Students: too poor to protest?
(C) Andrea F Creative Commons
News that politics students at Sheffield Hallam University are to be taught how to protest has been met with surprise. After all, the student radical is a cultural archetype - surely “at …
(C) Andrea F Creative Commons
News that politics students at Sheffield Hallam University are to be taught how to protest has been met with surprise. After all, the student radical is a cultural archetype - surely “at one time student protest was as much a part of university life as getting drunk?”
The lecturer behind the course believes that students don’t have the time to protest as they’re too busy working to pay off their tuition fee loans. While it’s entirely implausible that a mass of politically engaged students are kept from marching only by their long shifts, there is a grain of truth in this. It’s more realistic (and more worrying) that students are increasingly focusing on their debts and the need for a career - pronto - and it’s this that directly saps their political engagement.
It is a common belief that the student radical quickly gives up their ideals as soon as they’ve got kids and a mortgage. The additional worry of £10,000 worth of student debt per head could radically change student culture. That students are increasingly identifying as ‘consumers,’ can go a long way to explaining their changing behaviour.
Change in student culture is far deeper than simple disengagement though. In many cases, students are actively turning against overt political demonstration. Recent student demonstrations in Cambridge, for example, were met by substantial student opposition. People not only expressed disagreement with the protest, but with protesting itself. Rather than viewing demonstrating in support of a cause as healthy expression, it was implied that the very act was immature, naïve, even positively offensive.
I suspect that virtually everyone on this site has experienced the same cynical attitude when expressing a political opinion: “Politics? So passe… Keep polite conversation to Peep Show and the Premiership, please.” Again, this can plausibly be traced to a change in student, or youth, culture: image matters more than ever, for the student-consumer. Far from being a dangerous, radical counter-culture, ‘youth culture’ is now largely contrived and packaged by dedicated corporate marketers.
Beyond mere apathy, students can be seen to be sharply de-radicalising. Far from being woolly-headed dreamers, much student political action seems driven by a shrewd self-interest. Despite the fact that lecturers took to the streets to march with students opposing top-up fees, when the academics demonstrated against their low pay, student groups lobbied against them on the grounds that their demonstration disrupted marking. The same can be seen in Venezuela – while the poor, urban masses have largely supported Chavez’s ‘Bolivarian revolution’, students (disproportionately middle class, educated and aspirational) have been among his most vociferous opponents.
Such changes cannot be explained away by labelling students as busier, poorer or lazier than yesteryear. Certainly students are a complex and diverse group of individuals, but we are no more immune from mass social change than society as a whole. Recent years have seen a number of hugely complex developments as well as the loss of grants, rising student numbers, the introduction of top-up fees and a post-Thatcher model of education based on measured ‘performance’ and ‘impact‘. The result is that students need to be more competitive than ever before. With merely getting the grades no longer sufficient, we must be ‘marketable’ ourselves.
The press release announcing the new campaigning course at Sheffield Hallam is telling. It reads: “Students are developing transferable skills in campaigning, which are useful for a wide range of careers like media, marketing and public relations.” In a society overwhelmingly focused on efficiency and market value rather than moral values, is it any wonder that marching and Marx are giving way to marketing and marks?
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David, that’s a very interesting article, I really enjoyed reading it.
But perhaps you view the student protests of the past with a slightly rose tinted view. My Dad went to Warwick University in the early 1970s at a time when it was reknowned for student radicalism. He tells me that there used to be student lie-ins basically every week but this was as much fuelled by self-interest and laziness as by political activism.
However, I suspect that student apathy has increased along with the apathy of the rest of society. I remember Ken Clarke saying that at Conservative meetings and conferences held on university campuses in the 1970s/80s the response was sometimes so violent that they had to leave with a police escort. Whereas today, many of the students don’t even know who they are.
But isn’t society generally less militant, less interested in politics?
Thanks for the comment Gary.
I agree with you, both that it’s easy to be overly optimistic in imagining a past golden age and that there’s been a tendency towards increased apathy. I also think that there’s been an increased move away from ‘principled’ action leaving pure self-interest.
If you ask me, these two trends are linked. Under the banner of ‘no such thing as society’ Thatcher actively encouraged individualism, rather than solidarity with others or with the sort of abstract ideals that might unite others. It’s also a consequence of our ‘post-modern,’ fragmented society: people no longer have easy groups or traditions to identify and act with. Without these things to unite around, people are naturally left with purely self-interested goals to pursue.
Nice article, David.
As one of my old History tutors at Leeds said; “Student protests tend not to change anything simply because students don’t know very much.”
Whether that is true or not, having been involved in student politics myself, I was completely disillusioned with the self-serving and completely two faced nature of student politicians (quelle surprise, some may say). I could count on the fingers of one hand the activists who had anything approaching what I would call ‘principles’, and most just seemed to be involved because it was good padding for the CV. Again, not surprising when Jack Straw, ex-Trot, currently in charge of the Ministry of Injustice is a Leeds alumnus.
John, I found much the same thing of student politics unfortunately. Ironically I spent far more time involved in student politics back in my school days, than at university where social networking and careerism seemed more the order of the day. I had to cut from my article, a discussion of the fact that lots of students are turned off by mainstream politics and are increasingly getting involved in non-partisan/non-political single issue campaigning groups. At my own university, for example, the party political groups were certainly seen as pretty much clubs for people who wanted to get ahead in the party or just generic social clubs for the toffy or less toffy. By contrast there must have been a society for every sub-issue under the sun, and not just a tonne of voluntary groups, but a voluntary group devoted to co-ordinating charities http://cambridgehub.org/ !
All this might suggest the rather more optimistic conclusion that young people aren’t disengaged, they’re just turned off by mainstream politics. I think that both trends are real and significant personally, but obviously there wasn’t scope to discuss this within 600 words. (My original article tried to discuss the connection between students increasingly campaigning through single issue causes and online means and the development of postmodernities increasingly fragmented identities and the loss of traditional, broad solidarities, but that was desperately in need of cutting!)
[...] Another The Vibe article, by David Moss, discussed the de-radicalisation and self-interest present in one of society’s traditionally more active protest groups: students. The analysis presenting an argument that students see protesting as naïve and less enticing than image and consumerism. [...]
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