Post on Higher Education, or why the cuts in EMA and raising of the cap on tuition fees are fundamentally unfair.
This is something i posted on Warseer I was kind of proud of writing. If i had a blog i'd repost it there but I don't and this is the closest thing I have. Its a little bit out of context but I think you can grasp the gist of what the other people I'm referring to have said without the need to reproduce their posts.
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As someone who has been in and around higher education for quite a number of years I do share some of Meri and Riks frustrations with the university system and the culture associated with it. Higher education is in great need of reform in general. I would disagree on their conclusions and I would argue that even from their position, the current proposals for the UK are less about trying to reform the education service and are actually a neo-liberal ideological assault on one of the bastions of Public spending, and a vulnerable one at that, and amount to a short sighted raid on the future incomes of the next generation to compensate for the mess that this generations ruling class have made of the economy, for simillarly short sighted and ideological reasons 20 years or so ago.
That's why I was on the protests in Belfast, why I personally attended organising meetings and got off my unemployed, messed-up sleep patterned arse at what for me count as ridiculous times of the morning (I don't think I'd seen 10 Am except from the other side of an all-nighter once this year until last week) and ran myself ragged in the frozen snowy conditions of Belfast in the last week to try and publicise the demonstrations to the best of my abilities. Its also why I was stewarding part of the local demo and when the students occupied the road outside the Belfast City Hall, I joined them, disseminated resistance tactics among them and tried to put the case for keeping the moral high ground with a nice peaceful protest.
Post on Higher Education, or why the cuts in EMA and raising of the cap on tuition fees are fundamentally unfair.
This is something i posted on Warseer I was kind of proud of writing. If i had a blog i'd repost it there but I don't and this is the closest thing I have. Its a little bit out of context but I think you can grasp the gist of what the other people I'm referring to have said without the need to reproduce their posts.
.....
As someone who has been in and around higher education for quite a number of years I do share some of Meri and Riks frustrations with the university system and the culture associated with it. Higher education is in great need of reform in general. I would disagree on their conclusions and I would argue that even from their position, the current proposals for the UK are less about trying to reform the education service and are actually a neo-liberal ideological assault on one of the bastions of Public spending, and a vulnerable one at that, and amount to a short sighted raid on the future incomes of the next generation to compensate for the mess that this generations ruling class have made of the economy, for simillarly short sighted and ideological reasons 20 years or so ago.
That's why I was on the protests in Belfast, why I personally attended organising meetings and got off my unemployed, messed-up sleep patterned arse at what for me count as ridiculous times of the morning (I don't think I'd seen 10 Am except from the other side of an all-nighter once this year until last week) and ran myself ragged in the frozen snowy conditions of Belfast in the last week to try and publicise the demonstrations to the best of my abilities. Its also why I was stewarding part of the local demo and when the students occupied the road outside the Belfast City Hall, I joined them, disseminated resistance tactics among them and tried to put the case for keeping the moral high ground with a nice peaceful protest. Well I guldered "Sit down! Its harder for the pigs te bate ye if yer sat douwn!". Its why there's footage of me on the local news of me in a tussle with the PSNI and why my leg and boots appear on the bottom of a picture of the police hauling away my friend and comrade Gerry, who was one of the leaders of the protest and was in the crowd with a megaphone also pushing the passive resistance tactic.
Ok, I could bore you with my demo stories all day, and if anyone wants me to elaborate on anything feel free to ask, but back to the serious point at hand.
The "3-year party" thing is a fallacy to an extent, but its also partly true, but I would put the extent to which its true down to a side effect of the Marketisation of Tertiary education in the last 30 years.I'm talking now specifically about Britain but from what I can tell this is a world wide trend. In the 1980s Thatcher and the cabal around her identified the university sector as an enemy, they saw the faculties as riven with people from the hated 60s generation who also wielded an amount of cultural power as opinion makers. A privileged and to some degree necessary section of society that could cause trouble. The way they went after them then was to dilute their clout by making a shed load of polytechnics into Universities and opening a string of new ones, subtle ideological warfare in the guise of egalitarianism, just like the Tory policies on home ownership. This actually worked, the academic establishment didn't quite this coming and got pwned.
Its a subject I could go into a lot more but the point, as it relates to where we are now, is that the student body got massively enlarged and the status of owning a Degree massively devalued. Sadly, higher education (particularly for Arts and humanities departments) has become an apprenticeship for some office job or job in the civil service, the universities themselves, Degree farms.
Another effect of having a lot of students is that "student" is now a form of identity consumerism. Freshers week is practically one long advertising campaign to induct the incoming student body into the idea of what "Being a student" is (somebody that spends their disposable income at the bar, on stupid clothes and look, here's some financial services to get you in the debt you'll need to sustain this lifestyle!) induct them into every other type of identity consumerism they could feasibly be attached to and make them feel left out of the huge amounts of fun everyone else is having if they don't partake in it. And it runs on like that for the rest of the year.
Academics are given increasing classes with decreasing support and a very limited time with the students and are left to compete with "the lifestyle", and largely fail at it with any but the brightest ones who are usually smart, interested and motivated to learn anyway. The other students are facilited to the extent that they can scrape by and get their degree if they do the minimum they could be reasonably expected to do and are lucky if they ever actually get a handle on what their subject is about. I'm not blaming them, most of them work up to 3 jobs and get into a ton of debt to sustain the lifestyle. Actually students are one of the most ruthlessly exploited workers in the western capitalist system and much of the bravado is actually them mythologising the petty compensations of their predicament, convincing themselves they are having the best years of their lives because the reality is that they are being cheated and their youth and energy exploited In all honesty I think this is part of where the anger that was unleashed yesterday came from.
I personally did it differently. It wasn't entirely by choice but I feel that I did university the correct way. By the time I got to Queens I had developed a physical allergy to alcohol and within the first semester would realise I was also allergic to cannabis and didn't touch the stuff after the Christmas break of my first year, or ever since. I was living at home because I was going to Uni in the same city as I was born and lived in my family home for the duration of my 3 year undergrad. It was close enough to get the bus but too far away for me to hang out at the Uni much after hours. I was also wrestling with a crippling skin condition that had had me miss months of school and college.
The "Student Lifestyle" wasn't an option for me, although I did get into some of the social side of things in the last year, but losing out on some of those experiences is something I still regret. I didn't need to get a job the whole time except a little summer work between years 2 and 3. I had the time to do the reading required by the course and i talked to the lecturers because i liked the subject and I found them interesting as people. I even spent my time using the university and campus facilities to give myself a broad education beyond what I was supposed to do for the course. I wasn't quite the convinced revolutionary i am today but i was quite interested in things like Marxist theory, so i always had something to say in the seminars a bit offside from the reading and an actual opinion. I even attended a couple of lectures for subjects I didn't do just because i thought they looked interesting.I saw the whole time as an opportunity to learn and I spent my time doing just that. I consciously built the foundations for a coherent world-view of my own. That's what i think a university should be for and to be fair that's what I did even under the current education system, but i hope you'll be able to grasp how special my circumstance were for me to be able to do that. I would like to see some serious reform of the education system to facilitate my experience become something like the norm, but that can't happen without a whole shift in the culture of higher education, and neither my vision or anything else good can emerge from these "reforms". They are a fundamentally unfair raid on the earnings of the next generation to pay for the mistakes of people who got their higher education for free.
This is something i posted on Warseer I was kind of proud of writing. If i had a blog i'd repost it there but I don't and this is the closest thing I have. Its a little bit out of context but I think you can grasp the gist of what the other people I'm referring to have said without the need to reproduce their posts.
.....
As someone who has been in and around higher education for quite a number of years I do share some of Meri and Riks frustrations with the university system and the culture associated with it. Higher education is in great need of reform in general. I would disagree on their conclusions and I would argue that even from their position, the current proposals for the UK are less about trying to reform the education service and are actually a neo-liberal ideological assault on one of the bastions of Public spending, and a vulnerable one at that, and amount to a short sighted raid on the future incomes of the next generation to compensate for the mess that this generations ruling class have made of the economy, for simillarly short sighted and ideological reasons 20 years or so ago.
That's why I was on the protests in Belfast, why I personally attended organising meetings and got off my unemployed, messed-up sleep patterned arse at what for me count as ridiculous times of the morning (I don't think I'd seen 10 Am except from the other side of an all-nighter once this year until last week) and ran myself ragged in the frozen snowy conditions of Belfast in the last week to try and publicise the demonstrations to the best of my abilities. Its also why I was stewarding part of the local demo and when the students occupied the road outside the Belfast City Hall, I joined them, disseminated resistance tactics among them and tried to put the case for keeping the moral high ground with a nice peaceful protest.