents and analyses of these struggles in Ontario, a "how-to" guide for those planning occupations, and a propaganda tool for the defence campaign for the Guelph students, raising money and awareness.
This book gives the real flavour of occupation, from great images of the University President yelling through his office door to reflections on stir-craziness. It claims "this move towards occupations, a political response to the perceived ineffectiveness of previous protests, thus marks an increase in the intensity of student resistance". There is another reading of this. In 1997 the gap between the more militant student activists and many others on campus who hated tuition hikes and cuts was much wider than in January 1995 or February 1996. The more isolated activists were actually more radical than before, while the rest did not feel it was possible to fight and win. The radicals had no confidence that it was possible to mobilise greater numbers of students.
Students at Windsor, Ontario, in 1996, invented chants and When Campus designed posters about Resists is a "howissues ranging from to" guide for those future shitty employ- planning occupament in Macjobs to tions ur derfunding for fine arts. They thought about the world and their own activity in new ways.
Then, sadly, it ended.
We need to figure out why these protests ended so suddenly with such a limited residue of radicalisation:
Students are pissed off by changes on campus. They know the job markertupon graduation sucks. This can lead to radicalisation, or to narrow horizons and a competitive attitude, combined with acceptance that cuts, tuition hikes and the corporate agenda are inevitable.
The book suggests that the central dynamic in student protest should be to expose and challenge the power relations in education. The goals are student power and education for freedom.
But power relations in education are not simply produced on campus. The capitalist education system's goal is training for relations in the workplace and society. Potential workers are conditioned to show up on time and accept authority. Women and men learn gender roles, while people from different ethnic backgrounds are assimilated or marginalised.
• We are currently seeing a real shift in capitalist education priorities, to fit the neoliberal corporate agenda. Employers believe that the schools, colleges, and universities are pumping out too many graduates with high expectations who don't take well to the low-wage, part-time, or temporary jobs that are out there for younger people.
Students know this. They are oncerned about the relationship between university and the rest of their lives (jobs, debt, etc).
The student movement needs to transform this knowledge into an activist movement that builds solidarity with workers and others fighting the corporate agenda, a student-worker • Adapted from a book review in New Socialist magazine. THE