universities
News and articles about work, policy and workers' and students' struggles in education around the world.
Austrian student occupations: our social context and our demands
A statement by students at the university occupation in Vienna (winter 2009). This document was produced early in the struggle. Published in English by The Commune (22.11.09).
The strike signifies the refusal of work, but in this case it means an enormous intensity of labour. For more than a week people have been organizing, coordinating, communicating, writing, filming, photographing, cooking, doing media work and much more.
Higher education: It's become our crisis
Already faced with cuts before the crisis, education now looks to be one of the sectors hardest hit, and not merely financially. Kirsten Forkert looks at the current conflict in higher education and the difficulties faced by those trying to protect it
We need to consider UK higher education in the context of a situation where neoliberalism, in some ways, has been destabilised economically but remains hegemonic on an ideological level.
Communique from an Absent Future
Pamphlet associated with the occupation movement at universities in the state of California.
An introduction was included in some versions of the pamphlet, and not in others.
7 AGAINST POMPEII
Occupy the Crisis: The Emerging Student-Worker Direct Action Movement in California
A summary of the recent student occupation movement commissioned by the antioch rebel newspaper from a participant in the UCSC actions.
ALF bombings in Mexico lead to anti-student witchhunt
Student activists are targeted on Mexico's notoriously independent and active public university campuses following a string of bomb attacks in the vein of Animal Liberation Front (ALF) tactics.
Throughout the month of September, over ten bombs were placed in banks, a car dealership, a luxury clothing store, a small police station, and an animal testing laboratory in Mexico City and the states of Guanajuato, Nayarit, and Jalisco. Most exploded; no injuries were reported.
Staff, students to walkout at 10 University of California Campuses
In an effort to protest education cuts, students and staff at ten University of California campuses will stage a walkout on 24 September 2009.
University of California administrators say they want to keep things running as smoothly as possible Thursday -- the first day of school at many campuses -- when many faculty, staff members and students are expected to walk out of classes, host rallies and stage a systemwide labor strike for technical employees.
The life of students - Walter Benjamin
Benjamin makes an intelligent and eloquent case against the poverty of student life under capitalism in this early essay, written more than fifty years before the Situationists would tackle the same subject. He argues against the intellectual frigidity and alienation of the university as a factory of future workers, and for a genuine “community of learning.” Wider social issues that affect the university environment such as student activism, gender, and sexuality are also dealt with.
There is a view of history that puts its faith in the infinite extent of time and thus concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which people and epochs advance along the path of progress. This corresponds to a certain absence of coherence and rigor in the demands it makes on the present.
Education: the future of an illusion
Article looking at 1989 attacks by the government on the higher education system in the UK.
Despite the rhetoric about reducing "state interference" the government has a unified social policy that seeks to restructure all areas of social life in line with the changing needs of capital. Examples of the breadth of this policy include the dismantling of the NHS, the increase in the size of the British prison population and a number of changes in the education system.
Stephen Jay Gould: What Does it Mean to Be a Radical?
Marxist biologists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins remember the life and career of paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould, and his role in the social criticism of science.
Early this year, Stephen Gould developed lung cancer, which spread so quickly that there was no hope of survival. He died on May 20, 2002, at the age of sixty. Twenty years ago, he had escaped death from mesothelioma, induced, we all supposed, by some exposure to asbestos.
Union busting at University of Westminster?
University of Westminster management have just offered academic staff a settlement on their framework agreement without the agreement of the UCU union. This means that academic staff are being offered quite large amounts to sign agreements by 26th June that will, in effect, undermine the role of the union...
To quote from a union memo the agreement will:
