Anthony Barnett: Student Power: 1968... 2010
[Anthony Barnett is the founder of openDemocracy and the Co-Editor of its UK section, Our Kingdom.]
I've just been in to University College London to show solidarity with the students, including Guy Aitchison, now occupying the Jeremy Bentham Room #UCLoccupation. It freshened up my memories of the first wave of student occupations in the late sixties. Much feels the same, except for the laptops and phones and the hired in security. Others might want to add their reflections.
The sixties was the start of the great capitalist cycle of expansion - its announcement. Education was free, jobs were plentiful, rent was cheap, consumerism was just getting into its stride, for young people especially those with any skills. In England, we were at the forefront of the wonderful economic sixties: music, mini skirts, mini cars, a swinging boom. It was 'Americanisation' but we influenced them too.
Accompanying this heady sense of emancipation was the sense that our parents were from another planet. They had grown up without television, central heating, open sexual relations before marriage, rock and roll, and often without university education as we were part of the first great expansion of mass higher education then underway. There was a generation gulf.
A lot of the student protest was driven by opposition to the hierarchy that was the residue of the old order; its ridiculous rules and not so much the morality as the hypocrisy of the older generation. For students, authoritarian teaching methods and secrecy ('open the files' was a demand, and a number of occupations broke into the administration to do just that) were another target....
Read entire article at openDemocracy
I've just been in to University College London to show solidarity with the students, including Guy Aitchison, now occupying the Jeremy Bentham Room #UCLoccupation. It freshened up my memories of the first wave of student occupations in the late sixties. Much feels the same, except for the laptops and phones and the hired in security. Others might want to add their reflections.
The sixties was the start of the great capitalist cycle of expansion - its announcement. Education was free, jobs were plentiful, rent was cheap, consumerism was just getting into its stride, for young people especially those with any skills. In England, we were at the forefront of the wonderful economic sixties: music, mini skirts, mini cars, a swinging boom. It was 'Americanisation' but we influenced them too.
Accompanying this heady sense of emancipation was the sense that our parents were from another planet. They had grown up without television, central heating, open sexual relations before marriage, rock and roll, and often without university education as we were part of the first great expansion of mass higher education then underway. There was a generation gulf.
A lot of the student protest was driven by opposition to the hierarchy that was the residue of the old order; its ridiculous rules and not so much the morality as the hypocrisy of the older generation. For students, authoritarian teaching methods and secrecy ('open the files' was a demand, and a number of occupations broke into the administration to do just that) were another target....