The New University in Amsterdam.Ah you loved me as a loser, but
now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the
discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
Leonard
Cohen, ‘First we take Manhattan’
The university movement in the Netherlands
has just won its first victory; a victory for democracy and academic freedom
against the commercialization of higher education.
On April 1, representatives of staff and
students from the occupied Maagdenhuis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA)
came to an agreement with the
University’s Executive Board (CvB) concerning the formation of two independent
committees, one to investigate UvA’s finances and another to investigate
possibilities for decentralization and democratization. In an unprecedented
development, the committees will have the authority to make binding
recommendations that promise to transform life at the University.
No one could have predicted this a few weeks
ago. Our victory vindicates the choice to step up the pressure by engaging in
grassroots extra-institutional activism – including an occupation and other
disruptive tactics – to force the attention of those who have been wilfully deaf
to the discontent and frustration that has accumulated in the lecture hall for
decades. The coming weeks will see intense debate on the shaping
of those committees, as well as on the future of the protest movement that
has made the (still) occupied Maagdenhuis into a bustling cultural venue – a
symbol of what the university could
be: a space of collaborative learning open to everyone – hosting events from
avant-garde electronic music concerts to talks by intellectuals like David Graeber, Gloria Wekker, Jacques Rancière, and Wolfgang
Streeck.
Even though the mood is festive on central
Amsterdam’s Spui – the Maagdenhuis’ address, now prankishly renamed Red Square
in an allusion to the symbol of the red square introduced during the 2012
Quebec student protests – the structural maladies afflicting Dutch higher
education are not receding. Indeed, the preliminary victory for the protest
movement at the UvA is a j’accuse against these maladies as a whole, that is, against
the neoliberal pathology that caused them.
This pathology has to do with chronic
underfunding in light of increasing student numbers, creeping
micromanagement of research and teaching, and growing authoritarianism from
university management – all made possible, indeed foisted on universities, by
national and EU policies. Our Winter Palace is therefore not in Amsterdam, but
in The Hague, the seat of government in the Netherlands.
The Dutch minister for Education, Jet
Bussemaker, has so far been good at playing UvA’s staff and students against the Executive
Board. There is an element of self-reproach to that, given that Bussemaker was
a member of UvA’s Executive Board until 2012. Moreover, as minister, Bussemaker
appoints the members of the university’s Supervisory Board that is supposed to
control and advise the Executive Board. She is therefore at least partly
responsible for the unfolding crisis. No matter: the Executive Board has now
returned the compliment by pointing to the Dutch government as the ultimate
culprit for the bureaucratic commercialization of the university.
Indeed, a constant sticking point in the
forthcoming negotiations is likely to be the content of Dutch law pertaining to
university administration. And this is where the plot thickens: short of
changing a set of 1997 laws (the
auspiciously labeled Modernisering
Universitaire Bestuursorganisatie), staff and students cannot get full democracy
at their place of work—at least not without transgressing the spirit of these
laws.
It follows that, while the Amsterdam
committees start their work, the movement for university self-government must
increasingly look towards The Hague. The Maagdenhuis occupiers cannot win this
wider fight alone: fighting a single university bureaucracy is one thing,
fighting the Ministry of Education – until recently a driving force behind the
neoliberalization of Dutch society – is another. Thankfully UvA is not alone.
Students and staff from other Dutch universities already stand behind it and have
started developing their own protest platforms, addressing problems from within
their own academic communities that significantly overlap with the agenda of
the movement in Amsterdam. This is the movement for a New University (named after the student component of
UvA’s movement), which spread like a fire
throughout the Netherlands in February.
The New University has a life of its own,
well beyond the Amsterdam occupation and the concerns of each member
institution’s local remit. Like the global movement of
university occupations and protests that has sprung up in recent weeks, the
different cells of the New University have supported each other in a spirit of
solidarity.
The New University is therefore the natural
vehicle for taking the fight beyond Amsterdam. In order to be successful, this
struggle will have to proceed according the same dual approach that has
informed the protest movement in Amsterdam: build up – keep up – pressure
outside established institutions and procedures and at the same time maintain secure and organized control over
procedures and committees, such that the movement does not simply disintegrate
and evaporate over time. It is now time to take the struggle to another level: and
then we take The Hague.
If you enjoyed this article then please consider liking Can Europe Make it? on Facebook and following us on Twitter @oD_Europe