students

Alfie Meadows and Zak King found not guilty - two years, three months, and three trials later

Alfie Meadows after the "not guilty" verdict

After years of uncertainty and two mistrials, Alfie Meadows and Zak King have been found unanimously not guilty of violent disorder on a demonstration against tuition fees and cuts to education of December 9, 2010. Alfie was beaten so badly by police on that day he needed three hours of emergency surgery after he developed bleeding on the brain.

Free standing column

“FREE STANDING COLUMN” - This A5, double-sided photocopy from the student protest on November 30th 2010 was the first thing produced by the group that was later to become Deterritorial Support Group. Some of the strands of ultra-left rhetoric are clear but it has a much more tabloid tone. The drop-shadows remained. The term “Wolf-Eyed replicant” to describe Nick Clegg may have been coined by China Mieville.

Could students in the US pull off a strike like in Montreal? An interview with Marianne Garneau

Against a kind of activist-y, spectacular politics, Marianne Garneau argues that US students and workers can learn from the Quebec model how to organize our power as a class. Quebec students have kept their tuition low because they’ve historically had a vibrant, militant student movement, one that is willing to strike and directly disrupt, and not wait for the leadership of the business unions. The organizing model is to create directly democratic bodies—department-by-department assemblies—that know how to leverage our power to fuck up the business of the people who are screwing us over, whether they’re our educators or our employers.

The university is a racket

Discussing conflicts of interest on my school's Board of Trustees and some forms that all non-profit institutions are required to keep on their premises and that you can request!

Turkish state in unprovoked brutality against students

1,000 students have clashed with the police at the METU University in Ankara, Turkey. The students were protesting the visit of the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan – who has been pushing an agenda of privatisation across higher education in Turkey for the last couple of years.

FIOM strike and student demonstrations

The union FIOM (the metalworkers’ federation) held a general strike on December 5 and 6 to protest against both the agreement’s merit and the fact of having a separate agreement signed by the sector’s right-wing unions excluding FIOM, the sector’s most representative union.

1968 - Interview with Ian Bone

Originally published in May 2008.

The history of the Quebec student movement and combative unionism

An article by Jerome Raza on the history of student syndicalism in Quebec and the conditions which gave rise to Classé.

Housing speculation, student debt, fees and dispossession; a 21st century love story - Communique concerning UCL Stratford

An article from the website of The Imaginary Party exposing the relationships between tuition fees, rents, student debt, university funding, and private equity funds, in the context of UCL's £1bn plans to dispossess the 300 residents of the Carpenters Estate in Stratford in order to build "profitable" student housing units.

A book bloc's genealogy

A potted history of the book bloc - often students demonstrating against cuts to education using shields decorated as giant books.