A Campaign in Defence of Higher Education

'A single spark can set fire to the prairie', said Chairman Mao. In the case of this campaign against the government's attack on the higher education system in this country it was a placard in the ground-floor window of the office of Worcester College's French tutor which read 'Students not Customers'. The tutor had carried it on the 10 November 2010 demonstration against education funding cuts and higher tuition fees and a passing student knocked to remark that this was the first evidence she had seen of the engagement of academics with the student protest movement. This provoked an informal meeting of academics and students on 1 December who set up a group called 'Worcester College against the cuts'. From this small initiative support was built up across the university in a series of concentric circles. One was the Free University of Oxford, a critical and experimental university designed as response to prohibitive student fees which announced itself in the town centre on a rainy afternoon in January 2001. It held a number of sessions at the Town Hall with teach-ins on a galaxy of topics such as free music, free health, origami and beginners' Arabic. The other was a campaigning arm, the Oxford University Campaign for Higher Education (OUCHE), which modelled itself on the Cambridge Campaign for Higher Education (CACHE) and the Campaign for the Public University. Its founding meeting on 7 March 2011 brought together scores of academics from across the university, mainly from the humanities and social sciences, who committed themselves to 'defend the principles that universities are a public good that must be fostered through public funding, that they are sites of open and unfettered research, teaching, and learning, not just providers of commodities to paying customers, and that university education should be affordable to all without incurring a crippling debt burden'.

The next move for the campaign was a strategy, a forum and a media impact. Belying its fuddy-duddy reputation, Oxford had three distinct advantages. The first was a sovereign body, the academics' parliament or Congregation, which had voted to deny Mrs Thatcher an honorary degree in 1985 for previous attacks on education. The second was close relations between academics and students and a highly active Oxford University Students' Union (OUSU). The third was a media profile which meant that a dramatic gesture of opposition conducted through Oxford would have a wide impact. OUCHE discussed many wordy versions of resolutions to put to Congregation but OUSU persuaded it to endorse the simplicity of 'Congregation instructs Council [the executive] to communicate to government that the University of Oxford has no confidence in the policies of the Minister for Higher Education'. Student support was mobilized to persuade academics in the throes of the exam period to attend the debate and OUCHE met to discuss its offensive on the day. On Tuesday 7 June Congregation heard a succession of powerful speeches, a dozen by OUCHE members, defending universities as a public good and attacking the government's reckless and incoherent plans that would marketize higher education, further divide society and increase state interference. Resoundingly, Congregation voted by 283 to five to support the unprecedented resolution of no confidence in the minister. The press was on hand to report the debate which appeared on online news sites within the hour, while a petition of no-confidence in the government's higher education policies to attract the support of the lecturers, students and alumni of all universities was launched at noconfidence.org.uk.

Resistance to oppressing authority, history has taught us, is learned not according to some blueprint but 'on the job'. So, after one battle, what has the practice of resistance taught us? One is that thought and action are in constant dialogue. OUCHE was founded on a set of principles that preserve the vision and coherence of the campaigning group but those principles are the bedrock of arguments that are developed for combat situations: flyers, press releases, speeches or interviews. Another is that campaigning requires both expertise and faith. Expertise in analysing, drafting, IT and media-savviness; faith that that despite...