UK higher education staff are currently on strike at 58 universities after university bosses and their representatives refused to withdraw pension cuts or address falling pay and worsening working conditions.
The strikes have been supported by hundreds of students on picket lines and by staff-student solidarity groups at many of these institutions.
But we’ve still got a lot to learn from previous struggles, particularly the most recent and largest student movement in 2010-11.
This movement was not just confined to England, where staff and students were protesting the £9,000 fee hike, cuts to public university funding and generally the austerity measures of the Coalition government,
In Chile, France and Italy, similar movements, but often larger and more radical in nature, swept local higher education sectors.
Here I speak to Hector Rios-Jara, a social scientist, writer and activist, and PhD student in Social Science at Institute of Social Research, University College of London.
Hector’s research analyses the impacts that neoliberalism has on the political economy of higher education.
His current project explores why fees and loans reforms triggered student opposition in England and Chile during the last decade, and how student activists impact higher education policy.
HRJ
Why did the 2010 UK student movement fail, in your opinion? If you look at that, it was probably the biggest, most militant movement of recent years. In 2011, at the peak of this movement, everyone was expecting something more aggressive, more massive to happen, but it didn’t.
DR
Yes, good question. I think, yeah, I mean, it definitely failed in its objective, which was to stop £9,000 fees, or marketization, which were related. And when it was united with the trade union movement, the objective was to stop austerity. And in those respects, it failed, because it didn’t do that. But in another way, it didn’t fail. I think there’s a legacy from 2010 which you can trace into Jeremy Corbyn. Along the way, it changed into something else, something arguably more powerful and more influential. And while Corbynism failed, it’s also structuring politics in the present. So I think, it’s not as simple as failure or success. I think every left movement comes with a right-wing countermovement, and vice versa, in the never-ending struggle, at least within capitalism. It’s a dialectic, isn’t it, if you like.
But to answer your question, I think firstly, the government had already done the deed, as it were. As Andrew McGettigan explained in The Great University Gamble, the UK Coalition came in and cut public university funding by £2bn – by over 50% – with some (mainly humanities and social science) subjects seeing all central funding removed. This then set the context for the introduction of £9,000 fees, to replace this funding. This was all done before the publication of the 2011 White Paper, “Students at the heart of the system”. These changes were met with protests, but they were always after the fact. To overturn existing legislation, you have to either replace the government or cause the current one so much pain it is prepared to lose face by rolling back its own policies. The UK student movement, even with the involvement of working-class college kids – who were protesting the removal of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) – and the trade unions, never generated the necessary power. Whether there was any way that it could have generated this power, given the conditions at the time, and the speed of government action, is a good question. I don’t know. But the severing of the link with the EMA protest movement was problematic, because the student movement then became purely about higher education, and became quite idealistic, and the trade union movement remained at the level of protest, rather than say a general strike.
Also the trade union leadership – and also the National Union of Students (NUS) – responded badly to the radicalism of the student movement. For example, when protesters occupied Millbank and smashed its windows, both the NUS president and UCU general secretary at the time distanced themselves. This created tension and distrust within the movement which, of course, the ruling class capitalised on. For example, the media explained every spontaneous student action as a result of anarchist entryism, which was nonsense. On the other hand, at a certain point of maximum solidarity between the trade union and student movements, such as when we turned out over 300,000 people for the 30 March anti-austerity protest in London, it felt significant, like anything was possible. And right at the beginning, with the college kids, this felt very special. I remember I was on the bus going to the very first anti-fees protest. There were all these kids from Hackney on there excited about going to the protest. Their political consciousness was really developed, they knew what they were talking about. They were arguing about the situation, explaining to each other what had happened, linking it to the wider context. But when the movement became just about fees, and about higher education, these youngest students kind of gave up because it wasn’t about them anymore.
HRJ
Yeah, I agree with your interpretation. I think one of the interesting thing, which I actually really liked from your interview with Zac and Connor from Red Square, is to explore the other side of the political agenda. The Tories have a plan, there is a national and international coalition of interests working towards marketisation. For example, in 2010, you had universities – especially those elite institutions in the Russell Group – endorsing the Browne Review and accepting the argument that the only way to secure funding and shield the sector from austerity was to raise fees to £9,000. Some vice-chancellors even wanted uncapped tuition fees, like in the US. All of this helped cement the narrative that there was ‘no alternative’, that free public education is just impossible today. The government basically ignored the students and the anti-fees and cuts movement. They had a very clear plan – I have spoken to some advisers from the time as part of my research – and they focused on winning support within the university leadership. So, on the one hand, there was this quite stable power coalition within the ruling class, and a lack of power within the student movement, which eventually turned to Corbyn as a source of renewed hope in 2016.
DR
Yeah, like I definitely agree that vice chancellors have acted like a class and a powerful collective, well before 2010 in fact. In my own work, I’ve tried to how Thatcher’s reforms in the 1980s, particularly when she privatised polytechnics and introduced private sector style governance structure into the sector via these new universities, drove marketisation ‘from below’, as it were. With a death by a million cuts over subsequent years, both Russell Group and the ‘post-92’ universities were primed for higher fees and the acceleration of commodification that this represented. But it’s interesting that you argue that students were essentially ignored in 2010-11. Was this because of weaknesses within this movement? So it couldn’t act as a countervailing force against this coherent pro-market interest?
HRJ
Yeah, I think, well, the only way the student movement could have won in 2010-11 was to basically shut down the sector. What we did in Chile in 2011 was exactly that. We built a huge coalition between university students from private and public sector institutions, school students, teacher and staff unions as well. So the entire education sector was in movement and on strike and in occupations and for nearly half of the year. I think in November 2010 in the UK you had that chance, but then you couldn’t move forward because the window of opportunity was so short. Legislation was passed in December, so you have just one month to prepare everything. In Chile, by contrast, the movement was built over a longer period of time, back to 2006, for example. So, there was a previous process of organization, of defining a framework and a strategy. In the case of the UK, you had a really short period of time between the arrival of the Coalition government and the first wave of austerity, so I think the movement was absolutely unprepared. Whereas the on the other side there was this really powerful cohesive coalition of stakeholders and political interests fully aware about what they were doing.
DR
Yeah, that’s interesting. Can you say a little bit more about the Chilean context? What happened in 2011? When you say, you know, that the movement became organized and shut the sector down, how did it do that?
HRJ
If we analyse neoliberalism as a long-term political agenda, then we can trace the attack on universities back to the 1980s, to the Pinochet dictatorship. So, during 81-82 you have these big reforms to the higher education sector, so the state-owned universities, which used to be the biggest ones, for example the University of Chile, which was the national university and had branches all over the country, this was divided in independent and small institutions. And that was a political decision. It was no coincidence that this was also one of the biggest sources of political opposition to the dictatorship. These newly independent universities were then allowed to charge fees, with no cap, and at the same time, the system was opened up to for-profit entrants. So, when democracy was recovered in the 1990s, there were already a large number of new universities. Later in 2000, you had a wave of financialisation, with the new government extending the loan system for poorer students and creating a massive expansion of the university sector – from something like 500,000 students to nearly 2 million during the last few years. A lot of these new students taking out big loans were concentrated in the for-profit universities, offering really low-quality education, and many of them collapsed with students never graduating. So there is an extremely uneven and unregulated market in Chile.
So you can see the process is kind of similar in Chile compared to in England. Fees were introduced earlier in Chile, but the massive expansion of loans was only introduced in 2004, so only a couple of years before here. And the inspiration was the same, of creating a loan for poor people, but making it contingent on future earnings. A lot of the same people that were working on this kind of system in the UK moved to Chile and played an important role in advising the New Labour style democratic government. So, it’s kind of a similar kind of logic and analysis – these reforms are ‘progressive’ because they were supporting people, they were increasing enrolments and blah, blah blah. And as you said, like in the UK, there is already a process of marketisation. And with the expansion of the sector, new regulations and new systems of accountability are created, with metrics, quality assessment and ranking systems introduced gradually over the years. In terms of the student movement, you then have a similar reaction, so you get a movement demanding free education. We don’t want to pay fees. We don’t want to be in debt. We are also tired of undemocratic policymaking processes at the level of government, but also at the level of the university.
By 2011, there had been an entire year of demonstrations, most of the universities were occupied. The size of the movement was huge. At one point, there was a demonstration with nearly half a million people, which is basically like half the sector. And people were involved from across the sector, students, academics and non-academic staff. Also the big teacher’s union (Colegio de profesores) called for many strikes, because that sector was getting modernised and we had engagement from the main union , the Workers’ United Center of Chile (CUT). So it was a very large coalition. And students were very good at establishing a counter-narrative, critiquing polices on TV shows and live debates, really mobilising this narrative. And this narrative had two interesting aspects. The first one, of course, was the ethical defence of free education as a social right, and also the critique of the anti-democratic procedures. The other was the role of higher education in worsening inequality. Because most of the students are going to low quality universities and paying a lot of money, not getting good degrees, and then not finding good jobs because their degrees are bad. So that mobilized a lot of the movement but also created popular support.
DR
That’s such a good summary, thanks. Could you say a little bit more about the kinds of things that were happening, you know, specifically the forms of action that the student movement was taking?
HRJ
The Chilean student movement is organized around assemblies and unions. So each university, each degree even, has its own local assembly. So for example, at that time I was doing a bachelor’s degree in psychology so I attended the assembly of that degree. And the unions at each university answer to these local assemblies. So any decision from the union must first go to the local assembly, and must have more than 50% of the local assembly deciding in favour. Then you have a national confederation of unions and students, with activists. But these are ultimately answerable to the local assemblies, which are made up of mostly students.
DR
How did this structure come about?
HRJ
It took about five years, basically since 2006. It was a long process of becoming autonomous or at least independent from political parties connected to government.
DR
And how did the occupations work? In the UK, occupations are usually very isolated, small-scale affairs, which do not challenge management’s right to control the university’s operations. How did Chilean activists manage to shut down whole universities?
HRJ
Occupations are really common in Chile, especially in the traditional universities. So when you occupy, university authorities say ‘okay, we’re leaving’. 2011 was great because you had national demonstrations that would pass the different universities, which were all occupied. The demo would be organised on the basis of these locations and activists from the universities would put up the barricades to fight the police, which were very repressive. All of this was coordinated at a national level. So you start the day with entire streets blocked by student activists and assemblies throughout the day to modify strategy at the different occupied universities, as well as food, fundraising events, education and organising actions like banner making, letter writing etc. So the occupations were both decision making centres and also centres for political discussion, debate and consciousness raising. The occupations meant that the movement was constantly moving.
DR
How did students manage to occupy the whole university? Are they enclosed?
HRJ
To occupy you need hundreds of people. But because you have this tradition of occupation, you don’t need walls, you just put a couple of chairs and a couple of tables at the entrance and say ‘this university is occupied’. In newer, private universities, however, occupation is not allowed. So you need to do it by force, and therefore have to fight with private security and face tougher repression from the police. So in those cases, people occupying traditional universities will help activists at these private universities, surrounding entrances with picket lines for example, when the authorities try to take the university back.
DR
Amazing. This is very different from in the UK. On the one hand, its similar, in that you also have a tradition of occupation where the authorities will step back from occupations and not interfere too much. Management have also learned from their mistakes, with security sometimes getting carried away – for example at Warwick University and more recently at Manchester University during COVID-19. But I feel like occupiers don’t go for the right buildings. You know, they occupy the faculty, rather than the administration building. Maybe in 2010 it was a bit different. At Goldsmiths, for example. We occupied the administration building for a while and at UCL there was an attempt to take over the administrative centres and also provide an organising centre for the movement. I remember going to a lot of meetings, but I can’t remember there being much strategic decision making.
What about education, were there alternative forms of education going on as well during these occupations? Because that’s always something really interesting.
HRJ
Yeah, I remember there was kind of a network of popular education. As I mentioned, each assembly also was a place to discuss all the issues. For example, I get involved in a social study group in which we discussed as politics and social policy. This was really powerful and helped inform strategy and communications. This evolved very well, after a couple of years the these small groups started to create independent think tanks that could continue to work on policy and how to fund free higher education.
DR
Was this driven by academics or students?
HRJ
Academics were there at the beginning helping out. But it was mainly driven by students, who created their own expertise, independent from the academy. Of course, some students moved into the academic world, but they continued with this kind of research network.
