Occupational hazard
University occupations are a pointless flashback to a misunderstood era
The University of Sheffield has been occupied by students! How. Retro. Can. You. Get. A group of forty or so students are currently ensconced in the Hicks building’s lecture halls, snuggling down for the night.
Sprinting after a bandwagon that is now quite far in the distance, they are protesting Israeli actions in Gaza and the University’s inadequate response to them. Quite what Gaza has to do with Sheffield is beyond me. I, for one, would rather go to a university that didn’t make cheap, ideological soundbites at all.
But I digress.
While I support many of the occupation’s aims, I’m not too keen on their methods. There’s something wonderfully futile about occupations. They can end only in one of two ways: 1) It fails and people get bored and leave. 2) It fails and people get chucked out by that ubiquitous fellow ‘the man’.
Along the way, sit-ins tend to piss off the bystanders affected and make them associate the protester’s aims with their personal inconvenience, which is not a good link. They are not effective, they are merely annoying. Occupations don’t work. Israel needs to realise this, and so does this group.
Perhaps an example is required.
In Paris ’68, students staged sit-ins throughout the Sorbonne’s campus and triggered similar protests in universities across Europe. But things were a little different back then.
It was not a case of a couple of hundred students, sitting down until the police told them to get lost. Rather, it was a few thousand rushing into the street, hurling paving slabs at the police and setting fire to cars.
Not only this, but vast swathes of the French workforce also went on strike to show solidarity with the student body (but mainly because they were French, the weather was nice, and they fancied a day or so off).
It was bedlam. Society was in a state of flux. Revolution really was in the air. And what changed? Nothing. Zip. Nada. The right-wing Charles De Gaulle (certainly not one of history’s progressives) was re-elected the same year with a considerable majority.
France went back to work (until the next strike) and the ‘revolutionary’ students went on to become a mixture of doctors, lawyers and, in the case of their leader, a Green MEP.
The protests did achieve very minor gains for students. University administrations make some concessions, but these were basic at best. Prior to the protests, for example, male and female students were just about banned from visiting each other’s dormitories. This rule was subsequently abolished
Basically, after 1968 universities in France became a bit less authoritarian and stuffy.
So, what was the result of weeks of strikes, riots and sit-ins? The students had earned the right to stay the night at their partners’, and gowns were no longer worn at graduations.
Thus, will this occupation make a difference? No, it will not. The reason this upsets me is that I want them to succeed in their overall aims. I want a free Palestine and would love my university to have links with – and be engaged in charity work in – the region. But this is not the way to do it.
Protest by all means. Be loud, seek attention and get your cause heard – just don’t do it by actively pissing people off.
Oh, and also, PR Rule No. 1: if you’re going be an admin in a Facebook group about an issue where the debate is often clouded by accusations of terrorism, don’t have your profile pic as a bloke in a balaclava, holding a machine gun. Just sayin’, like…
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