Why an Ulster university common room is worth fighting for
Students occupying Ulster University’s common room are defending higher education against creeping corporatisation
by Terry Eagleton First published in theguardian.com, Thursday 12 December 2013
Common rooms are vital places in universities. In today’s corporate-minded, technocratic colleges, where professors are senior managers, junior staff dogsbodies and students consumers, they represent a dim memory of a time when higher education was a rather more collegiate affair. The senior common room in the University of Ulster at Coleraine, run jointly by staff and students on a non-profit basis, is one of the few such places left in the UK. During the years of the Northern Irish Troubles, it provided a safe haven in which Catholics and Protestants could speak to each other across the sectarian divide. Today it represents the sole remaining public space on the Coleraine campus, apart from a dingy entrance hall that looks like a Ryanair departure lounge. It is also one of the only centres open to the general public on a campus that has become increasingly privatised and off-limits to them. Town events have been staged there and local people taking evening classes use it for recreation, as do a host of clubs and societies. In a part of the world where commonality is at a premium, the Coleraine common room has kept alive a notion of the university as a place of dialogue, criticism and open-ended debate, and has recently acquired learned society status.
All this will soon be ancient history if the Coleraine administration has its way. Some time ago, they announced they were appropriating the common room as a corporate dining area. In a magnanimous gesture, however, they offered to replace the room with one containing a kettle and a microwave. Coleraine students, stemming as they do from a deeply conservative region of the world, are hardly noted for their political militancy, but a group of them occupied their common room last week and are set to stay. Some of them are sporting T-shirts reading “Ulster Says Know”, an Ulster enlightenment variant on the Paisleyite slogan. They have had messages of support from such diverse sources as Alec Baldwin and the university rugby club, while supportive academics and stout-hearted mums have baked them brownies and made them soup.
While negotiations for the executive dining room were afoot, the university bosses steadfastly ignored expressions of student alarm, along with a number of requests to meet with them. Now they have been forced to put out a statement declaring that they intend to convert the common room into teaching suites, an idea they seem to have plucked from thin air. Even if this is true, which no student or staff member I’ve spoken to believes for a moment, it will still mean the destruction of a precious space.
I gave a talk to the occupying students last week, and the vice-chancellor was invited to attend so we could hold a public debate. He didn’t show up, but 10 minutes into my talk three senior officials from the university physical resources department barged in threatening to have protestors removed by the police. Since the protesting students are occupying a room that’s theirs to sit and talk in anyway, it is hard to see what law they are breaking.
A good many universities these days breed a climate of bullying and intimidation. The student occupation took place around the time of the national strike called by the Universities and Colleges union, an event that spurred the Coleraine administration to send an email to its staff reminding them of the dire effect this exercise of their democratic right might have. Since Coleraine has scarcely any tradition of student militancy, the students who are determined to hang on to their common room deserve special congratulations for their courage. It is they, not the technocrats – who understand nothing but measurable outcomes – who are standing up for the true idea of a university.