Student activism in the Welfare University. (Universities).(Australian university students)

IN THE FIRST WEEK of 2002 the Sydney Morning Herald published a brief exchange on student politics. Under the heading "Bring Back the Fiery Radicals and Put Spark into Our Unis" John Schumann, writer and member of the folk-rock band Redgum, asserted that "a preoccupation with vocational goals has turned the tertiary education system into an intellectually arid landscape".

For some time Schumann had suspected that "the broad-based liberal education, so long the mainstay of Australian intellectual life, is on the brink of extinction". When addressing students on such issues as Australian cultural identity, contemporary Australian popular culture, and the relationship between politics and the arts, he was struck by their polite indifference to any discussion that did not directly relate to their vocational purposes. The radicalism he had enjoyed in the early 1970s had disappeared, as had liberal education.

Three days later a postgraduate student and tutor in the history department at the University of Sydney responded with an encouraging message: "Cheer up, storming the chancellor's office is not a lost art." Yes, in crowded tutorials the "ideas of Marx may appear painfully twee in the face of overwhelming economic rationalism", but what had changed was how the students chose to be political. In the 1970s their slogan was "Destroy the Dominant Paradigm!" (somewhat more sophisticated, one might interpose, than "Workers of All Lands Unite!"). Nowadays arts students are asking what is the dominant paradigm, what are the alternatives, how are these disseminated "and a million other questions generated by postmodernism".

Funding cuts, this response went on, mean that "spending three years swanning about in the student bar in a Che Guevara T-shirt quoting Oscar Wilde is no longer the rite of passage it once was". Students tell the world what they think on their own websites. Or "maybe gender, film or media studies offer more opportunities for making interesting social critiques". Or the twenty-two-year-old is too tired for politics after her late shift, working because she is considered dependent on her parents and therefore not qualified for Austudy.

The ideologies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when radicals and postmodernists, despite their different philosophies, jointly attacked the cultural tradition, cannot be revived. The old radicalism cannot be reclaimed because the Western liberal humanism against which the students revolted has disintegrated.

In its turn, the cultural revolution was overtaken by the growth of neoliberal, free market, or economic rationalist policies. This brought the "unified national system" of higher education, the merger and restructuring of universities and colleges of advanced education. A new type of student protest appeared, one for which the term "activism" often seemed more appropriate than "radicalism".

Today a major concern of student activists is the defence of the student welfare system, which is linked with compulsory membership of the Students' Representative Council, the Sports Union, and the University Union. Opening the Commonwealth parliament in February the Governor-General included compulsory unionism amongst the matters the re-elected Howard government would address. In April the new Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, told Sydney University's weekly student paper, Honi Soit, that voluntary student unionism would be introduced, despite its unpopularity. At a more modest level, a Herald reader, Vee Andrews, contributed on 18th February a column objecting not to unions as such--they are "an unfortunate necessity"--but to "the arrogant, indifferent and eventually cliquish nature" that compulsory student unionism breeds.