Media Release – 30th September 2011

An open letter to journalists, and ministers, and vice chancellors, and the public at large regarding the events at the University of Auckland as part of the Nationwide day of Student Action

We Are the University (Auckland) staged a rally and protest occupation on the 26th September 2011, aiming to build awareness of current issues affecting universities nationwide. This was an event for re-establishing unity between students. This was a rally to defend the university against sustained attacks upon its foundational bedrock. The university’s traditional role has been to foster members of society who can contribute genuinely to a better future through free critical endeavour. Universities in Aotearoa New Zealand are seeing that future slip away as the central point of education is being ignored in favour of profit.  We Are the University reclaims the university as defined by those who attend or teach at the university: a space of intellectual expansion, a hotbed of creativity that shapes, improves and informs society, independently and with freedom from pecuniary interests that mislead and wound the quality of scholarly content.

The rally and ensuing occupation aimed to demonstrate student opposition to three key issues symptomatic of increasingly profit-driven decisions by the University management and the Government:

1. The Voluntary Student Membership (VSM) bill, due to pass its third reading on the 28th September. This bill will decimate communal culture on campus and see a number of vital services cut. It is important to remember that all automatic student association schemes include an opt-out clause as it is. As Chris Trotter says, “One can no more be a “voluntary” member of the student body than one can be a “voluntary” member of the human race.” (http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/columnists/chris-trotter/5652798/Political-vandalism-will-be-death-knell-of-student-representation)

2. The erosion of democracy on campus through the revocation from staff of key working conditions around study leave, disciplinary procedures and course content. This despite protracted efforts by the Tertiary Education Union to defend the collective staff agreement and protect the power over academic decisions from funnelling into the hands of university management alone.

3. The student debt disaster, sitting at $11,898,955,693 and rising rapidly at the time of writing (www.students.org.nz). This scheme hobbles graduates before they even begin working life. Add to this burden the fact that there are very few jobs in New Zealand for graduates and we begin to see the working parts of what Mohsen Al Attar calls the “soft war” on students, aimed at producing compliant cogs that maintain the status quo, rather than progressive thinkers who find ways to improve the whole of society and the world by refusing to continue behaviours and structures that do not work.

Here follows a summary of the events of and motivations behind 26th September, lest people who were not in fact present continue to labour under any more unfortunate illusions.

1pm: Around 300-400 students gathered in the University Quad to hear speakers from AUSA, NZUSA, the Tertiary Education Union, The Labour Party and the Green Party talk about their struggles to be heard in their opposition to recent destructive and corporatist education policies. They all concurred on one thing: that making the connection, that conceiving of these specific policies as part of a larger ideological assault on the university and society en masse is the only rational principle on which to proceed. That this struggle does not begin and end with VSM, or the TEU dispute, or another other single issue. They form a networked web of controls. So just as we are attacked on all sides by those who believe in money more than they do in people, so must we defend ourselves from those attacks on a number of fronts. The future is at stake here.

c.1:45pm: After the rally, students marched on the Vice Chancellor’s building to protest his attacks on staff and student conditions.

c.2pm: It was decided collectively that we would march through the campus to the Owen G Glenn Building, the business school, symbolic bastion of the corporatism of the university. Along the way, we picked up many more students unhappy with how the Government and university management is crippling staff and student conditions on a number of fronts.

c.2:05pm: When we arrived, over 300 people invaded the top floor of the business school as a statement about who the university is, ie. those who study and teach there.

c.3pm: As people were free to come and go through one exit, numbers fluctuated, levelling out at precisely 243 people. We know this, because we did a head count. The Vice Chancellor’s claims that there were 60 people, 20 of whom were not students, is woefully uninformed bordering on disingenuous, given that he would not come and talk to us in good faith and see the numbers himself.

c.3:30pm: We were given word that the Vice Chancellor would come and speak to the leaders of the group. We were provisionally pleased about this, but explained that there are no leaders, we are a collective voice. We began gathering questions for the Vice Chancellor from among the students. We were soon told that the VC would only speak with us if we left. We politely declined.

c. 4pm: We heard that the VSM bill, one of our points of protest, had been postponed until after the election. We were very happy to have achieved some little progress with one of our demands. We have since discovered that it will still have its third reading on Wednesday.

All the while during the occupation, students from across the disciplines were meeting each other, speaking critically and constructively about how to improve the university, what the university’s role might be in society, what responsibilities it might hold in relation to wider society, and how best to defend those principles: empathy over cynicism, seeking over arriving, questions that open up capillaries of ideas over answers that close down discourse, inclusivity over marginalisation and taking responsibility over wallowing in fear or guilt or apathy. Students were seen sharing food, knitting, reading and standing together in common purpose on a scale unseen for a long time at the University of Auckland.

c.6pm:Police entered the building. Mediated by the Auckland University Students’ Association President, Joe McCrory, we agreed to leave peacefully on the understanding that there would be no penalty as they recognised this as the peaceful protest it was. Students got together and cleaned up the 6th floor, removing rubbish and wiping away any mess. After all, our dispute is not with the cleaners, who we know work under gruelling and inequitable conditions themselves and who we appreciate warmly.

c.6:30pm: Upon exiting the building, a student was arrested by the Police in an alarmingly aggressive manner. Unfairly and without recourse to appeal, this group member had been trespassed from the university last week for taking part in some critical street theatre as part of AUSA Human Rights Week, a peaceful re-enactment of an Israeli checkpoint aimed at raising awareness of the everyday plight of Palestinians, many of whom attend our university. In opposition to his arrest, students gathered non-violently around the police car in which he was detained and chanted “let him go.” At this point, around ten police officers charged the group, shoving and throwing punches at the students gathered there. If the media is going to report that the protest turned violent, they should also report who the parties were offering this violence, that is, the Police and security. (http://www.3news.co.nz/Students-lock-themselves-in-uni-to-protest-VSM-Bill/tabid/423/articleID/227354/Default.aspx; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV9MXtdQYEQ&feature=channel_video_title)

c.7pm: In support for this member, we then marched to the Central Police station to demand his bail. We sat peacefully on the intersection of Cook Street and Mayoral Drive and listened to speeches by members of the university, and engaged in some rousing chants for Marcus’ release.

c.9pm: We reached an impasse when it became clear that the police would not release Marcus while we were there. We decided to return to the university to await word of his bail and reflect upon the day. Spending the best part of eight hours fighting for the principles of justice and democracy that New Zealand claims to laud so highly, had made us hungry. We had pizza.

(This seems to have emerged as one of the most fascinating aspects of the day for reporters. It is disappointingly cliché to see journalists honing in like flies to sugar to exploit, in a manner poignantly embarrassing to their high-journalistic claims, the tired stereotype of the one-dimensional student. Furthermore, the claim that students abandoned their protest out of  boredom or lack or commitment or defeat (“[Joyce] also questioned their commitment to the cause, after the protesters abandoned their occupation to go and get pizza.”) is an interesting one, coming from a source that would benefit were it the case that student resistance may be so easily quelled. (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10754503, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10754706)

This government and in particular the education minister, Joyce, has a shameful track record of stubbornly not listening to the actual words coming out of students’ and staff’s mouths. This constitutes a perplexingly wilful and obvious obliviousness. Even a cursory look at our “grab bag” of demands shows a number of common intersections of concern around the danger of valuing profit over people. It is understandable perhaps for the “wo/man on the street” to not understand how these issues relate to one another, especially when s/he is subjected to consistently omissive reporting.  But for a journalist, or a vice chancellor, or a Government minister, who is by virtue of their position purportedly versed in the workings of society, how and why the micro intersects with the macro, to appear to miss this relationship when it is expressed explicitly is unacceptable. And, honestly, not very believable.

Steven Joyce is a man presumably cognisant of the actual situation confronting students, and by extension, workers in Aotearoa New Zealand as it is he who has been elbow-deep in the flagrant flaying of policy in place to protect staff and students. This is conducted with much confident assurance in his right to ignore critical questioning of policy by those involved or affected. To claim that the interests of students are treated in a privileged manner under this Government is massively disingenuous and deflects attention from a discussion that needs to be had about our collective future vision for the university.

(http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10754706)

Joyce’s advice to students to “keep your heads down…” sounds very much like a threat_: keep your heads down. Look at how good you have it now. We wouldn’t want to jeopardise that now, would we? Now keep your heads down or I’ll take away more of your things._ This is bullying language, filled with implied threat, but also hollow enough to be plausibly disavowed in the future. This is not the language of a leader.

It also seems a tactic to alienate students from workers by calling upon the implication that “most New Zealanders” resent universities and begrudge students for going to them. This works in the interests of keeping opposition to this Government’s destructive actions divided and diffuse. Joyce’s rather, well, obvious argumentum ad populum, “I think most New Zealanders think students are reasonably well looked after at this point in time,” has very little bearing on the reality of the current situation. “Most New Zealanders” is, first-off, an impossible claim for Joyce to make. What, did he meet and ask them all? Secondly, even if we could scientifically attest that “most New Zealanders” think this, what of it? A lot of people thinking something does not an argument make. What Joyce, and McCutcheon, and other supporters of neoliberal expansion fail to understand about our perspective as students and workers, is that a pattern of measures taken over the past years and intensifying today are one-way moves, very difficult and hugely expensive to change back later if and when they don’t work. Toothpaste is very difficult to get back in the tube.

Steven Joyce’s threat will not work to intimidate us. It only confirms the reasons we are compelled by principle to stand up.

The education minister’s role is to represent the interests of students, a task at which he is failing dismally. Let us not forget that the Hon. Steven Joyce was at university before 1992 and the end of free tertiary education in Aotearoa New Zealand. We have become so used to the apathy and cynical defeatism bred by failed protests against fees in the 90s that even a glimmer of disagreement in self-defence seems radical.

The university’s traditional role has been to foster members of society who can contribute genuinely to a better future through academic endeavour. Universities in Aotearoa New Zealand are seeing that future slip away as the central point of education in society is being dismantled in favour of profit. Enforced voluntary student membership, threats to key working conditions and colossal student debt will cripple the future of our institution and its benefit to society.

Well, no more. We’re back. We are the university and we will defend it.

Love from the future,

THE UNIVERSITY