The traditional left-wing view of students has been that they were a privileged elite who drove trains in the General Strike. This view corresponds less and less with the reality of the student movement, Very roughly since the days of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, a wave of student unrest has travelled round the developed world, Rome, Warsaw, Berlin and Paris have been rocked by student demonstrations, In Britain, although the wave of student militancy has been less aggressive and less well organised, considerable changes in the temper of the students have been apparent. Sit-ins, supported by considerable sections of the university population, have been held in L.S.E. and Leicester, Militant demonstrations have been launched against establishment figures in Leeds, Manchester, Essex, Sheffield and Sussex, The March 17th demonstration owed much of its success to student participation and university activities.
The old analysis of the political role of students seems not to make much sense, It was not the students who were scabbing in their recent confrontation with the dockers. Why has student politics moved so sharply to the left in recent years? One answer lies in the de facto coalition between Wilson, Powell and Sandys, which has closed the option of traditional party politics to many young radicals, but other reasons lie firmly rooted in the university based situation,
UNIVERSITIES HAVE BECOME KNOWLEDGE FACTORIES
The rhetoric of liberal education lives on but only as a facade to cover a university that is now a knowledge factory, As the technology of capitalism grows more complex, so there is a commensurate need to churn out a skilled labour force to service the economy. The university as a function of big business has been adequately discussed in the Robbin's Report, let alone in any socialist critiques. In destroying liberal education - which it is agreed was over-ripe for destruction - capitalism has substituted a stunted utilitarian alternative whose watchwords are "specialisation" and "practical", University education is no longer the finishing school for gentlemen, but the "socially necessary work of training and study", to use the phrase of Andre Gorz, without which the economy would not survive today. The "dilettante" student is now being turned into an apprentice,
As well as the global view of the University in capitalism, it is necessary to fill in some finer details, A part of the British student experience has been a revolution of rising expectations, Even a few years back, many working-class were surprised and delighted that they had been allowed to go to university, This deference to the self-governing, independent citadels of learning has subsided, leaving many who are willing to question the function and quality of the education they receive. On top of this, the grant situation is such as to put many students in very serious financial difficulties, The present rise of £25 a year in the grants of provincial students is an insult. At Nottingham, Hall fees have promptly been raised by £17.
"OVERPRODUCTION" OF STUDENTS
One surprising aspect of this situation is the crisis of "overproduction" of students, This is a well known feature of India and other third world countries, but it is now seriously being debated in Europe, During the recent student strikes in Paris, Marc Zamansky, Dean of the Science Faculty, asked the following question, "How does anybody think that our society can absorb every year 3,000 sociologists, 2,400 psychologists and 750 archaeologists?" Earlier, the chairman of Kodak had raised a similar point and answered it, "It is a bad thing to be in a country where there is a surplus of highly skilled personnel, since, should a crisis arise, young people who have spent a long time in studying but without being able to get a suitable post at the end, are not merely a point blank loss, from the point of view of wasted investment, but also a threat to the established order", This aspect may not be acute in Britain, but, for example, in the cut-down of teachers in spite of their "scarcity", it could be a growing problem,
The response of the left to the student upsurge has been confused, From Wright Mills and Marcuse has arisen the concept of students, as opposed to the working class, being the progressive force that is capable of radically reforming society, Many Marxists - even those who recruit mainly students - or, perhaps, especially those who recruit mainly students - have countered with a rehash of the "driving trains in the General Strike" thesis, They defend, it must be said correctly, the prime role of the working class in any transition to socialism, In a very mechanical manner they then convert this truth into a simplistic truism by downgrading completely any activity directed along student demands, The students must be brought off the campus into real struggle.
"GO ON THE BUSES"
This confusion of short-term and long-term strategies seems endemic to the British left. Just as some will counterpose "workers' uniting" to Black Power, so at the recent Leicester student conference some marxists were calling for students to "go on the buses" and take part in the real struggle rather than organise on the campus, In fact the only way of getting large numbers of students to adopt a marxist approach is via student demands, Both the L.S.E. and Leicester sit-downs showed that a sizeable minority of students can become student-militants. This does not mean that all of these will become politicised, but sizeable numbers will be, The way ahead for the student left can only be by a judicious mixture of agitation on anti-imperialist struggles, involvement in working-class struggles and a systematic defence of student conditions with a series of probing demands aimed at the University establishment. The fruition of such work, owing to the death of NALSO, will be the creation of a national Student Socialist League,