Apathic students are good for business

Hicham Yezza looks at the student protests against the Israeli re-invasion of Gaza and what this meant for the political awareness of students:

For anyone interested in the health of our political system, these events are highly instructive. For a start, they would have been unthinkable a decade ago: everyone remembers the quasi-proverbial, and not wholly undeserved, reputation students have cultivated over the years for extreme political apathy. Indeed, the extent of the indifference to the political process among the youth was a source of national despair, wistfully and routinely bemoaned by politicians across the spectrum.

More importantly, these protests have also been very indicative of some larger truths: not only have they highlighted a rise in political awareness among a new generation raised in the shadow of the Iraq war debate, they have also exposed what has for long been a suspected but unspoken reality: rather than being the centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore, British universities are now little more than businesses purveying a product, employable students. The message is unambiguous: political engagement might be good for the mind but it is very, very bad for business.

Of course I doubt these “centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore” ever really existed apart from in golden Baby Boomer memories of ’68… Universities have always been as much if not more guardians of the existing order as incubators of radicalism and any room for political engagement has to be created by the students themselves. What has happened in the last few decades is that this room, hard won during the sixties, seventies and eighties, has disappeared as universities “went commercial” while succesive governements made it more difficult for students to do anything but study. If you have to depend on a student loan of several (tens of thousands) of pounds to be able to study, you’ll be less likely to waste your time with political activity, especially if, as in the Netherlands, your loan or grant is made dependent on your study results. It’s perhaps no coincidence that there was little if any student protest over here against the invasion of Gaza, certainly not on the scale of the UK protests.

If the name of Hicham Yezza sounds familiar, it’s because he was the student arrested for supposedly downloading an Al Queda terrorism manual, which turned out to be made available at the U.S. Department of Justice website and who, once he wasn’t charged under the anti-terrorism law, was re-arrested for unspecified offences against the Immigration Act — wouldn’t want to waste an investigation after all. Here’s what you can do to help him.