A Campaign in Defence of Higher Education

‘A single spark can set fire to the prairie’, said Chairman Mao. In the case of this campaign against the government's attack on the higher education system in this country it was a placard in the ground-floor window of the office of Worcester College's French tutor which read ‘Students not Customers’. The tutor had carried it on the 10 November 2010 demonstration against education funding cuts and higher tuition fees and a passing student knocked to remark that this was the first evidence she had seen of the engagement of academics with the student protest movement. This provoked an informal meeting of academics and students on 1 December who set up a group called ‘Worcester College against the cuts’. From this small initiative support was built up across the university in a series of concentric circles. One was the Free University of Oxford, a critical and experimental university designed as response to prohibitive student fees which announced itself in the town centre on a rainy afternoon in January 2001. It held a number of sessions at the Town Hall with teach-ins on a galaxy of topics such as free music, free health, origami and beginners’ Arabic. The other was a campaigning arm, the Oxford University Campaign for Higher Education (OUCHE), which modelled itself on the Cambridge Campaign for Higher Education (CACHE) and the Campaign for the Public University. Its founding meeting on 7 March 2011 brought together scores of academics from across the university, mainly from the humanities and social sciences, who committed themselves to ‘defend the principles that universities are a public good that must be fostered through public funding, that they are sites of open and unfettered research, teaching, and learning, not just providers of commodities to paying customers, and that university education should be affordable to all without incurring a crippling debt burden’.

Government (linguistics) · Higher education · Media studies · Pedagogy · Political science · Sociology · TUTOR · Global Educational Policies and Reforms · Higher Education Governance and Development · Higher Education Practises and Engagement · Law