Student Reps Support Fee Rises

THE UNIVERSITY of Otago's 2006 budget-setting meeting saw the ridiculous spectacle of student representatives advocating an increase in student fees! Obviously hoping that if they offered an inch the University Council wouldn't take a mile, the two student reps proposed an average fee increase of 3.4 per cent.

Not surprisingly, the fat cats that run the Uni treated the sycophantic OUSA gesture with contempt and voted to snatch 5 per cent more fees from students - the biggest increase currently allowed by government. Fees for non-research Masters students will increase by 12.7 per cent.

Student Reps Support Fee Rises groups opposed successive fee increases with demos that drew thousands of people at a time. Year after year, militant students occupied the registry buildings of their universities and dragged the University management to the negotiating table.

Another problem is that many of the student leaders were members of Labour, Alliance and Green parties, and saw the education campaign as auxiliary to the main game - parliament. Indeed many see student politics as a stepping stone to a high-paying government job. When Labour took power in 1999, many student bureaucrats saw their job as cheerleading for the government instead of defending students against fees. At a recent workshop organised by the national students' association, government ministers even lectured student leaders on how best to lobby the government. Protest was probably not recommended.

Conscious youth need to take a greater involvement in their student associations, broadening and deepening political participation, and taking back the power from careerist officials. Student politics can then be oriented away from the parliamentary puppet show and towards the struggles of the working class, who are the only group in society with an interest in ensuring free education and the latent power to do something about it.