UK: At the Occupation
8th December 2010
Nothing brings back the sixties like students getting kicked away from the public trough.
The occupation began at a ‘What Next?’ meeting on the day of the second student march when a group of UCL students voted to take over the Jeremy Bentham Room (students at SOAS had gone into occupation two days before). A general meeting was then held to draft their demands. The most important, and most often repeated, is that UCL’s management issue a statement ‘condemning all cuts to higher education’. They also want things they might be able to get: for the university to pay UCL cleaners the London living wage, to bring outsourced support staff in-house and to change the composition of the university council to get rid of the majority of corporate, non-UCL members (they’d like a quarter each of management, students, tutors and support staff). Decisions are made by consensus – ‘better than democracy’ a first-year undergraduate explained – at two lengthy daily meetings. Students are divided into working groups according to their talents – IT, media, process (analysis of how the occupation itself is working) – but there’s no leader, everyone insisted. An email account, Facebook page, website and Twitter feed were set up overnight and messages of support started to come in from people like Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky and Billy Bragg; comedians came to tell jokes, bands to play, novelists to read their books, tutors to give seminars. On 29 November, the day before the third march, they sent a delegation to protest outside the Oxford Circus Topshop about Philip Green’s alleged tax evasion. And on the day of the march itself, another delegation was sent to Trafalgar Square, while tweeters back at the occupation offered tea and biscuits to anyone running away from the police.
I wonder how they would cope if they were just left to sit and rot for a year or two? It’s not as if anybody needs them or their campus buildings. They might even serve as a tourist attraction. ‘Come see the student demonstrators! Like Madame Tussaud’s, only they move and smell bad!’
December 8th, 2010 at 12:25
Had to laugh at this one. Reminded me of the Republican National Convention when it was held in Texas a few elections back. Protestors staged a huge sit-in, lying down and blocking traffic. They wanted the cops to do a “Chicago” on them and had plenty of cameras waiting to document the beatings. Instead, the cops just sat back and waited. In the hot Texas sun, that pavement was probably 150 degrees F. or more. Didn’t take long at all for the protestors to “bake” into submission and leave. Cops thought the whole thing hilarious.
December 8th, 2010 at 15:54
I suspect that more of these things would spontaneously disintegrate if the Powers That Be just let them sit and stew for however long it took. “Man, we’ve occupied this campus for months!” “Yeah, what’s going to happen when the semester ends and you have incompletes in all your classes? Mom & Dad going to pick up the tab for an extra semester? Is your financial aid going to stretch any farther?”