#Occupy the university

This despite the fact that, as a report in The Times Higher Education Supplement pointed out, 60 per cent of surveyed students consider in depth knowledge to be the most important quality in a teacher. By contrast, 9 per cent reported that a teaching qualification was the most important factor.

It is poor form to justify oversight and control purely on grounds of expertise at cost cutting and profit making. More substantial epistemic claims at the university level need to be made and that is where pedagogical theory steps in.

The university workforce also increasingly forms part of the precariat. Many with doctorates and masters degrees eek out a casualised existence on low pay and low security. Pedagogical theory is used to justify a whole raft of "compliance," they are so named, documents and templates requiring development and completion to the satisfaction of management.

This means that the managerial class has ultimate oversight on campus, and that lecturers and tutors become more readily hireable and fireable.When a whole raft of compliance requirements are used to enable the rotation of academic workers into and out of courses those who sit at the managerial top retain ultimate control over proceedings.

The academic becomes an expendable cog in the machine, something akin to an automaton, not a free and independent mind.

The control revolution forms part of a broader counter revolution against the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The university, a key seat of ideological hegemony in any society, threatened to get out of control as students and, albeit some, faculty revolted.

Loading up students on debt, compelling them to work to finance tuition, and skewing the system toward the privileged sons and daughters of the cashed up elite, are a magnificent means to bring students under control. Students are far too worried about their future financial prospects to concern themselves with addressing basic questions of essence and existence, social justice, cultural expression, our relationship to nature, and to parlay these concerns, and much else besides, into social and political action.

What is needed to combat all this is a campaign to restore the autonomous university to its rightful place. This campaign would have as its objective struggle both within and without the university to transform it into a publicly funded association of federated student and worker self managed departments and faculties. The departments and the faculties, not a seat of power in the centralised administration building, would become the true locus of university governance.

This would require interested students, academic and general staff, alongside concerned members of the public acting in fraternity, to set up an organisation, Campaign for the Autonomous University, which would engage in direct action, such as occupations and pickets, on campuses nation wide and which would campaign within respective student and staff unions for industrial action directed at bringing such a publicly funded federal association of departments and faculty into being.

Such a campaign would hopefully set both a spark and an example for workers elsewhere to bring matters of control and domination, not just wages and working conditions, to the forefront of class struggle. It might translate, like Occupy Wall Street, ideas about a self managed, federated, society based on popular participation and mutual aid to the public at large.

As shown in Paris in 1968 when students, university workers and the broader working class engage in joint struggle it becomes possible to demand the impossible.