It is important, though, not to see this as merely a struggle over cuts in funding or job losses, however devastating they will be. There is also a deeper critique beginning to materialise over the role and form that universities and higher education take. Criticisms are being voiced over the commodification of knowledge – the enclosure of research within exclusive and expensive institutions and publications, or behind electronic gateways such as Ingenta or ProQuest.

The squeeze on educational institutions is, like the crisis of capital, global. But so too is the emergent resistance. People from Chile to Austria, from Greece to the US, and from Japan to Puerto Rico are challenging the neoliberal model of the university, which produces ‘skilled’ workers who can be put to use for the reproduction of capital.

In the US, there have been some of the largest and most vibrant student mobilisations for years. California has seen students facing prohibitive hikes in fees and increasingly dire job prospects join forces with precariously employed academic and support staff to stage a wave of marches, strikes, teach-ins and occupations. On 4 March, there was a US-wide strike and day of action to defend education.

Here in Europe, the focus is on challenging the ‘Bologna Process’ aimed at the privatisation and standardisation of universities across the EU. Students and educators are proposing alternative processes of collective self-organised struggle, knowledge sharing and the liberation of education. To these ends there have been protests, counter-summits and occupations in hundreds of European cities, including Vienna, Paris, Prague, Barcelona, Rome, Turin and Bologna itself.

In the UK, 200 University of Westminster staff and students occupied the vice-chancellor’s office for three days in March. Protests and occupations have occurred at Sussex in the face of forceful attempts to suppress them by university management, including arrests and the use of riot police with dogs. Many other campuses are gearing up to take action against cuts.

Here at Leeds, vice-chancellor Michael Arthur announced £35 million cuts, branded the ‘Economies Exercise’. Leeds University Against Cuts (LUAC) and the Really Open University (ROU) formed to resist the plan and in early February, in a record ballot, UCU voted in favour of action.

While UCU was balloting its members, Leeds University Student Union started an anti-strike campaign, erroneously called ‘Education First’. In response ROU created a spoof union website, reallyopenunion.org, as well as a series of stickers encouraging strike action. LUAC ran stalls on campus, mobilised staff and students for demonstrations, and attempted to counter some of the scaremongering and disinformation that the ‘Education First’ campaign had spread.

Experiments in education

ROU was established to simultaneously resist cuts, critique the neoliberal model of education and engage in experiments in critical and participatory education. The aim is to break out of the insularity of the university and student politics. ROU asks ‘What can a university do?’ placing itself within an expansive politics of creativity and affirmation. It produces a newsletter, The Sausage Factory, and has organised several public meetings with participatory workshops, where participants are encouraged to create collective visions of what a ‘really open university’ would look like.

These attempts at resistance and the creation of alternative spaces share a common recognition of the systemic nature of the crises facing not just students, universities or the public sector in general, but the very commons on which life depends. There is a growing recognition that the same ‘logics’ that demand education serves the needs of markets are also those fuelling socio-ecological degradation, precipitating global financial crises and excluding the majority of the world’s population from participation in how the world is run.

While there have been important successes in these university battles, there have been setbacks too. Although UCU won an important victory in Leeds, it has not undermined the threat of cuts in general, with various departments, especially classics and biological sciences, still facing uncertain futures. Another challenge is that those taking action are facing punishment, with six students facing disciplinary action at Sussex.

If the resistance to the commodification of education and research is to be successful then it must be generalised beyond the walls of the university. If this happens then perhaps the spectre of university radicalism may once again come to haunt the academy.

This is the essence of LCAP’s strategy of ‘direct action casework’, in which direct action is used to pressure an institution to accept the demands, rights and needs of individuals, families or communities. The tactic has proven successful in breaking through the cynical ‘gatekeeping’ ruse employed by London’s Homeless Persons Units (HPUs).

Eran Cohen, a HPU service user and secretary of LCAP’s Tower Hamlets section, explains: ‘Gatekeeping is denying people a service or right they are entitled to. For example, preventing them from submitting a homelessness application, which is a right regardless of whether they turn out to be homeless or not. We do direct action casework around that.

‘If someone comes to us who has been to the council and refused an application, then we’ll go down to the office, stage a sit-in, and demand that they see the application. So far that’s worked in every case.’

Ellenor Hutson helped organise the recent ‘Gatekeeping Roadshow’, which toured ten London boroughs, mobilising people to fight gatekeeping and raise public awareness: ‘Central government gives councils targets for the percentage by which they have to reduce homelessness, but there’s no way to reduce homelessness in London without money or more council houses, except by massaging the figures.’

‘Gatekeeping provides the statistics that allow the government to hide the fact that there’s a huge housing crisis in London,’ Hutson continues. ‘What we’re asking for is many more council houses and a cap on the rent that private landlords are allowed to charge. But of course we’re nowhere near being in a situation where we can demand them until we’ve built up a lot more strength at the grassroots.’

Springing individuals over the gatekeeping hurdle is ‘often a bit of a hollow victory’, Hutson says, ‘because the housing that they’re given in the hostels is so poor and then there’s another fight to be had.’

LCAP has entered this tussle too, with its semi-autonomous hostel residents group.

The ten-storey Alexandra Court hostel may sit directly above Hackney’s temporary accommodation office, but given the council’s snail-paced response to its state of disrepair, seems to exist in some impalpable vortex.

Ellie Schling, who has worked on the campaign for two years, lists bed bugs, mice infestations, broken boilers, out-of-order lifts, cramped living spaces and cut-off drinking water among the appalling conditions that Hackney Council has left residents to cope with, sometimes for months on end. Only when residents marched on the Town Hall in protest did repairs begin to be done.

The most challenging part of LCAP’s work is getting people to the point where they feel able to take action. ‘When people come to us for help they have suffered a lot of knockbacks and they have an expectation that they’re going to be kicked when they’re down and there won’t be anything they can do about it,’ says Ellenor Hutson.

‘It’s about introducing people to the idea of collective action and demonstrating to them it will work. Then things escalate quite quickly because it’s very empowering.’

She recalls the first hostel residents meeting, ‘where people were saying, “Nothing will ever change, we can’t do anything.” About a month later we had a march and managed to very quickly get the council to install new security doors with really very little effort. After they had that taste of power then they were like, “Right, we can have everything!” It was brilliant.’

‘It’s really important for people to organise with each other, partly because they’re much more protected when they’re together,’ says Schling. ‘Recently a family was told verbally that they had two days to leave, which isn’t allowed at all, but because they’re involved in the campaign and had our support they were able to fight it off.

‘The temporary accommodation campaign shows that collective action is possible even when people are in one of the most unstable positions and facing multiple problems. That they’re still able to organise and fight together is really inspiring.’

That’s what makes LCAP so special. As Cohen says, ‘It’s pretty much the only actual campaigning group that works around these issues. Everything else is either just an advisory service or a charity.’

The challenge now is developing collective action for broader as well as individual change. As LCAP recognises, ‘taking on individual problems one by one is in no way sufficient. Collective organising and mobilising for broader change is its necessary complement. In the Great Depression, casework took place as part of a mass movement, which forced Roosevelt to institute the New Deal – a product not of the benevolence of politicians, but of the activity of unemployed and working people.’

www.lcap.org.uk