University campuses around Aotearoa [New Zealand] have been rocked in recent months by a wave of protest at tuition fee hikes. Student anger has spilled over at continual government funding cuts and the willingness of university administrations to pass these cuts on entirely to students through increased fees.
Tuition fees at NZ universities have increased 16-fold since 1989, to an average of US$1600 per year. However, "user-pays" charging at some universities raises fees for courses like medicine and dentistry to as much as US$13,000. Student tuition fees account for around 25% of all funding for universities — the highest proportion in the world.
In August, following another round of government funding cuts, tertiary administrations proposed a further 20-25% increase in fees, which would take them to over a third of average annual student income. A meeting of the Lincoln University Council to enact a fee rise was thrown into disarray when students disrupted the meeting and barricaded themselves in the Registry. Occupations followed in successive weeks at Otago, Auckland, Victoria and Massey universities.
Coming a month before the NZ general elections, the occupations shot the tertiary funding issue to the forefront in the media. Opposition parliamentary leaders did "tours of duty" to the protest sites, with the NZ Alliance leader Jim Anderton being served a trespass order for his appearance on the Otago campus.
University administrators were anxious to avoid confrontation and generally sought negotiation rather than force. Exploratory use of the occupation tactic at Canterbury (1993) and Otago (1994 and 1995) had shattered student-administration relations. Otago administrators in 1995 called in the police to evict students, many of whom were beaten with batons and arrested in the process.
Settlements were reached in most cases after about a week of disruption, with the universities reducing the increases to around 15% and agreeing to make public statements criticising the government funding cuts.
At Auckland, however, Maori and Pacific Island students resisted the settlement negotiated by the white student leaders, pointing out that the fee rises were hurting their communities the most. When large numbers of Maori and Pacific Island students turned out on the day the Auckland occupation was due to end, university authorities reacted with force, calling in the police, who, after a tense stand-off, evicted the remaining students, arresting 16. At Massey, two days before the general election, police were called in to evict students occupying the Registry.
The willingness of students to engage in more radical forms of protest reflects the growing pressure on the middle class as a whole from the neo-liberal offensive. High fees and the prospect of repaying student debts over a lifetime have raised the stakes for students.
Much of the leadership of the student movement remains social democratic. Their vision is to build public pressure to force a change of government to a party more sympathetic to student concerns, such as the Labour or Alliance parties. This makes these leaders vacillate when a strong stand is needed, to be more preoccupied with media image than mobilising students, and to rely more on negotiating deals with the powerful rather than waging mass struggles with their members to force change.
The current wave of occupations is the culmination of a five-year campaign Radical Society has been working on for a more militant student movement around the demand for a fully publicly funded education system.
As times get tougher for students, as the solutions posed by the social democrats fail to deliver the results students demand, there is an ever-increasing willingness to try new approaches and fundamentally question the way things are. [Abridged from an article written by Radical Society and published in the Asian Students Association Magazine, October 1996.]