Police are cracking down on students – but what threat to law and order is an over-articulate history graduate?

A protester towards the proposed closure of the ULU student union final week. Photograph: Paul Davey/Demotix/Corbis

Why are some of the most powerful men and women in Britain so terrified of a bunch of students? If that sounds a ridiculous question, take into account a number of recent information stories. As reported in this paper last week, Cambridge police are hunting for spies to inform on undergraduate protests against paying cuts and other “student-union variety things”. Meanwhile, in London final Thursday, a student union leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested right after a tiny and schedule demo. Officers hauled him off to Holborn police station for not informing them of the exact route of the protest – even even though it was on campus.

The 24-year-old has considering that been freed – on the strict condition that he doesn’t “engage in protest on any University Campus and not inside of half a mile boundary of any university”. Even with a copy of the bail grant in front of me, I cannot make out no matter whether that applies to any London school, any British university – or just any institute of larger training anyplace in the planet. As total-time head of the University of London’s pupil union, Chessum’s work is partly to protest: the police are blocking him from doing his function. But I suppose there’s no telling just what risk to law and order may well be posed by an above-articulate background graduate.

While we’re trawling for the ridiculous, let us keep in mind an additional incident this summer time at the University of London, when a 25-yr-old lady was arrested for the crime of chalking a slogan on a wall. Which is correct: dragged off by the police for creating in water-soluble chalk. Presumably, there would have been no bother had she utilized PowerPoint.

It all sounds farcical – it is farcical – till you delve into the information. Consider the London demo that landed Chessum in such bother: university employees had been filming their personal students from a balcony of Senate Property (the developing that inspired the Ministry of Reality in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, appropriately ample). Such surveillance is a current tradition, the nice man in the University press office explains to me – and if the police wanted the footage that would be no difficulty.

That website link with the police is turning out to be more and more essential across far more and more of our universities. London college students allege that officers and university security guards co-ordinate their attempts to rein in demonstrations even though personnel comment on the increased police presence close to campus. At Sussex, pupil protests against outsourcing companies had been broken up this April, when the university named in the police – who duly turned up with riot vans and dogs. A comparable point happened at Royal Holloway university, Surrey in 2011: a little number of college students occupied 1 measly corridor to demonstrate against course closures and redundancies the management barely bothered to negotiate, but cited “overall health and safety” and called in the police to clear away the young folks paying out their salaries.

For most of my existence, pupil politics has been little more than a joke – the things of Neil off the Young Ones, or apprentice Blairites. But in the previous few years it has all of a sudden grow to be each significant and admirable, most notably with the protests of 2010 towards £9,000 tuition fees and the university occupations that followed. And at just that stage, both the police and university management have turn into really jumpy.

For the police, this is element of the age-outdated work of clamping down on feasible sources of civil disobedience. But the inspiration for the universities is considerably much more challenging. Their historic role has been to foster intellectual inquiry and host debate. Yet in the brave new market place of larger education, when universities are competing with each other to be the two conveyor belts to the jobs marketplace and vehicles for personal investment, such dissent is not only awkward – it truly is dangerously uncommercial. As Andrew McGettigan, writer of The Wonderful University Gamble, puts it: “Anything at all also disruptive gets in the way of the business strategy.”

Final month it appeared that Edinburgh University had forced its student union to sign a gagging clause (now withdrawn). No union officer is permitted to make any public criticism of the university with out providing at least 48 hours’ recognize. University managers reportedly made that a deal-breaker if the student union was to get any money.

The managers of the University of London want to shut down the student union at the finish of this academic yr. The strategy – which is why Chessum and co were marching final week – is to maintain the swimming pool and the a variety of sports activities clubs, but to quash all university-wide pupil representation. Right after all, the college students are only the people paying the salary of the university vice-chancellor, Adrian Smith – why should they get a say? The prepare, it could not shock you to understand, was drawn up by a panel that did not quantity a single pupil. What with sky-substantial costs and rocketing rents in the capital, you might feel that the require for a pan-London student entire body had in no way been larger. But then, you are not a university manager on a 6-figure salary.

The place universities have been historically spots of free expression, now they are having to sacrifice that function for the sake of the cost-free marketplace. For college students, that comes in the form of a crackdown on dissent. However the twentysomethings at university now will end up running our politics, our firms and our media. You might want these long term leaders to be questioning and concerned about society. Or you might wonder whether sending in the police to arrest a lady chalking a wall is proportionate. Either way, you ought to be troubled.

Police are cracking down on students – but what threat to law and order is an over-articulate history graduate?