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Students at Britain’s University of Sussex occupied a conference center on campus for 29 hours earlier this week, in opposition to coming cutbacks and in solidarity with campus labor actions against those cuts.
One hundred and six students were present at the start of the occupation on Monday, and two hundred more reportedly joined the group the following afternoon.
The students ended the occupation voluntarily. There were no arrests and no immediate reports of disciplinary action. The students made no demands over the course of their action, and did not seek to negotiate with the university administration.
One class scheduled to be held in the occupied space was canceled, but the cancelation came at the insistence of the university, over the objections of the course’s professor and students.
The Sussex protest and other similar actions prompted the weekly magazine The New Statesman to ask this week whether Britain’s campuses are seeing the beginning of a new wave of student protests and strikes.
We’re three weeks away from March 4, and the planned Day of Action to Defend Public Education keeps growing from coast to coast. Late last night I got word about a new blog out of Louisiana State University, joining the action and calling for a general strike at LSU. Here are some excerpts from their blog’s first post:
The University is in crisis. And not just our university. The University System. Public higher-education itself.
This crisis is not caused by the global recession. Rather, it is caused by the the leadership of our educational institutions, who have cynically used the pretense of financial pressure to pursue their own narrow agendas.
Through their decisions (eliminating faculty and programs while continuing unnecessary large-scale construction projects; laying off custodians while giving athletic coaches massive raises), university policymakers have made it clear that their priorities share little in common with those of the teachers, students, and workers who make our school great…
We will not be silenced: these are OUR universities. The problems facing LSU are not isolated, but global. The new student movement to save education must also be international.
The call has gone out for an International Strike and Day of Action in defense of education for Thursday March 4, 2010. Students, faculty, and staff of LSU will of course participate. On this day, we are calling on all LSU professors to cancel class, all students to skip class, and all workers to call in sick. Instead of business as usual, we will begin a constructive discussion about the future of our school – a discussion that is ours to have.
