Why an Ulster university common room is worth fighting for | Terry Eagleton

‘Some of them are sporting T-shirts reading through Ulster Says Know, an Ulster enlightenment variant on the Paisleyite slogan.’

Widespread rooms are crucial places in universities. In today’s corporate-minded, technocratic colleges, exactly where professors are senior managers, junior staff dogsbodies and students consumers, they represent a dim memory of a time when increased training was a rather more collegiate affair. The senior frequent room in the University of Ulster at Coleraine, run jointly by workers and college students on a non-profit basis, is 1 of the few such places left in the United kingdom. In the course of the many years of the Northern Irish Troubles, it presented a safe haven in which Catholics and Protestants could speak to every single other across the sectarian divide. Nowadays it represents the sole remaining public room on the Coleraine campus, apart from a dingy entrance hall that seems like a Ryanair departure lounge. It is also a single of the only centres open to the basic public on a campus that has grow to be increasingly privatised and off-limits to them. Town events have been staged there and neighborhood men and women taking evening lessons use it for recreation, as do a host of clubs and societies. In a component of the planet in which commonality is at a premium, the Coleraine frequent space has kept alive a notion of the university as a spot of dialogue, criticism and open-ended debate, and has recently acquired realized society status.

All this will soon be ancient background if the Coleraine administration has its way. Some time in the past, they announced they were appropriating the typical space as a corporate dining spot. In a magnanimous gesture, however, they supplied to change the room with one particular containing a kettle and a microwave. Coleraine students, stemming as they do from a deeply conservative region of the planet, are hardly mentioned for their political militancy, but a group of them occupied their widespread room final week and are set to keep. Some of them are sporting T-shirts studying “Ulster Says Know”, an Ulster enlightenment variant on the Paisleyite slogan. They have had messages of help from such varied sources as Alec Baldwin and the university rugby club, while supportive academics and stout-hearted mums have baked them brownies and manufactured them soup.

Whilst negotiations for the executive dining area had been afoot, the university bosses steadfastly ignored expressions of student alarm, along with a amount of requests to meet with them. Now they have been forced to put out a statement declaring that they intend to convert the widespread area into teaching suites, an notion they appear to have plucked from thin air. Even if this is correct, which no student or workers member I’ve spoken to believes for a second, it will even now indicate the destruction of a precious room.

I gave a talk to the occupying students last week, and the vice-chancellor was invited to attend so we could hold a public debate. He didn’t show up, but ten minutes into my speak three senior officials from the university bodily resources department barged in threatening to have protestors eliminated by the police. Because the protesting college students are occupying a space that’s theirs to sit and talk in anyway, it is challenging to see what law they are breaking.

A great numerous universities these days breed a climate of bullying and intimidation. The pupil occupation took area close to the time of the nationwide strike named by the Universities and Colleges union, an event that spurred the Coleraine administration to send an electronic mail to its employees reminding them of the dire effect this exercising of their democratic appropriate may possibly have. Given that Coleraine has scarcely any tradition of pupil militancy, the students who are established to hang on to their common area deserve particular congratulations for their courage. It is they, not the technocrats – who comprehend nothing at all but measurable outcomes – who are standing up for the real idea of a university.

Why an Ulster university common room is worth fighting for | Terry Eagleton