Following on the theme of yesterday’s blog on May ’68, I recently read a volume of papers edited by University of Surrey Professor Rachel Brooks called Student Politics and Protest: International perspectives (Research into Higher Education).  As with any volume of essays, the quality of the articles is uneven and it while doesn’t have quite the global reach of the late 60s works of Seymor Martin Lipset and Phillip Altbach (here and here), it still has a reasonably impressive scope and I think there are some good takeaways to be had from it, albeit not necessarily the ones the authors intend.

Though not always recognized as such, universities are phenomenal laboratories and training grounds for citizenship.  Any decent-sized campus in the western world is going to be host to a few hundred different student organizations – social clubs, cultural clubs, residence associations, departmental/faculty associations, political groupings, you name it – and not only does each of them deepen community engagement by bringing like-minded people together, they each have their own democratic organs and ways to articulate and resolve conflicts over resources and directions (bonus: with only rare exceptions, their institutional memory is never much more than 24 months, so every generation of students gets to participate in developing/renewing a new culture – how great is that?)  So, it’s not surprising that politics, whether with a small p or a big P, takes up a lot of student energy.

There are two great divides in student politics.  The first is between those who choose to focus on issues related to higher education itself and those who choose to devote themselves to issues which are of wider societal interest (this is not an either/or, obviously, but most politically active students tend to specialize in one or the other).  The second divide, amongst those who focus on the former, is whether or not to pursue political aims through the “parliamentary” route – that is, lobbying and generally behaving like an interest group, or the “extra-parliamentary” route – that is, through street protest, occupations, etc.  Again, this is not an either/or, but clearly individual students tend to have different preference levels for each of these two strategies.

(Not quite on topic, but maybe my favourite part of this book was the survey of UK students post the 2010-11 tuition fee protests which suggested that although 22% of students had participated somehow in one or more forms of protest, the ones going on multiple marches, or engaging in blockades and the like – were only about 2% of the student body.  Which is a reminder how much noise a small group of people can make).

The book nods in the direction of the more non-academic types of protests with a pair of articles about the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement and student participation in the Gezi Park protests of 2013, neither of which treads much new ground.  But most of the book is focussed on precisely the more student-focussed types of protests, the ones that have to do with tuition fees and grants and university governance and the like (that is, precisely the types of issues the famous late-60s wave of protests have very little to do with).  And in fact, maybe the most interesting article in there is one about the Quebec student mobilization of 2012 co-authored by Rushida Mehreen, a former (I think) Concordia graduate student.

Mehreen explains the perhaps unique success of the Quebec student movement in terms of people, structures and culture.  Two of these I think are unarguable: the Quebec student movement’s core of activists (people) are very good at maintaining a student culture from which student protest can grow – much better, in fact, than nearly any other student movement in the world (the middle bit – structure – is weaker; basically, she thinks Quebec universities having the specific attribute of strong departmental-level student associations is a necessary part of the equation, whereas a quick glance at, say,  McGill, would tell you there’s nothing inherently radicalizing about that kind of structure and that maybe the whole active department-level organizing structure is just “culture” by another name).

She goes on to talk about the need for students to cultivate a “combative culture in order to build rapport de force and regenerative capacity”.  Translation: it’s possible for students to lose the culture of strong protest if they don’t protest regularly.  Thus, it’s good to protest and shut down institutions every once in awhile even if there’s nothing to protest about because hey you never know when something genuinely protest-worthy is going to come along.

I think this is dead on.  Elsewhere in the book, Alexander Hensby of the University of Kent makes the point that sustained student movements are basically impossible to maintain: to the extent you can get cohesion out of student politics it’s at the level of a single movement.  But movements end – mainly because the key players graduate and move on.  The trick that Quebec student unions have been trying to pull off, with various levels of success over the past half-century, is in effect to create a permanent pool of experience activists, and a semi-permanent culture of protest, so that the chances of success for any single movement are maximized.

If only what they were protesting for weren’t so regressive.  But that’s another story.