From fees to fines, it's been a hectic year
A review of the year would reveal it much like the last: rents are still going up, and in many colleges by inconceivable amounts; the Higher Education Bill drags slowly, yet inevitably, through its readings; and the demands on Oxford's accommodation as a result of rising student numbers could see the adoption of drastic measures, along with doubtless higher prices. Times are indeed getting harder, and certainly more expensive, for students.
After the innumerable anti-fees, anti-war and anti-rent rise protests of last year, this year seems, however, to have been a somewhat quieter one. The ideal of free education still inspires many, as is evident from the October march against top-up fees, in which between 10,000 and 31,000 students marched.
Yet the Higher Education Bill has now entered the Lords. It passed its third Commons reading by a slightly more comfortable margin of 61, after the debacle of its second reading in January that saw the biggest revolt against the Government on a three-line whip in more than 50 years, the Bill scraping through by just five votes.
And still there are those who say that it will not be enough, Oxford's Chancellor, Chris Patten, and Vice-Chancellor, Colin Lucas, among them. There is no doubt that higher education in Britain is facing a severe funding crisis, a situation that is affecting all involved, not just students. Britain's academics are notoriously underpaid but, as with many issues currently facing students, the financing of higher education is consistently framed as an 'us against them' struggle, in which the University and other authorities battle against 'difficult' students while their opponents fight the 'uncompromising' establishment.
The several hundred students that occupied Exam Schools in January in protest against the Higher Education Bill were met with short shrift from the University, with around 30 of the participants summoned before the Proctors.
Just as the University and Government expect students to understand that moves such as the Higher Education Bill are, in the minds of many, necessary efforts to combat the problems inherent in higher education today, so too should the authorities appreciate the high ideals of student opponents and the frustrations felt by many of them. The longer the establishment and students view each other as staunch opponents, rather than different sides of the same coin, the longer it will take to reach any form of consensus.
This internal struggle is not limited to higher education funding, but is endemic in University-student relations.
Whilst the University Estate Bursar's Committee may have identified the withdrawal of rent subsidies as a means of making ends meet, to students already struggling under the burden of debt, rent rises of up to 40 per cent over three years will appear to some to have been implemented by those who have no awareness of student hardship.
Whilst the University will deal with the complaints surrounding students' post-exam behaviour, the heavy policing outside Exam Schools seems both oppressive and excessive to those just wanting to soak an overworked friend in cheap Cava.
The treatment of OxStu journalists Patrick Foster and Roger Waite, who exposed serious failings in the University IT network by themselves hacking into the network, sees the pair depicted as malicious villains for breaking the holy University statutes, instead of thanking them for highlighting a potentially critical flaw before someone with far worse intentions found their way in.
Top-up fees will not go away. But then neither will the higher education funding crisis, at least not in the near future, nor the harsh realities of student debt. Rents will keep on rising, and students will keep on breaking 'The Code'. Until the University and the students apparently pitted against it are recognised not as foes, but as two parties suffering the effects of the same problems, only then will the internal struggle be replaced by a constructive drive towards a shared future.
10th Jun 2004