Gareth Stedman Jones

Anthony Barnett
Tom Wengraf

Student Power: What is to be Done?

Until this year, Britain, perhaps uniquely, has lacked any significant student
movement. During the past 15 years sections of British students have played an
active, if not predominant role in the agitation over Suez, campaigns against
racism and colonialism, and, most auspiciously, CND. But none of this political
activity reflected anything that could be termed, a specific student consciousness.
Traditionally the ideal self-image of the student was the ‘undergraduate’—a
debased version of the renaissance polymath, a gentleman taught by gentlemen,
freed from prejudice by the austere pleasures of socratic debate. Collective student
consciousness was precluded by such a schema. The liberal philosophy of acade-
mic freedom and the non-vocational university fused both teacher and taught in
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the abstract and unfettered quest for wisdom. Even the concept
‘student union’ was confiscated by liberal academic terminology to
mean either nursery training in the rhetorical skills of parliamentary
repartee or cheap passes to foreign museums and youth hostelling in
southern climes.
The events at the LSE have at last signalled the beginnings of the
demystification of the undergraduate complex. For the first time stu-
dents have shown unprecedented collective solidarity in their role as
students. The LSE affair was the first occasion in Britain in which a
student union has been used as a corporate instrument against the
arbitrary powers of academic staff. The British student, belatedly, has
become part of the international typology of militant student action.
Structural Change

Since 1954 important structural changes have taken place in the British
university system, without which the complete and militant solidarity
of students at the LSE would hardly have been conceivable. The greatest
single factor has been the increased number of students engaged in
higher education. Before the second World War the number of stu-
dents never rose above 70,000, but the pace of expansion began to
increase after the war by 1954-55 the number had risen to 122,000.
This was still insignificant beside the acceleration of expansion in the
late 1950’s and early 1960’s. By 1962-63 the numbers had risen to
216,000. Only three years later (1965-66) the numbers had gone above
300,000, and according to the annual report of the ministry of Educa-
tion for 1966, all targets for student numbers set in the Robbins Report
had so far been exceeded.
Such dramatic increases can only be seen in their proper perspective
when set in counterpoint to a consistent record of government parsi-
mony. Successive governments whilst sanctioning university expan-
sion, have not been prepared to allocate proportionate increases in
expenditure. The result has been a growing ratio of students to teachers
and the physical overcrowding of students in university buildings. At
the LSE for instance a library built to accommodate 900 students is
now supposed to house 3,500. Even more scandalous has been the un-
willingness of governments to raise student grants in proportion to the
rise of prices. The difference is supposed to be met by parents but there
is no legal means of forcing them to do so. Nor is it ever made really
clear whether student grants are intended simply for the term time or
for the whole year—thus many parents claim to have fulfilled their
obligations simply by providing room and keep for students in vaca-
tions. The result is that students who wish to avoid financial blackmail
by their parents, even those paid the maximum grant, can now, most
accurately be included in the phenomenon of ‘new poverty’ discussed
by Robin Blackburn (NLR 42). Many students live on £6 per week, of
which £3 goes on rent—by no stretch of the imagination can they be
called ‘the pampered products of the welfare state.’ This situation is
aggravated by many other anomalies: the highest grants tend not to
go to people in London or other large cities without residential universi-
ties, but to Oxford and Cambridge where costs are marginally lower
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and credit facilities are much greater. Again for some unexplained
reason many students in training colleges, art schools and CATS get
lower grants than those reading for degrees.

The rise in the number of students reflects also a profound change in

their social situation. Before the Second World War students engaged
in higher education only constituted 2.7 per cent of their age group.
By 1967, however, this proportion had risen to 11 per cent. Students
are still an elite group, but their social destination has shifted. The
University no longer provides the almost automatic entrance into an
elite professional class. Now, a much larger and less exclusive social
strata demands degree qualification. The pre-war university pre-
eminently prepared its members for law, medicine, church or civil ser-
vice. In the modern university the predominant goals of students are
bifurcated between industry and further academic research. This
changing social function of the university is partly reflected in the
growth of new subjects—in particular sociology, a discipline still
socially unmoored from professional needs. It is significant that much
of the leadership in the LSE revolt came from students in the sociology
faculty.

Students and undergraduates

It is not surprising that the old liberal-undergraduate conception of the

University should have become incapable of adapting itself to the
reality of the student situation. Students are an oppressed group—
oppressed economically by the state and their parents, oppressed in-
tellectually by the suffocating weight of dead and conformist depart-
ments. But the unspoken technological pivots of university expansion
have been denied by government, press and public opinion alike. For the
bourgeoisie, whatever the opinion of the Times, a student must be an
undergraduate. University expansion has provided a place for the
marginal student—he should be all the more grateful. The student
lives on the coffers of the hard working taxpayer—for doing nothing;
he should at least try to behave like a gentleman and confine his energy
to student rags and the gentry vandalism that has so long been the
hall mark of Oxford and Cambridge. The LSE provided a real testing
ground for such mythology—and sustained it. The changed situation
of the student was almost ignored, and with true chauvinist precision
the spoliation of the public image of the student was laid at the feet of
South African and American demagogues.

But public condemnation had one happy result. It fortified the students’
consciousness of their corporate identity. The LSE ‘affair’ began as a
traditional issue of liberal morality, similar to the type of consciousness
aroused by CND and Suez. It was almost contingent that student feelings
on racialism and colonialism should have been crystallized in the ap-
pointment of Adams as the new Director. But in the course of the
struggle the issues became transformed into a controversy that con-
cerns all students, as students, i.e. 1. student power; 2. the status of the
union; 3. the in loco parentis system of discipline.
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The contest highlighted problems that will be vital in any student
strategy. These were firstly how to link concrete mobilizing issues (in
this case the suspension of Adelstein and Bloom) with the more
abstract ‘institutional’ issues (i.e. student power). Secondly, how was
militancy to be maintained, in the absence of a ‘total victory’? In other
words, how was a student consciousness to be made permanent?
To summarize, the basic issue that confronted the students at LSE, was
how to construct an ideology of student action out of nothing except a
useless mythology of ‘undergraduate’ behaviour.

Strategy

Two answers to these problems appear to have been thrown up in the

course of the struggle. The most dramatic was the appeal for a ‘free
university’. There seem to be two principal aspects incarnate in the
‘free university’ idea. Firstly, a recognition amongst students, of the
inadequacy of the official School curriculum, a demand for the control
over the content of education. Secondly it reflected a dissatisfaction with
the form of education. Propagandists for the free university appeared
to suggest some possible form of return to the medieval community
idea of learning. The ‘inhuman’ ‘machine-like’ official university was
to be replaced by the ‘human’ ‘organic’ university, which would flower
beside it. In fact this move represented a flight from the concern with
the proper political goals and strategies of the student movement. It
was a flight to experience, to a ‘naturalist’ and ‘spontaneous’ ideology.
It posed, incorrectly, two conflicting models; on the one hand a union
strategy which would only succeed in integrating the corporative
student body into the technocratic university, on the other, an ideal
non-institution outside the institutional structure of the university
proper. The free university, ultimately can only end up as another
student club.

But within its mystical shell, it contains a rational kernel: that is the
demand for control over the content of education. This was a demand,
absent from the other main form of solution proposed by the students
—the Union proposals for the reform of the University structure. Any
serious student strategy must integrate both the demand for control
over the content of education, and the demand for union power.

Practical forms

What practical forms should such a strategy take? By and large it can
be said that there are six principal demands for Student Union activities
in all institutions of further education.
1. The status of the union. Here there is a wide disparity among dif-
ferent universities. The crucial issue is the control over the acquisition
and the disposal of union funds. In particular many unions, including
the LSE, are not allowed to choose to subsidise political clubs or activi-
ties. The removal of all such external prohibitions should be a priority
demand.
2. The destruction of the in loco parentis system. In the long run the
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student aim should not be representation on disciplinary committees,
but their abolition. There is no justification for oppression and in-
trusion in the private lives of students. Students should be held re-
sponsible for their actions in the civil courts alone, and not doubly
punished by the university administration, as happened in a recent
case at Oxford.
3. Student unions should immediately constitute their own elective
non-faculty lectureships, using their own funds.
4. Control over the content of education. Students, through the Union,
should aim to open up a liberated zone of critical knowledge in the
dead body of institutional learning. This will involve negotiation with
staff, with the aim (as far as possible) of control over syllabuses, re-
quired reading, examinations, and in addition the demand for a
number of lecturers and professors to be appointed by the
students.

5. The length of courses; in most other countries the usual length of a

degree course is four years. It is essential that British students should
press for a fourth year, this would raise the quality of education and at
the same time give more reality to demands for student control over
courses, appointments and discipline.

6. A massive grant increase and of course total opposition to the idea of

loans.

7. There should be constitutional guarantees that no elected representa-

tive of any student body may be disciplined for acting in his official
capacity.

Three inferences

There are three further inferences to be drawn from the LSE affair, all of
which will be vital if student militancy is to make further headway. The
first concerns the task of student socialists. Socialists have always tended
to bypass the union. But the events at LSE show clearly that where
feasible socialist students should work within the union as the only
institution that can act as the permanent embodiment of corporate
consciousness. As the LSE showed, union militancy can to some extent
transcend political differences. In particular the socialist student should
concern himself with the struggle to attain control over the content of
the education offered, in other words, in the creation of the critical
university. Socialist students should make it their ‘theoretical’ task to
comprehend the nature of the university, its ideology, and its place in
society. This should involve a critique both of the administrative
structure and the curriculum. Tactically this entails active participation
on union committees, in student journalism, and in official seminars
or discussion with the staff. Of course this does not mean the absence
of concern with external problems, any more than it would for socialist
trade unionists. It does, however, mean, that in the present political
situation at least, the socialist student should make control over the
university his first concern.
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Secondly, the LSE affair was instrumental in revealing the disunity and
fragmentation of the university staff. Indeed the staff became more and
more fissiparous, as the student body became more solid. It is essential
that such splits should be widened and deepened. It is unlikely that the
students would have been so successful, if it had been confronted by
monolithic hostility from the staff. In fact this is unlikely to happen.
The latent contradictions among the staff are very great, both in terms
of power and ideology, between senior and junior staff, between de-
partments and between different political commitments. Students
should try as far as possible to bring these differences into the open,
preferably in the form of open debate. On the other hand, vague
alliances with parts of the staff are to be avoided. The LSE events show
that individual, ‘friendly’, ‘mediating’ members of staff only tend to
confuse issues. Alliances should only be formed where both staff and
student positions are clear. In some cases, especially like that of the
Gervasi dismissal, some form of specific joint strategy could be made in
conjunction with the AUT.
Thirdly it is instructive how the existence of the Radical Student
Alliance strengthened the positions of the student leaders in LSE, and
how this in turn buttressed the power and influence of the RSA. The
connection between RSA and LSE could have overturned the tired and
compromised leadership of the NUS at the last annual conference. The
new student corporate consciousness and militancy must clearly ex-
tend beyond the framework of individual schools and universities.
The RSA is at present the ideal medium by which such specific ex-
periences can be compared and generalized, and thus strengthen both
analysis and strategy of student action. Ultimately, of course, the goal
is the capture of the NUS. This is now definitely realizable.
A new stage

The lifting of the suspensions on Adelstein and Bloom, the entry of

Adams, invitation of the new union president to tea at the Athenaeum
and production of yet another set of reactionary reform proposals by
the Administration, presages a new stage in the struggle for student
liberation. Students are in an unequalled position to understand the
nature of their mystification and oppression. But they must start by re-
jecting two forms of assimilation which pose a constant temptation:
one, acceptance of academic dilettantism as a mode of culture; two,
leaden adherence to their set courses; the first leads to a complacent
liberalism, the second to intellectual fragmentation. Unlike the worker,
the student situation is transitional; a student strategy which based it-
self only on the politics of the campus would do no more than carica-
ture the liberal conception of the university as a retreat from society. In
fact, the student’s future will lie outside the university. His passport
will be his qualification. This only confirms the central importance of
student control, both over the content of courses and the position of
final examinations. Here socialist and radical students must not repeat
the mistakes of the English tradition which conflate modern technologi-
cal society with advanced industrial capitalism. Just as liberalism within
the context of learning contains values which are unquestionably pro-
gressive—freedom of expression, autonomy of institutions of learning
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—so the technological basis of university expansion vastly increases the
number who benefit from higher education and potentially at least
through its technical superiority, greatly enhances the power of scholar-
ship and science. Student demands for power over their role in the
university and the subject matter of their education are demands for a
stake in their future, the technological basis of which is beyond
question. The struggle for control within the universities is the strug-
gle for an education which can sustain technology and subdue it.

Obviously the kinds of suggestions and theoretical remarks that NLR

can make, can only be realized in the Universities themselves. The
major work of the development of student consciousness must be
undertaken by the students themselves. In this vital task they will have
before them, not only the example of LSE, but similar initiatives in US,
France, Japan, South America and elsewhere. If this task is performed,
then the events at LSE will be no more than the detonator for future
and more total struggles in other universities. Only by making the
struggle for the campus his first concern will the student ever be able to
make the acquisition of critical knowledge a right of education.