En Passant

Despite the success of the strikes so far, more serious industrial action is needed. The public face of management intransigence, Professor Ann Brewer’s latest email to staff, reaffirmed that the university will not be backing down on a range of clauses that will impact job security and worsen conditions. Management wants to slash sick leave by 60 percent, increase the time for academic probation to two years, increase workloads, force the union off campus and make it easier to push through redundancies and restructures.

The protests against Labor’s attacks on Universities have been a shot in the arm for student activists. But rebuilding the student movement will require a lot of work and left wing politics. We need more people in our student unions who do not shy away from criticising the government, who want to build grassroots organising collectives and who see ordinary people in the streets as the way to force change.

5-600 students rallied at Curtin University on 14 May 2013 in the biggest student demonstration in over a decade. It was built by socialists who run the guild. That is why it was such a success.

The last few decades have seen governments wage war on our universities writes Declan Murphy in Socialist Alternative. We need a different path – one in which education is a right and where learning is valued as a social good.

Local labor member and former ANU Professor Andrew Leigh, in justifying Labor’s massive higher education cuts to the large group of student protesters, fell back on that old furphy that things would be worse under Abbott. That’s like the python who is squeezing us to death warning us to beware of the tiger lurking nearby. In fact Labor’s attacks lay the groundwork for possible attacks by the Liberals in the future. Such is the degeneration of the ALP that the Liberals agree with Labor’s current cuts to higher education. The way to fight Abbott’s neoliberalism is to fight Gillard and Leigh’s neoliberalism.

To roll back the attacks on higher education we need more than a defensive campaign Cat Rose argues in Socialist Alternative. Cat is the Queer Officer in the National Union of Students, and an activist in the NSW Cross-Campus Education Action Network. She is a student at UNSW.

Funding the defence killing machine; attacking workers and the poor – these are Labor’s real values; these are Labor’s priorities.

Going to university should be a liberating experience. It should train us to critique rigorously all orthodoxies and dogmas. It should be about unlocking intellectual and practical abilities, giving us the tools to help transform society for the better writes Jordan Humphreys in Socialist Alternative.

However, universities, like all other major institutions, are shaped by the needs of the capitalist system – an authoritarian order run in the interests of the rich and powerful, who put profit above everything else. Going to university is an alienating experience because educational institutions take on the authoritarian, profit-driven dynamic of the system as a whole.

At least three La Trobe University student activists are under threat of expulsion for their participation in a campaign to stop major cuts in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HUSS) Faculty writes Socialist Alternative.