After the defeat of the NUS Governance Review, how do we transform our national union?
How do we win the fight for free education?

A conference for student activists and student union officers

Saturday 17 May, London School of Economics

Tuition fees in higher education are at a record level, and set to go up again in 2009. FE students also face soaring fees, and the great majority of students face massive debt, course cuts and marketisation.

The New Labour politicians responsible for this didn't pay a penny to go to university: free education was okay for them, but it's too good for the rest of us now that post-16 education is expanding beyond a privileged few. Meanwhile the new president of NUS (also a supporter of New Labour) says students should "get real" and give up demanding free education.

The people who run our national union are the same people who have run it for more than twenty years - and whose supposed "realism" has led to defeat after defeat after defeat for students.

Rising fees are part of a much broader political agenda. For thirty years, a neoliberal capitalist offensive has seen funding for education and other public services squeezed, with gains transferred to the rich and business and costs transferred to workers and service users. This is the same drive which means public sector pay cuts, anti-union laws, environmental destruction and war.

Successful campaigns against this neoliberal agenda in countries like France and Greece show what is possible when students join forces with workers and organise mass campaigns. So do historical examples like France's worker-student uprising of May 1968, of which this year is the 40th anniversary.

Student activists in other countries have been "realistic" in a very different way from the fledgling cabinet ministers of NUS: they have assessed the huge scale of the tasks confronting them, and the radicalism necessary in order to win. "Our demands are very moderate, we only want the earth."

As part of the campaign to challenge the neoliberal agenda for education and reclaim our campuses, we need to reclaim our national union. The new constitution proposed under the leadership's "Governance Review", which NUS conference narrowly rejected on 1 April, would have destroyed what little democracy remains in NUS and transformed it into a bureaucratic NGO. Its defeat does not change the status quo; but it shows there is a real appetite among activists to challenge the NUS leadership and fight to transform our national union.

The recent revival of student activism - through anti-cuts campaigns, the anti-war movement, workers' rights and global justice campaigning, feminist activism, campaigns against climate change - gives the lie to the claim that students are apathetic. The need for a political, campaigning student movement which gives a focus to this activism, which fights to transform our education system as part of the fight to transform society, is greater than ever.

We need to extend links between student unions, campaigns and students at different colleges and universities. We need to work out ideas for a real expansion of NUS democracy, in order to win the kind of campaigning union students need. And we need to develop a vision of an education system and a society organised in the interests of human beings, not capitalism's relentless drive for profit.

That is why we are organising the Reclaim the Campus conference on 17 May. Please get in touch, support and register for the conference and add your or your organisation's name to this statement.

Sofie Buckland, NUS National Executive and Education Not for Sale
Aled Dilwyn Fisher, LSESU General Secretary-elect
Koos Couvee, University of Sussex SU Communications Officer

- Email  reclaimthecampus@gmail.com
- You can also join the Facebook group: "Reclaim the Campus"