Protest and Resistance and the Emergence of Autonomous Learning Spaces

Abstract

The previous chapter outlined how higher education in England has been shaped by a series of reforms made during the post-war period (1945–present). These reforms have fundamentally changed the nature of academic labour and attempted to commodify what is produced by universities as a driver for economic growth. Influenced by neoliberal ideology, the reforms have been pursued with greater intensity from the 1980s onwards in an attempt to impose a neoliberal model of higher education on the sector. It is this neoliberal model that is currently in crisis; however, the problems that contemporary universities face run much deeper than a deficient model of higher education. Instead, as the previous chapter argued, the crisis that universities currently face is a double-crisis—both a crisis of the neoliberal model of higher education and a crisis of capitalist social relations more generally. Thus, any meaningful response to the crisis that universities currently face must address both elements. It is for this reason that the book does not lament the demise of the public university (which forms part of a strategy for capitalist accumulation) and instead examines responses that have the potential to prefigure the idea of the university for a post-capitalist society. As such, this chapter will explore more radical forms of protest and resistance that have emerged in response to reforms to higher education made during the post-war period to examine what can be learned from them.