Yes, talking about politics with some students is like keeping a sleep-deprived sloth awake. And how this image tars the rest of us. Everything, from McCain chips (with their student newspaper advert: “Students Get Back To Doing Nothing Quickly“) to this blog, gives an ironic wink to the stereotype of the dosser student.

As the Independent columnist, Mark Steel, wrote a while ago: “The youth of today – they just don’t show no disrespect“. It’s the “quasi-proverbial, and not wholly undeserved, reputation students have cultivated over the years for extreme political apathy”, according to Hicham Yezza writing in The Guardian. Even the system is against us. Yezza continues: “Many universities have now grown to see their task as that of churning out generic, malleable clones for the consumption of ever more regimental recruiters…they view the very act of students engaging with the wider reality of their world as a subversive phenomenon to be nipped in the bud before it infects the rest of the student population”.

Talking about politics with some students is like keeping a sleep-deprived sloth awake. This image tars the rest of us.

No, we don’t have the freak banner of a modern day Hendrix, or the geeks and one-eyed midgets of Dylan. “Change” happened in America and the recent Greek student protests happened in…well, Greece. And there are some apathetic dossers out there: “Do we really care?”, one student commented on a York University newspaper website article that detailed the amount of money uni‘s invest in the arms trade. “Worst front page ever. So incredibly boring” another student put. One cheerful soul typed on a ‘Campaign Against the Arms Trade York Uni’ Facebook group: “The vast majority either don’t care or support it”. It seems being a student radical is so 1992.

But positives change happens regardless of negative perceptions. In recent months, over 20 universities were occupied by student activists, demanding action over Gaza and uni arms trade investments. The occupation of Queen Mary’s, University of London, caused the university to withdraw investments in the arms trade and review it’s ethical policy. The School of Oriental and African Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London and Bangor University have also withdrawn investment from arms companies after student pressure.

Sit-ins are one off demonstrations. Nevertheless, at York University at least, there is a healthy political student community. We have a model UN, Labour Society, Liberal Democrats Society, Conservative Society, Amnesty International Society, Oxfam Society and Friends of the Earth Society. Then there is all the independent groups like Gig For Gaza and The Campaign Against The Arms Trade. There are regular film showings on everything from The End of Suburbia to The Zionist Story .

Both the university newspapers have thriving politics sections, featuring interviews with Nick Clegg, Mozzam Begg, George Galloway and more. There are countless talks, always so popular that everyone from Hilary Benn to The Prince of Jordan enjoys a full house. Oh, and as for the “System”, York’s large Politics Department and the Centre for Applied Human Rights would have something to say about it’s production of “malleable clones”.

Why must the student activist always be on the defence against the stereotypes of the student radical and the student apathetic? We don’t want either Project Mayhem OR two-for-one drink deals. So what does your average politically active student sound like?

“Do we really care? Clubbing tomorrow night instead. And, yeah I’ll be going to the talk on Gaza tomorrow, no need to cook, just re-heat some leftover pizza. Send me the link of the Amnesty group over Facebook, I’ll see if I can make the meeting. My essay isn’t due in ‘til next week, so should be fine. Don’t wear a keffiyeh tomorrow, you’ll look like a twat. Pub?”

Related posts:

1. Politics, pirates and Papadofragakis, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love union elections
2. Occupational hazard
3. Labour are losers when it comes to university funding

Exhibit A: Edinburgh University

Through an occupation and a rather snazzy blog, Edinburgh’s occupiers managed to do the unthinkable. They made a change that will affect you, me, Palestinians and Israelis. Yes, people, they did it: they managed to get Eden Spring mineral water banned.

Students will no longer sup from the cup of ideological perversity, and can instead refresh themselves in the well of ethical purity. This breakthrough, however, was slightly undermined by the fact that the University was banning bottled water anyway. Oops.

Here’s the quote:

“With specific regard to the use of bottled Eden Springs water, the University acknowledges that there are strongly held concerns about Eden Springs, and that were it not for the fact that it is preparing to cease using bottled water, it would have been necessary to review the purchase of water from Eden Springs.”

I suppose if you campaign to ban things that are already getting banned, you’re going to be successful. So well done there. The Occupation also won the right to, err, exercise a right they already had, and go through official channels to argue for a more ethical investment policy. Radical!

The only discernible achievement of the Edinburgh Occupation is the possible establishment of 5 scholarships for Gazan students. This is a genuinely good thing, but before Occupation advocates get carried away, they have to ask themselves: could this have been achieved without an occupation? The answer, I think, is yes. Edinburgh had done similar schemes with other humanitarian crises. Thus, was the occupation necessary? No.

Exhibit B: Cardiff University

On the face of it, it was Cardiff’s occupation that most successful. They persuaded the University to divest from BAE and General Electric (partly). That’s good. But their aim was a bit different:

“Cardiff University to divest all shares, direct or indirect, from arms manufacturers and aerospace companies.”

They may have divested shares, but the University still has a large stake in the arms industry. £150,000 worth of contracts with QinetiQ in the engineering department. It’s not okay to invest in bombs, but it’s obviously okay to make them.

The entire list offered by Sheffield Uni Occupiers is full of rather dubious successes, and plenty of vague promises from various universities, who will ‘consider’ or ‘review’ the aims of the Occupiers.

I would love it if the Occupation succeeded in some of their aims (the scholarships, for example) but I’m willing to bet that the University of Sheffield will not cave to the main demands of the occupiers. Any takers for a cheeky fiver?

Related posts:

1. Occupational hazard
2. Credit crunch survival for just £500. Kind of.

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…

Related posts:

1. Can occupations ever be successful?
2. Relative funding cuts for Russell Group universities
3. The pathetic apathetics: are students getting political again?