The Uni Is Ours

University is for students, not professionals.

You cannot eat, you must not talk, you must not leave your desk for more than 15 minutes. Age-old library rules? Yet is there any need for them to be enforced as though we, the little people, the nasty horrible students, are vermin to be treated with authoritarian disdain?

It’s not as though we’re not the whole point of the university – and their job therefore. It’s not as though we don’t pay fees of up to £9,000 for the privilege of being here.

Do librarians really need to police the library, removing people’s stuff if they’ve gone for a particularly long and arduous poo or telling them off for eating at their desk? I saw one student leave the library crying after having been given a particularly stern warning for some nebulous Robbo-crime.

I’m not saying she’s not ridiculous for having such a brittle emotional state, but it’s hardly an offense against academia to eat an apple while reading a book. Or, for that matter, to eat to a Big Mac if we want to. The failure to recognise this reflects the contempt and absolute sense of superiority which some professionals hold over the students.

It appears that there is little or no appreciation of what this university is for – it’s for students, unequivocally. Without the students; good-bye lecturers, good-bye all you bureaucrats of the King’s Gate building who will probably take action on the editor from this article, and good-bye librarians.

The University no longer want to simply mark the work you hand in and adjudicate its quality. Rather, they would like to monitor how ‘engaged’ you are with your course, they want to know how many lectures you miss, how regularly you visit the library or take books out and how many times you go on Blackboard.

Even if you hand in a 75% piece of work, your grade could be slashed if you aren’t deemed to have put in enough effort. Such a load of nonsense could only be taking place because professionals at the University don’t like those students who to do little and still get good results; and so want to force them to behave differently.

In one of my seminars the other day we had a lecturer peer reviewing my seminar leader. Regarding a particular piece of work, which some of us hadn’t done, she commented “aren’t you going to name and shame them.”

Name and shame?! I felt a sense of glee when the other lecturer somewhat hesitantly replied; “No, it’s up to them.” You bet it’s up to us, if we want to fail; the University needs to shut up and let us.

The ‘spontaneous’ (in fact organised more than 24 hours in advance) clapping on floor 3 during the January exams was a great symbol of who the library, and the University, belongs to.

Yet in the 3 months since, it seems to have been forgotten. Does this mean we need to reassert the student ownership of the university over the professionals who so want it to belong to them?

I’ll leave that to the students, but next time a librarian talks to you like you wouldn’t be welcome on the bottom of their shoe, or a lecturer talks to you like they’re the boss, feel free to remind them how it really works.