Student Protest, What and How
Student protests are a thorny topic. Even the phrase is contentious – are they strikes? Boycotts? If they’re protests, do they have to be protesting something? I’m going to be trying to answer a few, but not all, questions about student protests – namely what are they and how are they done.
There are clearly two terms to distinguish what we mean by ‘protest’ and what it is for protests to be done by students. I understand protests, for the purposes of this piece, under a broad definition that might be formalised as some kind of sign or action that indicates political displeasure. This way we can include rent strikes and marches as protests, as they are communications of disagreement. Student protest is not just protest done by students. For example, the students that marched in solidarity against Thatcher were striking in a general sense; they were protesters that happened to be students. Student protest is students protesting in their capacity as students. This type of protest concerns the student as a political body itself, rather than the person generally protesting who happens to be a student. This division is, of course, not absolute. There are plenty of instances that might seem to blur the line. Do rent strikes count as protesting as students or are they just students protesting?
In these issues, I’d advise that we think “whose interest does the protest serve primarily”, if the interest is that of the student as a political grouping and the students are leading the protest, then it is students protesting as students. As the university student is, and deserves to be seen as, a political entity in and of itself, rather than a collection of other groups that happen to be students.
An effective protest seems to comprise three general points – it is targeted, constant, and disruptive. Here an ‘effective protest’ is typified by the 2006-9 German protests against tuition fees. The protests broke out over the proposed introduction of a €500 per semester fee that each local government was given free reign whether to give universities the opportunity to charge. While there was more extreme action during each university’s voting process over its implementation (or lack thereof) of the fee – especially in Bielefeld, where student activity included occupying the university’s offices, smearing human waste on professors’ houses, and even setting a professor’s car on fire. Over the next 7-8 years, constant student action, as well as the development of a connection to the organised labour movement, resulted in the abolition of tuition fees in 2012-3.
These protests of the 2000s created real political change, and made the student body operate as a genuine political entity. The protests were effective because of three qualities that would produce similarly effective protests wherever implemented. They were targeted, they knew their goal – the abolition of tuition fees – and they knew who they were protesting against: the university’s governing body, and then the German government. The benefit of close targeting is that it means the protest can end faster – those who are suffering from the protest know what to change and how. The second quality these protests had was that they were constant – it wasn’t because of one episode of protest that tuition was abolished, but thanks to a prolonged campaign which lasted years. In those years, protest took different shapes. You needn’t march every day to still be in a campaign of protest, just to repeat yourselves enough that you aren’t ignored or forgotten. This also highlights a key aspect of an effective protest – organisation. It is not enough to have one or two passionate students leading the way. Protests must be organised so they incorporate constant change in the members of the protest, people leaving the university and those joining, to ensure a protest is capable of constancy.
Finally, the protests showed that, to be effective, you have to be unignorable. It is not enough to just march, or to put up banners or social media graphics – even if all of these are integral to a long-term campaign. The reason this disruption is so effective is that, whatever the beliefs of a given institution, there are a few necessities they cannot do without. Targeting these necessities means that the institution has to come to some kind of agreement with the student protestors in order to continue operation. We can deprive an institution of its necessities in many ways; one particularly common method is through occupation: a relatively low stakes way of throwing a spanner in the works. For the occupation to be unignorable, however, it needs to target those spaces that are necessary for the university, so rather than some public place it ought to be the administrative hub of the institution.
It seems now we have a usable account of what an effective student protest looks like – it is a constant campaign of disruption, targeted at achieving certain goals that represent the interests of the student as a political entity. There is a long and rich history of student protest from which we can learn. However, each and every act of protest is unique – there is much to learn from historical or contemporary protests, they will never provide an exact blueprint for how to carry out an effective one under unique circumstances. All we can do is keep pushing, not just for the goals of now, but for the recognition of the student as a legitimate political entity in its own right. We are not here to simply ignore or be dictated at, we are a group with shared collective interests which necessitate change, and force those in power to listen. Through constant targeted disruption, we cannot be ignored.