The University and Social Justice

Struggles Across the Globe

Aziz Choudry, Salim Vally

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780745340685
• eBook ISBN: 9781786805751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Labour Economics

Higher education has long been contested terrain. From student movements to staff unions, the fight for accessible, critical and quality public education has turned university campuses globally into sites of struggle.

Whether calling for the decommodification or the decolonisation of education, many of these struggles have attempted to draw on (and in turn, resonate with) longer histories of popular resistance, broader social movements and radical visions of a fairer world. In this critical collection, Aziz Choudry, Salim Vally and a host of international contributors bring grounded, analytical accounts of diverse struggles relating to higher education into conversation with each other.

Featuring contributions written by students and staff members on the frontline of struggles from 12 different countries, including Canada, Chile, France, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Occupied Palestine, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, the UK and the USA, the book asks what can be learned from these movements' strategies, demands and visions.

1

Lessons in struggle, studies in resistance

Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally

While the commodification of education and the spectre of the corporate university (private and public) haunts, and has indeed materialised in many locations, many campuses remain sites of struggle, whether erupting, dormant or under the radar. Over 50 years have passed since the 1968 wave of rebellion reverberated around the world against authoritarian rule, war and colonialism when students, often alongside workers, organised mass protests, sending shockwaves of alarm among political, economic and military elites (Dubinsky, Krull, Lord, Mills & Rutherford, 2009; de García, 2005; Pensado, 2015; Vrana, 2017). Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – and since – in Thailand, Pakistan, South Korea, Iran and other parts of Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Pacific, campuses have frequently erupted in protest.

At the start of the twenty-first century, struggles within higher education continue in the context of deep social and economic inequalities, global ecological and capitalist crises, multiple forms of state violence and repression, demands for rethinking the framework and purpose of formal education and universal access to free quality education (on recent student movements, see, for example, Brooks, 2017; Ferguson, 2017; Hensby, 2018; Myers, 2017; Solomon & Palmieri, 2011; Weiss & Aspinall, 2012; Zamponi, 2018). Demands for institutional change, and calls to decolonise (however this term is defined) institutions, programmes of study and curricula have spread across campuses and countries (Bhambra, Gebrial & Nişancıoğlu, 2018; Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, 2018; Sian, 2019). As labour precarity bites deeply across sectors and societies, in many countries, university workers – academic and non-academic – and students have organised to resist further cuts to education and social spending, the imposition of neoliberal governance models, reorientation of education along market lines and the suppression of dissent. In some instances, students have also supported staff in universities struggling for a living wage and opposed the practice of outsourcing workers. In many countries, students, academic and non-academic staff have organised against military research on campus, formed an anti-sweatshop movement against apparel manufacturers, opposed university investments in fossil fuels, mining and other environmentally destructive businesses and demanded institutional/structural changes to address sexism, racism and economic marginalisation (see Chatterjee & Maira, 2014).

Some of these struggles draw on or implicitly continue longer histories and traditions of popular resistance and have been connected to broader movements for progressive social, political and economic change and radical visions of a fairer world. But while intergenerational knowledge may be sometimes passed on within organisations, movements and activist networks, this does not always happen. Among other reasons, the transitory nature of student life at universities poses challenges to recovering useable histories of earlier struggles. As well as a critical geohistorical lens which attends to specific histories, contexts and politics, we believe that these movements need to be theorised within the context of wider understandings of contemporary capitalism and authoritarianism and their potentials explored.

In recent years, from RhodesMustFall/FeesMustFall in South Africa to the ‘Maple Spring’ in Québec, from Chile to Palestine, student demands, and those of teaching faculty and non-academic workers have sometimes connected to broader struggles for social, economic and political justice – and indeed wider politics of people’s movements for liberation, and against authoritarianism, austerity and fascism. In many cases, student movements have met with violent police and state security responses. But they have also sometimes made significant gains. As we write, across the globe, students and professors are again being targeted by the state and right-wing political activists, criminalised, vilified, jailed and assaulted for speaking out against violence, injustice, fascism and repression.

From Palestine to Puerto Rico (Martinez & Garcia, 2018), some student/education justice movements still play important roles in resisting occupation and colonial rule, as in earlier periods. For example, Walker (1990) notes the role of Nga Tamatoa, which emerged from Maori students at the University of Auckland in the 1970s in the Maori movement for self-determination in Aotearoa/New Zealand, in successfully pressuring the New Zealand government for Maori language to be taught in schools. As with other movements, student movements also have their own internal contradictions. Important examples of this are feminist challenges about ways in which dominant forms of gender relations and sexual violence can be reproduced within these movements, as well as anti-racist challenges to student politics and higher education (see for example, hampton, Campos-Martínez and Olavarría, and Abdulhadi and Shehadeh chapters in this volume), including challenging the ways in which decisions are made during student struggles and relations with political parties.

Throughout the twentieth century, in many countries, students were involved in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics as well as mobilising to transform higher education either after independence or in the context of challenges to racism, colonialism and imperialism in countries such as the US (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Biondi, 2018; Kelley, 2018). Today, neoliberal policies and forms of authoritarianism are deeply intertwined as we can see most clearly perhaps in the chapters on India and Turkey. While student activism is often characterised as inherently left-wing, not all student activism is progressive. Indeed, as history (and some chapters in this book) tells us, campus politics often includes conservative, oppressive and anti-democratic tendencies. Prem Kumar Vijayan (in this volume) contends:

Perhaps the first task for any student political enterprise is to re-examine the identity ‘student’ – to see it, not as constituted by age or biology, class or gender, but as a particular element in a larger political-economic dynamic; and to see therefore, that not all student politics are necessarily either progressive or democratic, however much they may claim those qualities. It is to see that the terms ‘progressive’ and ‘democratic’ themselves need to be reviewed, given that they are increasingly defined by corporate and finance capitalist interests.

(p. 55)

While the ephemeral nature of students’ time in universities is seen as an impediment to organising, Alberto Toscano (2011) argues that:

the fragile, transitory nature of student politics can also be read as a strength: they allow for a fleeting if repeated formation of a peculiar form of collectivity … the university can also unify students in ways that corporativist or fragmented interests cannot … students do not constitute a class, rather they find themselves situated in a temporal condition: they are apprentice intellectual workers who the moment they gain self-consciousness as a community are dispersed and find themselves neutralized. But in the brief interlude of their preparation they constitute a compact group which has demonstrated an enormous political impulse in country after country.

(p. 83)

This collection explores movements and activism in higher education across diverse contexts. Taken as a whole, its chapters explore the scope for, and moments when, student activism and other struggles that emerge from within institutions of higher education influence, effect or participate in wider social change. We begin this chapter by addressing some dynamics of education, learning and the politics of struggle, linking the book’s overarching theme to the areas of critical adult education and critical literature on higher education, while noting some concerns about the fetishisation and securitisation of youth/students. Second, we note the corporatisation, marketisation, managerialism and neoliberalism of higher education and the dialectics of resistance. Third, we present a selective review of campus struggles and legacies and fourth, we turn to considering solidarities between students and workers/labour struggles and the university as a site of struggle. Finally, we reflect on alternative modes of organising and challenges to the politics of knowledge that have emerged from some of these movements. While we are writing, from Brazil and Argentina to Bangladesh and Sudan, new student mobilisations are challenging authoritarian rule and neoliberal cuts to education. In October 2019, student protests forced Chile's government to suspend proposed metro fare increases. As you read this, across the world there will be more.

EDUCATION, LEARNING AND STRUGGLE KNOWLEDGE

Regarding learning, our primary interest is not in the formal degree and diploma programmes, courses and curricula but rather in the spaces in which students, faculty and non-academic workers find themselves planning, mobilising and resisting together, including official student organisations, trade unions, campaigns and informal networks and modes of activism.

As university academics and educators with backgrounds in popular/movement radical adult education, research and organise outside of universities, we are keenly interested in the politics of knowledge production and the relationships between informal/non-formal learning in the course of struggles for change, and processes of more formal education. We take a sympathetic, but unromantic view of social movements and social movement knowledge production, well aware of internal tensions, contradictions and limitations that can be produced and reproduced as well as powerful visions and ideas that emerge from struggles for change.

Globally, within activist networks and social movements, there is a rich history of processes and practices combining informal, perhaps incidental learning with more programmatic political education – and indeed theory (Choudry, 2015; Choudry & Vally, 2018). Scandrett and Ballantyne (2019) note that:

[i]n the university, formal education (for credit) is given privilege and priority above non-formal education. Non-formal education however can be more self-directed, collective and democratic. A dialectical relationship between formal and non-formal education is a dynamic struggle in which both forms of education are valued and critically interrogate one another.

(p. 176)

Some chapters in this book explicitly build on and discuss activist knowledge and learning that arises in the course of campus mobilisations, occupations and protests and some of the possibilities, limitations and ambivalences as struggles and communities connect in the course of these activities (see Woodcock, Naidoo and Gamedze; hampton, in this volume).

Discussing the relationship between formal university education and non-formal/informal learning, Austin (2009) recalls the work of the Montreal-based group Caribbean Conference Committee (CCC) and New World Group in the 1960s:

Reflecting on his experience within the CCC and the C.L.R. James Study Circle while living in Canada, [Jamaican historian, Robert] Hill (2009) recently remarked: ‘Education was preparation to take part and play a role in the new stage of Caribbean history … more specifically, the next stage in the centuries-long struggle of the Caribbean people for freedom, dignity, and nationhood’ (p. 100). Hill continues: ‘To undertake this role outside the Caribbean … these students launched a series of community-based initiatives that were both a defence of their community as well as a testing of their intellectual cultural resources. They had one great advantage,’ he goes on, ‘namely, they saw no distinction between the campus and the community and they based their actions on this mutual convergence of interest.’

(p. 113)

After receiving the first drafts of their chapters we posed the following questions to all the book’s contributors: What can be learned from the strategies, tactics, demands and visions generated by student movements? What are their possibilities and limitations? How have these struggles resonated (or not) with other parts of society? How do current/recent movements/forms of activism relate to earlier moments in history/periods of struggle over education and society? In order to tackle, and indeed attempt to answer these questions, we seek to locate recent movements in a framework that attends to critically understanding them in relation to history, politics, power and context, but also one that avoids fetishising youth activism (Sukarieh & Tannock, 2015). Carpenter and Mojab (2017) write that the field of adult education should embrace ‘the category of youth not as distinct from adults but as a social category that is being equally regulated and invoked by the same social, cultural, economic, and political forces’ (p. 2).

The construction of university students as ‘unruly subjects’ (see Chapter 3) and as security threats is nothing new, as colonial and Cold War histories from around the world reveal, as well as more contemporary examples, such as the surveillance and policing of Palestine solidarity activism (Maira, 2019), and the ‘counter-terrorism’ and ‘deradicalisation’ ideology that has been enacted as law throughout Britain’s education system.

Giroux (2008) argues that youth have become:

one of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Lessons in struggle, studies in resistance
• 2 The trajectory of the 2010 student movement in the UK: From student activism to strikes
• 3 Insurgent subjects: Student politics, education and dissent in India
• 4 Neoliberalism, national security and academic knowledge production in Turkey
• 5 Nous who? Racialised social relations and Québec student movement politics
• 6 Learning from Chile’s student movement: Youth organising and neoliberal reaction
• 7 Resisting the US corporate university: Palestine, Zionism and campus politics
• 8 The Palestinian student movement and the dialectic of Palestinian liberation and class struggles
• 9 The new student movements in Mexico in the twenty-first century: #YoSoy132, Ayotzinapa and #TodosSomosPolitécnico
• 10 How did they fight? French student movements in the late 2000s and their contentious repertoire
• 11 The mustfall mo(ve)ments and Publica[c]tion: Reflections on collective knowledge production in South Africa
• 12 Revolutionary vanguard no more? The student movement and the struggle for education and social justice in Nigeria
• 13 Postcolonial and transformative education in the University of the Philippines
• Notes on contributors
• Index