Dissatisfied with dissatisfaction: Why the ASS protest flopped

Alright so the main point: it’s a shit time to be studying at Bristol.

Since 2012 there has been a 9.9 per cent increase in undergraduates at the university. The major consequence of this has been to put unprecedented pressure on class sizes, study spaces and teaching.

The most obviously affected group are Arts and Social Sciences students who now have a better chance of finding that missing Malaysian airliner than finding a seat in their own ASS library.

But even science students, recipients of a shiny new £60 million Life Sciences building, have plenty of reasons to be pissed off as well.

Up until very recently, nobody seemed to care that we were all being shat on by the university. It wasn’t very cool to care. This attitude might be described as “who cares if anyone cares anyway?”

Our collective mega-apathy can be explained in two ways:

People won’t engage in student politics in its current state because it doesn’t engage with them. Instead of encouraging dissent, our hyper-conformist union leaders are more interested in policing language, banning songs and stifling anything that counters their prevailing wisdom. Example: last year’s “Community” officer losing her shit and attacking “rich white male privilege” on Twitter because one of her motions wasn’t passed, even though maleness, whiteness and privilege (all of which exist) had nothing to do with the motion.

Cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones drawn to student politics. Instead, student politicians are the kind of kids who irritated you in school: geeky, badly tailored, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the game and get along with everybody. Affable but not quite whole. The kind of kids the bullies couldn’t be bothered to target because it was just too obvious.

 

Earlier this term one guy from outside the depressing milieu of student politics tried to change everything that had gone wrong in Bristol.

This guy:

His name was George Robb and he’d had enough.

He’d had enough of arts students subsidising science degrees (he wrote a factually inaccurate article for Epigram on the subject). He’d had enough of not being able to get a seat in the ASS. He’d had enough of having to pay for his course’s literature with his own money.

George wanted a better deal for Arts and Social Sciences students at Bristol.

Above all though, George wanted stuff. He wanted a pound by pound breakdown of exactly where the university was spending our money.

He wanted the ASS education provided at Bristol to feel like it was worth more in a concrete (e.g. books, teachers, contact hours, study spaces) way.

He made an event on Facebook called “ASS Protest: Where is half our money going if not on us?” It seemed to tap into just how pissed off and hurt all the ASS students were about how worthless they felt their degrees were. People started to click attending in the dozens, then in the hundreds.

Watch this video of George explaining his protest to UBTV:

Can you see it? George’s politics weren’t about believing in anything. “Essentially we need more books and more teachers.” He demanded that we demand more. Others agreed. 

His ASS protest movement took off because without any explicit underlying ideology (unlike our ideological-to-the-point-of-being-quite-creepy union friends) anybody could support it, regardless of what they actually believed. The consumerist vacuity at the heart of the protest seemed to be its greatest strength.

With a week to go until the protest over 1,000 people had clicked attending.

This was despite George writing on the event about the need for a liquid breakfast (alcohol = lolz apparently) before the protest.

Despite George writing a devastatingly unlettered and uninspiring “manifesto” to sum up the protest’s aims.

Despite an anarchist sect from Yeovil threatening to violently infiltrate the protest (seriously, this did happen).

Despite university chief Judith Squires sending an email to every ASS student shitting facts and figures and stats all over George’s ideas and articles.

Despite George’s posts to the event resembling those of a person ever more lost inside the maze of their own colossal self-regard.

Despite, well, pretty much everything, over 1000 people had clicked attending.

The days leading up to the demonstration were pregnant with tension and anticipation. The call to revolt reverberated around the city and its ideas and aims were viewed as refreshing, even engaging with the root causes of student dissatisfaction.

At 11:30 am on Friday 12th December, outside the Senate House, the protest was due to begin. This was the scene at that time:

Eventually, and in far, far smaller numbers than expected, some protesters appeared. There couldn’t have been more than 100 of them and the congregation seemed largely comprised of the 3rd year English students who edit Epigram. 

Not a frightening crowd, not an inspiring crowd. A crowd that could probably tell you quite a lot about Shelley or Wordsworth or whatever, but would struggle to topple a Christmas tree, let alone a university.

At a leisurely pace the protesters made their way to the Wills Memorial Building (WMB). Asked what she was marching for, one of them said “because everything is bollocks” and “there aren’t enough books for English [she probably meant the subject not the nationality] students in the library.”

So at the WMB it was like this. George’s ASS protest was huddled quietly in that grassy courtyard to the right of the main entrance. He was trying to get people to chant “Education, Exploitation, Explanation” by saying it softly into his intermittently working megaphone but very few people joined in with the chant.

A UBTV camera crew realised its camera wasn’t actually working. Another demonstration (read about it here) was making a shit load of noise about Free Education, even though it was a far smaller group, crewed by greasy-looking postgrad guys who looked like they were probably on exceptionally cool terms with the opposite sex.

The Free Education protest was now far more interesting than the ASS protest. It was better organised and its visceral, easy to scream message (“FREE EDUCATION NOW!”) could be heard above George’s megaphone, above the speech he was shakily reading off a crumpled piece of white A4 paper.

The two groups joined together.

Judith Squires appeared from inside the WMB – accompanied by a security detail who had a look on their faces which said as if this is how I’m spending my Friday lunchtime – as she’d agreed to speak to the protest, as well as take a copy of George’s “manifesto” as some sort of we’re listening to you, honestly gesture.

(A note: George’s “manifesto” wasn’t contained in a file, or stapled, or even paperclipped together. It was just a few crumpled sheets of paper.)

This is a video of what happened:

Notice the beard ‘n’ beanie bloke at the start, who then held up the ‘FREE EDUCATION’ placard above George and Judith’s heads?

That was Oliver Carter-Esdale, the kind of person who genuinely thinks if they posture enough it might one day add up to having an independent mind.

The kind of person who puts “Shortlisted for Guardian Student Columnist 2014” in their twitter bio, and who writes Strong Opinion articles like this for the Huffington Post’s “Student” section.

By virtue of making more noise than George, OCE took over the protest outside the WMB.

George was not the Russell Brand this party needed. No doubt pissed off that less than a tenth of the people who clicked attending on Facebook had turned up, he absolutely failed to summon the charisma needed to demagogue this event.

The way George handled the “FREE EDUCATION” crowd heckling him wasn’t to shout “FUCK OFF” into the megaphone but to become extremely torpid and sluggish like a lizard whose tank isn’t hot enough. He was more like a wet cardboard box than a rebel leader.

When George eventually handed over the megaphone to OCE the weight of relief which swept through the remaining protesters was like something physical: a kind of closed-eye, clenched-fist gratitude – finally mate.

As events degenerated into a radical left-wing open mic session (sample quote: “Kill and eat the rich”) it became clear that nothing fresh or exciting was going to happen.

And when somebody from UBU – an organisation that hasn’t organised a proper summer ball for two fucking years in a row – said they would be leading the charge for Free Education in 2015, it was definitely time to go home.

It was hard not to feel sorry for George. He started a conversation that will become more important and more necessary to have as long as the university continues to obfuscate it.

Online participation in the protest snowballed, but in real life, like a real snowball, it was unstable and melted away. We still don’t give a fuck. We can’t blame poor George for that.

We can only blame ourselves.