I was poking around Google this morning when I stumbled across a pamphlet, published in India in March of this year, called “The Student as a Worker.”

It strikes me as one of the better explications of that (often problematic) argument that I’ve read, so here are some excerpts:

The university is a workplace, where students, teachers and the karmcharis work. What is work about? It is about production – human beings are creative, and we create in our workplace. As creative beings we find fulfilment in what we create; what we create is an extension of ourselves, through which we reach out to others who are also part of society. In the university knowledge is produced; we study, teach, research and discuss. As creative beings involved in the production/creation of knowledge it is through the knowledge we produce that we put forth ourselves, our identities to the world. To truly find fulfilment, to be happy in other words, we would like to determine what we create, how we create and with what we create…

In this framework of ‘those who work’ in the university, students are an uncomfortable fit. When the teachers view them, or the administration, the students are either consumers or products. They are paying for a commodity, education, which they should get – so if teachers go on strike, they break the producer-consumer pact. Or it is the task of the teachers to prepare students for the market, so if they go on strike, they are hindering production. When individuals situated in the university, as subjects, look at the university, they see that while for those who “work” here it is the permanent site of labour, for the majority of the students, it fails to have any connotations of finality. Studenthood is a temporary state, a purgatorial interlude that precedes entry into the heaven of work and salaries. When one tries to “politicize” this space, one of the main problems one faces is that students do not feel that they have much to gain by its improvement – “I’m here only for one more year.”

A substantial number of professors have been cribbing about the semester system, but there is not much they can do. They are afraid to go on strike, because they themselves feel that by hindering production and by breaking the consumer pact they will be ‘harming careers’ and might bring the wrath of the ministry on them. On there own, they cannot stop these developments. They need to communicate with the students, establish a bond altogether different from the pedagogic one that exists right now. They need to be able to think about students differently, students as part of the same continuum as they, working in the university, desiring fulfilment, affected by what affects the teachers…

It doesn’t matter if some students come from rich households, if some will go on to become factory owners, or vice chancellors, at the moment of studenthood they are part of the collective worker. Professors and students are part of the same continuum. They together occupy the university, and in fighting for self-determination they are essentially on the same side. So in opposition to the student as a consumer, and the student as a product, is the student as worker…

Anyhow, we need self-determination for happiness, and for self-determination we have to fight. The tribal in Chhattisgarh might need to fight the police, multinationals, and the armed forces for self-determination, the factory worker will need to fight the factory owner, we have to fight the administration, the vice chancellor for instance. If students, teachers and Karamcharis work in the university, what right has any random person to determine what will happen here? The Vice Chancellor and his pals are not elected representatives; they come in through mechanisms in which we have no say. Today we might be fighting the semester system, or the service regulations, or against the attendance rule, fee-hike or for timely payment of karamchari salaries, but we also need to fight the arbitrariness with which these problems impose themselves upon us. It is not enough to say that the vice-chancellor should not bring in the semester system, we have to ask why the vice-chancellor should do anything at all? If there has to be an administrative body, then we should elect it, and have the power of immediate recall, if what we don’t want to happen happens. Of course all this is a long way off, but are we even ready to think our problems through?