Is protesting an integral part of the student experience?

Student protests in London last year

The protesting student has become part of popular culture, fuelled by a certain element of 1960s nostalgia. The current student generation, however, has been decidedly apathetic, preferring to lounge on the sofa watching the X-Factor with a can of beer rather than being out on the streets defending the values we believe in. A lecturer lamented last year that we were the most “unstudenty” students she had ever seen.

The financial crisis and general social turmoil seem to have jolted the stagnating student body back to life. The resurgence in student protests over the past year has fuelled colourful commentary presaging a return to the golden days of 1968; all this seems a bit excessive, however it is endearing to see that the student conscience has not been stifled by a razor-sharp cynicism befitting a disgruntled middle-aged adult more than anything. One need not be a bleeding heart liberal to protest in the name of a cause, nor are student protests all about getting high and engaging in social disobedience under the guise of some left-leaning political slogan.

The student experience is a wonderfully vague, all-encompassing concept which has been packaged neatly and marketed like a commodity across university prospectuses. This might smack of a left-wing political platitude, but there is no denying that the “student experience” has come to denote a certain standardised way of life which we are supposed to adhere to. Thus universities have been voted number one for “student experience”, when this is something that is intrinsically personal and cannot be crudely ranked. The student experience is fundamentally a learning experience, and learning is not something we can ever hope to achieve in the lecture room alone. Poring endlessly through books only serves to further entrench apathy; it is too easy to absorb ideas from books without having them challenged and moulding them to make them our own. Protesting is a way of asserting one’s opinions, engaging with peers and perhaps, at the end of it all, to emerge with a fundamentally different view. Education is more than a streamlined process of classroom learning, it is about building one’s opinions and sense of direction. To believe that student protesting will change the world is self-indulgent, however that is no reason to adopt a defeatist approach towards asserting one’s beliefs outside the classroom and in a community of peers.

Mammon's Bells: The Church of England's Fraught Relationship with the Protesters

“The alarm bells are ringing all over the world. St Paul’s has now heard that call” said the Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, after the debacle surrounding St Paul’s cathedral and its fraught relationship with the protesters camped outside seems to have subsided for the time being. One might point out that St Paul’s has heard that call rather belatedly, to say the least.

About 200 people and dozens of tents have been pitched in the churchyard since October 15^th to protest against “corporate greed and inequality” in the City, inadvertently sparking a massive public debate about the Church’s position in society. The Church’s first response was to close St. Paul’s for a week, because of health and safety concerns.  The next episodes in the saga saw the resignations of the canon chancellor Dr Giles Fraser because of the recourse to legal means, and the dean of the cathedral, the Right Reverend Graeme Knowles over his mismanagement of the case. This rapid succession of events seemed to prompt the sharp U-turn in the cathedral’s position, which in the space of two days announced the suspension of legal action against the protesters.

The convoluted evolution of the debacle has led many to question where the Church of England stands when it comes to the competing demands of God and Mammon. The location of St. Paul’s in the middle of the financial centre of the UK could not be more apt to highlight the situation. It professes to be a friend of the poor and marginalised in society, thus leading one to assume it would throw its full weight behind the protesters’ cause, however vague and ill-framed it might be. Its initial actions, both the closure of the cathedral and the resort to legal means, belie this traditional stance. The week-long closure to the public could not contrast more stridently with Dr Chartres’s later overtures to the protesters. It visibly showed a disinclination to engage with the protesters and more importantly to kick-start a public discussion on economic justice and the broader societal issues regarding the role of finance, all within the church’s remit. As Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University has said, “it’s not the business of the Church to be a set of economists. What the Church can do is to invite people to think thoughtfully, be honest and to ask the right questions”.

However we may be going too far in claiming that the Church of England actively sought to shun its role in helping the most vulnerable elements of society by attempting to evict the protesters. Nor does it follow necessarily that the Church ought to position itself squarely in either the establishment or anti-establishment camps. Church historian Stephen Tomkins argues that this debate stretches back 2000 years to the birth of Christianity itself. The Church has ambivalently been both a radical and conservative force in society, thus making it too diverse a phenomenon to be on one side or the other. Furthermore, from the article on the Financial Times written by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, it transpires that he sympathised significantly with the protesters in backing a “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions. It is regrettable that he did not speak out sooner to assuage the public ire. Thus whilst the Church’s fudging response was indeed shambolic and plain incompetent, it is inaccurate to lambast it for having forgone its duties to society. In excessively prioritising and mismanaging the practical issues of health and safety it allowed the broader philosophical debate to run ahead, scuppering its chance to be at the forefront of it.