Open statement of solidarity with Warwick Students occupying against police brutality

Open statement of solidarity from the Student Assembly against Austerity

We support the student occupation and ongoing protests at Warwick University in response to police violence, for free education and against fees, cuts and debt. We send out solidarity to all the students concerned and condemn the escalating use of police violence on our campuses.   

On Wednesday 3 Dec 2014 students at Warwick University were holding a peaceful sit-in protest on campus as part of the national day of action for free education called by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts and the Student Assembly Against Austerity. They were sat in a circle discussing free education and the university community.

However, this was met with violence from police and who attacked them using CS spray and drawing tasers.  A number of students were assaulted and injured, and some arrested only to be released without charge later that evening. 

We support the demands of the students occupying their campus and echo their calls on the University of Warwick management to “support the right to protest and condemn any form of state violence including the use of CS gas and tasers on our campus.”

This attack on peaceful protesters at Warwick University represents a further ratcheting up of police violence used against student activists following the disgraceful scenes that followed a student occupation at Senate House in December 2013 and those at Birmingham University last year.
Students and staff should be able to protest against policies and practices with which they disagree. They should be able to take part in protests without fear of attack or the use of tasers or CS gas.  Universities are meant to be places of debate and discussion.  We condemn the actions of the University, the police and security. We support all those students involved and offer solidarity to protests and occupations now taking place. 

To sign please email info@thestudentassembly.org.uk 

Why higher education workers in Britain are right to strike

The UCU’s action is about fairness, equality and defending public higher education, say Tom Hickey and John Holmwood - see also here

Defend University of London Student's Right to Protest

Please sign this statement:

We, the undersigned, unreservedly condemn the escalating use of police against peaceful protests at the University of London.
On 4 December, students were violently evicted from Senate House, University of London (UoL), by private security and police. On 5 December, a protest march in Bloomsbury in their support, calling for 'cops off campus', was attacked and kettled by police, and over 30 staff and students were arrested.
We believe this marks an escalation in the level of force against student-led protests at the University of London which threatens the ethos of the University. It seems clear that UoL Management are not negotiating with students and staff who protest - including occupying students - but are simply attempting to suppress dissent. We condemn the blanket injunction brought by the UoL against demonstrations or occupations across their many campuses.
We call on all who care about the future of our Universities to object to this invited invasion of the police onto campuses. Police intimidation has no place in a seat of learning. Many staff and students have fled repressive regimes. We are horrified at supposedly 'liberal' university managements adopting these tactics.
We demand an immediate repudiation of the injunction by UoL Management, no more police on campus, and for UoL Management to engage with students and staff about the concerns that led to the protests in the first place.

Defend the Sussex Occupation

Sign the statement in defence of the Sussex occupation

A petition has been launched to express our solidarity with the struggle against the privatisation of 235 jobs and express our opposition to the decision of Sussex university management to impose an injunction which bans both protest and occupations on campus until September, thus effectively also criminalising the ongoing Bramber house occupation. 

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/stop-the-protest-ban-at-sussex-university

Please sign and pass on…

More info from Defend the Right to Protest here

Edited to add: The Occupation has been smashed in a brutal manner by police - see this report by Jelena Timotijevic and oppose the trumped up charges against student protesters - see here for more.

The New College of Resistance

Earlier this year, it was announced that a private elite New College of the Humanities was to be launched in London, the inevitable logical result of the marketisation of education that has been steadily underway in the UK. It is therefore a pleasure to announce that in less than two weeks a 'New College of Resistance' will be held in central London on Saturday 29 October - a teach-in to help forge the links between lecturers and students for the coming struggles ahead. The timetable is now online, and to register go to here.

2011: Key Dates for Activists in Britain

January - The Student Struggle continues...anyone else who wants to join in most welcome!

Wednesday 19 January - Save the EMA

Saturday 29th January, National Demonstrations: London & Manchester
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=186143168067779
Also supported by UCU, NCAFC and in Manchester by TUC and PCS youth network

February

Saturday 5 February: Unite Against Fascism Protest against the English Defence League in Luton - this is critical after Jack Straw played the race card yet again recently.

Saturday 12 February: People’s Convention to Build Resistance to Austerity, hosted by Right to Work and others, London

March in March

Saturday 26 March: “March for the Alternative”, organised by the TUC, 11am Victoria Embankment, London.

Teach-In: Education for the People, Not the Market

From the Education Activist Network
Teach-in: Education for the People, Not the Market
Sunday 5th December, 12noon-4pm, King’s College London

Speakers include journalists George Monbiot and Laurie Penny, King’s College lecturer Stathis Kouvelakis and veteran of the 1968 student movement John Rose.

According to The Independent the student movement has broken through the ‘cuts consensus’. Now we have an opportunity to challenge a vision of education that is dominated by the market – where private companies are gaining the power to award degrees and young people are to be priced out of our colleges and universities. In the university occupations of May 1968 students took control of their curriculum from the authorities – thousands attended lectures by Sartre, Genet and others. At the national Teach-in, students, academics, artists, musicians, writers, precarious workers and trade unionists will be debating the alternatives for education. There will also be forums for HE and FE/school students to coordinate the next steps in the struggle.

Sous les pavés, la plage

'Let's say a Conservative government announced, in that sort of macho way: 'We're gonna slash public spending by a third, we'll slash this, we'll slash this, we'll do it tomorrow. We have to take early, tough action...I think if we want to go the direction of Greece, where you get real social and industrial unrest, that's the guaranteed way of doing it.'
Nick Clegg, March 2010

Probably the only thing I have ever agreed with the duplicitous Nick Clegg on was his pre-election prediction that savage cuts in social spending would lead to 'Greek style riots' in Britain. This week - and thanks largely to Nick Clegg's support for the Tories savage cuts in higher education spending - we saw the closest thing in Britain for twenty years to a 'Greek or French style riot' when a National Union of Students and University and College lecturers Union demonstration entitled 'Demo-lition' actually lived up to its name and saw, er, the demolition of part of the Tory HQ at Millbank.

Those on the 'demolition demonstration' deserve to be heartily congratulated for such a heroic and inspiring and much needed manifestation of civil disobedience and resistance - and solidarity has to now be built as the state machine seeks to exact its bitter revenge - urged on by hypocritical Tory politicians.

'A riot', Martin Luther King once said, 'is at bottom the language of the unheard'. Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine once poetically riffed off this, noting that 'the riot be the rhyme of the unheard'. The point is I guess that riots are not something that are organised at will by tiny minorities of 'Middle Class Braindead Anarchists' (copyright - the Daily Mail) - rather as Chris Harman once noted, they tend to come about in rather more unexpected and spontaneous fashion:

'Those without hope are capable suddenly, virtually out of nowhere, of shifting from apathy to anger. And that anger can break through all the restraints that education within capitalist society is supposed to build into people’s consciousness. The local streets suddenly take on the aspect of a revolutionary battleground, with barricades and burning cars and instant solidarity against the state.'

It is true that have not yet got to the levels of the 1981 Riots or the Poll Tax Riots of twenty years ago, though the mass militant direct action of students - and particularly young school and college students - this week certainly marked a turning point in British politics and showed beyond any doubt that the raw class anger on the European continent against austerity cuts exists here as well.

If the education cuts are going to be successfully resisted, the student and lecturers militancy now needs to be generalised across campuses in Britain - with occupations and the like - as seems to be beginning to happen already in some places. If the wider cuts are going to resisted, then the revolutionary spirit of the glorious Millbank occupation needs to find its way into workplaces up and down the country. To generalise this fightback and to win a new young generation to revolutionary socialist politics - that is the task of Marxists in Britain today.

Education Activist Network coordinating meeting: Where next after the national demo? Monday 15 November, 6pm, King’s College London.

The case for revolution. A London-wide meeting organised by the Socialist Worker Student Society. Mon 22 Nov, 6pm, Clement House, LSE, London. With Alex Callinicos (King’s College lecturer and author of the Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx), Mark Bergfeld (NUS NEC) and Fraser Anderson (Oxford University student)

Noam Chomsky on higher education choices

I had a startling experience a few weeks ago. I travelled to Mexico City for talks at the National University, an enormous and very impressive institution with high standards of achievement and scholarship. Entrance is selective, but the university is virtually free. I then visited an even more remarkable institution, the college in Mexico City established by former mayor Lopez Obrador. Again, the facilities and standards are quite impressive. It is not only free, but has open admissions, though sometimes that requires some delay and sometimes assistance for students lacking adequate preparation. Shortly after I went to San Francisco for talks, and learned more about the California institutions of higher education. They have been at the very peak of the international higher education system. By now tuitions are quite high, even for in-state students, and cutbacks are affecting teaching, research, and staff. It would be no great surprise if the two major state universities, UC Berkeley and UC Los Angeles, will soon be privatized while the remainder of the state system is reduced considerably in scale and level. Needless to say, Mexico is a poor country with a struggling economy, and California should be one of the richest places in the world, with incomparable advantages. I mention these recent experiences only to emphasize that the recent cut-backs in higher education seen in much of the world cannot simply be traced to economic problems. Rather, they reflect fundamental choices about the nature of the society in which we will live. If it is to be designed for the wealthy and privileged, mostly engaged in management and finance while production is transferred abroad and most of the population is left to fend somehow for themselves at the fringes of decent and creative life, then these are good choices. If we have different aspirations for the world of our children and grandchildren, the choices are shameful and ruinous.
Noam Chomsky, November 2009 - those who can should join the demonstration in London today called by the NUS and UCU - the revolt against Tory cuts to education has to begin today

Goldsmiths students occupy against the cuts

Why doesn't the National Union of Students follow this lead and call for and organise a national wave of occupations to defend education?

On the subject of students, ee also this powerful video highlighting police brutality against students protesting for free education in Dublin - also available here

Support the Anti-Academies Alliance

No more Academies - No 'Free' Schools - Defend State Education

The Government's Academies Bill is being rushed through Parliament. It proposes that all 'Outstanding' Schools are given the automatic right to become Academies, following a vote of the Governors. They will not be required to consult parents, teachers, school support staff or the local community. All other schools are also invited to apply to become Academies.

At a stroke this could take hundreds of the most successful schools out of local authority control. This would leave local authorities managing the schools with the most difficulties, with diminishing budgets.

Michael Gove has written to every school in the country. In it he offers
* freedom from local authority control;
* ability to set your own pay and conditions for staff;
* freedom from following the national curriculum;
* ability to change the length of terms and school days;
* having greater control over school budgets; and
* freedom to spend the money the local authority currently spends on your behalf.

In reality this means the end of the state education system as we know it. In every city and town we need to start to prepare to resist these proposals.

Save Middlesex Philosophy

Okay, its not quite Greece, but at Middlesex University, the students have already occupied in solidarity with their philosophy lecturers, and there is an online petition to sign

Take Back Education

Join the teach-in to build the Resistance - King's College London 27th Feb 11am-4pm - see here for more details:

Education is under attack. Up to a third of university funding - £2.5bn - is to be cut, 30 universities could shut down and over 14,000 lecturers may lose their jobs. Big businesses exert more and more control over the university system. Cuts in student places and higher fees could exclude many people from higher education altogether.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Education workers are lobbying for strike action, following the victory at Tower Hamlets College. Students are protesting across Europe, organising occupations to stop neo-liberal reforms - and taking control of campuses for another kind of education. This February we will be hosting a day of alternative lectures and tutorials in King's College London to bring together staff and students to celebrate what education could be - and to prepare for the battles ahead.

Initial line up includes:

literary critic Terry Eagleton + poet and education campaigner Michael Rosen + Jeremy Corbyn MP + lecturer and radical theorist Alex Callinicos + Justice for Cleaners Juan Carlos Piedra + activists from Ireland and Austria + education workers who have led successful strikes + voices from students and campaigns around the country + other speakers to be announced.

Alternative lectures and tutorials include:

The crisis in our universities and the battle for education + Education for liberation - what could our education look like? + The corporate takeover of our universities + How do we fight for free education? + Building fighting unions + Education for all - challenging Islamophobia, racism and the points based immigration system + The tasks ahead - building resistance that can win.

On the final point, people might like to note the recent vote for action by lecturers at Leeds University - messages of support can be sent here

On the joys of job interviews

From here:

I sat down in front of the panel of stony, unimpressed faces. An iceberg would have radiated more warmth. No one asked me about my presentation. There was just an embarrassed silence for a few seconds while... while what? What was I supposed to do? Inscrutable reptile looks. Then the first question. I was asked how I would promote the college's Equal Opportunites policy in the classroom. Of course, I'm wholly in favour of Equal Opps policies and it's good that they clearly take it seriously - but what am I supposed to say about this? I managed to mumble something vague - but only after considering, for a second or two, a facetious response. 'How would I promote the college's Equal Opportunities policy in my teaching? Well I suppose I would promote it by not being a racist, sexist or homophobic bastard in the classroom.' What else can you say?

McEducation

New Labour now think that multinational companies like McDonalds should have more of a say over education for workers - including being able to hand out A-levels. 'We should not be ideological about who provides the service - we should just work out who is best at providing it' says James Purnell, Brown's appointed successor to the hapless Peter Hain at the Department of Work and Pensions. Yeah, but isn't there a slight difference somewhere between teachers 'providing' A-levels through the old fashioned system known as education in schools, and McDonalds 'providing' A-levels through some new fangled scheme involving training its wage-slaves to serve up shit? The genius that is Steve Bell certainly seems to think so...as does another fine cartoonist Tim