The current crisis of capitalism confronts students in the form of rising cost of education and a drastic decrease in immediate returns from a college degree. Not only is it harder to afford college education, but education expenses also leave students and their families in more debt and with limited job opportunities. A shrinking job market with employment opportunities swayed through social capital in the form of ‘contacts’ has no space for the majority of the graduates. It seems like a four-year degree only qualifies one to become a daily wage laborer.
Given this continual crisis, students are organising on campuses across the country, but their efforts remain fragmented. Since the collapse of the students’ movement of the 70s, most campus activism has taken the form of single-issue groups. There are the labour solidarity organisations, the identity-based justice groups, feminist collectives, and a growing number of radical nationalist groups, sometimes all-organising on one campus but rarely supporting one another. While it’s great to see all this organising, it’s disheartening to see the different organisations having such difficulty working together. Even when they do coordinate their work on campuses, their national networks are often very reluctant to do so.
Even the militant resistance that is popping up at Quaid-e-Azam University against budget cuts and tuition hikes remains affected by this trend. The fiscal situation at QAU is not unique. Provincial governments across the country are cutting funding to schools and universities; the university officials are using budget cuts to hike up tuition fees (hikes that will continue for a long time) and to cut essential services and programmes. While the students in QAU has put up an amazing response to these hikes, there seems to be little connection between the QAU protests and those of students engaged in similar fights at campuses across the country.
Students are running and struggling in remarkable campaigns, but if they want to consolidate their gains they have to organise for issues beyond individual policy changes at their respective campuses
If we are to address our common crises as students as well current and future workers, we need to focus on building collective power. Students are running and struggling in remarkable campaigns, but if they want to consolidate their gains they have to organise for issues beyond individual policy changes at their respective campuses. They must organise to seek institutional power in universities and create a way of holding onto that power.
Progressive policy changes are a great thing on our campuses, and they should be fought for, but they should be fought for in the context of building student power at campus level as well as at national level. Building student power means gaining more and more control over our campuses and the decisions that affect us as students. In the end, student power means a student-run higher education system. It’s our education – we should control it.
To ensure that local victories do not become isolated pockets of progress and resistance and to ensure that this work spreads; students must find ways to coordinate efforts with those underway at other campuses in their areas. Movements grow not only by example, but when they actively engage people and share resources and hard-earned lessons. Because the federal government still makes most of the higher education policy decisions, students need to coordinate their work on a national level in ways that foster cross-campus solidarity and encourage local initiatives. And if we ever want to seriously push for universal education, we have to have a students’ movement that coordinates for the goal on a national level.
Coordinating efforts should never mean that local campus organising becomes merely an extension of some larger campaign because this sort of strategy can’t support long haul organising. We need coordination that is mutually beneficial to everyone involved.
If we want to create radical change at our campuses – change that addresses economic and cultural aspects of our life, we need to move toward students’ unionism. Unions that are run by the rank and file students, that fight alongside faculty and workers, seek to empower the historically oppressed, and seek to revolutionise our educational system are the only way forward in this struggle.
The writer is an alumnus of Government College University
Published in Daily Times, November 4th 2017.