By Daniel Randall, NUS National Executive (personal capacity)
The entire National Union of Students has been put to shame by one tiny students’ union, on one tiny site, of one university in Devon.
Rolle College in Exmouth — part of the University of Plymouth — is threatened with “relocation.” Rolle is primarily a teacher-training college, and many of its students have family responsibilities and financial restrictions that mean they couldn’t undertake the 55-minute journey necessary to get to Rolle’s proposed new site in Plymouth. So for these students, the “relocation” is, effectively, a closure.
The campaign by the Rolle College student union against the closure should be a source of inspiration for the entire student movement and its national leaders. The campaign in Exmouth has successfully engaged large numbers of students with student union structures and activities. Close to 50% of Rolle’s student body turned out for an anti-closure demonstration on 24 September. The campaign has also mobilised people from the local community as well as establishing crucial organisational links with the workers who will be effected by the closure.
What’s going on in Exmouth represents, on a microcosmic scale, both the worst of the attacks that students face and some of the best tactics and principles for fighting them.
Campus closures are an increasing consequence of the encroachment of the market into education. Rank-and-file student mobilisation along with student-worker unity is precisely what’s needed to fight them.
“Students and workers unite” has long been a slogan of the student left. At Rolle they have achieved it. But other recent campaigns offer inspiring examples. It was the support of the students’ union that finally forced Metropolitan University management back into negotiations with lecturers striking against cuts in pay and conditions. At SOAS, the recent sacking of two specialist librarians as part of a “restructuring” prompted immediate solidarity from the students’ union.
But it’s not just relatively well-paid workers such as lecturers or specialist librarians that students need to unite with.
On every college and university campus, there’s an unseen army of low-paid workers — cleaning staff, catering staff, security staff... With outsourcing these workers face sharp attacks. The “living wage” campaigns conducted at universities such as Harvard in the USA and Queen Mary’s here in Britain show the way forward.
Such campaigns involve student activists uniting with trade unions to organise low-paid campus workers, to fight for their rights against the attacks brought by privatisation.
Students are often workers too. With the introduction of top-up fees students will be forced to work longer hours in crappy, low-paid jobs in retail, fast food and bars. Developing campaigning links with trade unions will help student unions to take the lead on organising students to fight for their rights in the workplace.
The need for student-worker unity is clear, and campaigns across the country show how it can be built. It should be second-nature for the NUS to take such steps, but sadly it’s not the case. The NUS, representing 5.2 million students, needs tiny unions like that at Rolle (representing just over 1,000) to remind it of the spirit and perspective with which its campaigns should be carried out — or even that campaigns should be carried out at all.
One reason why Rolle student union has such an high-level of rank-and-file engagement with its structures is because it organises on a small campus. But another, perhaps more significant reason, is that the student union organises a first-term demonstration for its students every year, as a matter of principle.
It wants to show its members that it’s more than just a bar. It wants to show its members that it has a fighting spirit, and that it’s not prepared to stop campaigning effectively on the day-to-day issues affecting them. It’s time for the NUS to do the same.
Fletcher-watch
Those who still maintain a remnant of the illusion that NUS President Kat Fletcher is on the left, let alone a socialist, should be acquainted with her record over the last year — and particularly the last few months.
In 2004, having used the authority from her recent election to push through anti-democratic “reforms” to the NUS structure which Labour Students and the right-wing had dreamed about for years, she sabotaged the annual education funding demonstration by moving it from London to Cardiff.
At NUS Conference 2005, she endorsed the executive candidacy of Jamal el-Shayyal, a right-wing Islamist whose views range from opposing abortion rights to denouncing the idea of taxing the rich.
At the start of the summer, she endorsed and took part in a Government campaign to “explain” top-up fees. She then engineered the reversal of NUS executive’s decision to call a national demonstration, responding to “pressure” from a handful of right-wing sabbaticals that she had blatantly caucused with.
Now, most bizarrely, she has endorsed Dan Large, a candidate for the Conservative Future (youth movement) executive, with a statement that NUS needs to become “representative” by involving more Tories. All this while displaying complete indifference to any and every working-class or other progressive struggle which NUS might have used its substantial weight to support.
Kat’s accelerating and startling political degeneration is a lesson to would-be radical student unionists who reject the difficult task of building a principled and organised student left in favour of promoting themselves as individuals. It also makes clear the urgent need to build a left-wing rank-and-file movement in NUS to counter the highly organised right-wing which already exists and dominates our student unions.
Hizb ut-Tahrir ban
Middlesex student union president Keith Shilson, who was suspended by university management at the end of September for refusing to cancel a “forum” for right-wing Islamists Hizb ut-Tahrir, has been reinstated. We will carry more on this in the next issue of Solidarity.
