Contesting Higher Education: Student Movements against Neoliberal Universities 9781529208634

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Contesting Higher Education: Student Movements against Neoliberal Universities
Copyright page
Table of contents
List of Figures and Tables
1 The Contentious Politics of Higher Education
Exploring the political impact of student movements: a processual approach
Neoliberal universities as constraints and targets
Student politics: universities and critical masses
The empirical research
This volume
2 Student Campaigns
Introduction
The Chilean Winter of 2011
The 2010 student protest campaign in England
The Maple Spring in Quebec
Student mobilizations against Laws 133/2008 and 240/2010 in Italy
Conclusions
3 Higher Education Policies
Introduction
The formation of the neoliberal university in Chile
The recent round of neoliberal reforms in Chile
The formation of the neoliberal university in England
The recent round of neoliberal reforms in England
Higher-education transformations in Quebec: a not-fully-marketized sector?
Higher-education reforms in Quebec in the 2000s
Higher-education transformations in Italy: a not-fully-marketized sector?
Higher-education reforms in Italy in the 2000s
Conclusions
4 Student Politics
Introduction
Low institutionalization, coordinated field: Chile
High institutionalization, fragmented field: England
High institutionalization, coordinated field: Quebec
Low institutionalization, fragmented field: Italy
Conclusions
5 The Outcomes of Student Protest
Introduction
The outcomes of the 2011 protests in Chile
The impacts of 2011 on the political process
Value change and a changing policy paradigm in education
Public opinion
The 2010 student campaign in England: politicization without a politically successful impact
Politicizing higher education (and student fees)
No political impact
The Quebec 2012 strike: limited successful impacts
Public opinion
The marginal effects of the Italian student protests
Marginal effects on the public debate
A strategic failure of the movement
Conclusions
6 Conclusions
Introduction
Protest campaigns against neoliberal higher education: agency in process
Neoliberal higher-education fields as triggers and targets
Students as players: resources and strategies
The political impacts of social movements: beyond legislative effects
Further research
Status of the interviewees and codes, per country
Appendix
Status of the interviewees and codes, per country
Notes
References
Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

Manja Klemenčič, Harvard University

“This book will enlighten anyone interested in student movements, the policy consequences of movements and contentious politics more generally.” Jeff Goodwin, New York University

Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University

Donatella della Porta is Professor of Political Science, Dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences and Director of the PhD programme in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore. Lorenzo Cini is Research Fellow in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore. César Guzmán-Concha is Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Geneva.

Using new research on higher education in the UK, Canada, Chile and Italy, this rigorous comparative study investigates key episodes of student protests against neoliberal policies and practices in today’s universities. As well as examining origins and outcomes of higher education reforms, the authors set these waves of demonstrations in the wider contexts of student movements, political activism and social issues, including inequality and civil rights. Offering sophisticated new theoretical arguments based on fascinating empirical work, the insights and conclusions revealed in this original study are of value to anyone with an interest in social, political and related studies.

DON AT E LL A DEL L A P O RTA, LO R ENZO C INI AND C É S AR GUZ M Á N- CON CH A

“This is a welcome addition to the literatures on student movements, comparative political economy and new forms of contentious politics in an age in which neoliberal orthodoxy is being challenged around the world.”

CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION

“This is a theoretically advanced and empirically rigorous investigation of contemporary student movements in international comparative perspective. It is a must-read for all students and researchers interested in student politics.”

ISBN 978-1-5292-0862-7

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

9 781529 208627

B R I S TO L

@policypress

CO N T E ST I N G HI GHE R E D UC AT I O N ST U D E N T MOV E ME N T S AG AI N ST N EOL I B E RAL U N I V E R S I T I E S D O N ATE L L A D E L L A PO RTA , LO RE N ZO C I N I A N D C É S A R G U Z M Á N - CO N C H A

CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION Student Movements against Neoliberal Universities Donatella della Porta Lorenzo Cini César Guzmán-​Concha

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bristol University Press 1-9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 www.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2020 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-0862-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-5292-0863-4 (ePdf) ISBN 978-1-5292-0864-1 (ePub) The right of Donatella della Porta, Lorenzo Cini and César Guzmán-Concha to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by blu inc Front cover image: Alessandro Sacchi/Unsplash Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents List of Figures and Tables

iv

1 The Contentious Politics of Higher Education 2 Student Campaigns 3 Higher Education Policies 4 Student Politics 5 The Outcomes of Student Protest 6 Conclusions

1 29 65 97 129 171

Appendix Notes References Index

189 191 197 219

iii

newgenprepdf

List of Figures and Tables Figures 3.1 3.2

Number of first-year university enrolments Percentage of students enrolling at university, aged 19–25 years, by gender and total (1971/​72–​2013/​14)

87 88

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 3.1 3.2

4.1

4.2 6.1

Ideal types of higher education 13 Higher-education sectors and the impact of student protests 15 Political impact of student politics –​variations in 22 four regions Higher-education budgets –​proportions (%) by type of 71 subsidy (1990–​2016) Higher education initial participation rate (HEIPR) for 77 first-time participants in courses at UK higher education institutions and English, Welsh and Scottish further education colleges (1999/​2000–​2005/​6) 112 The main organizations/​political factions within the English student movement and National Union of Students, classified according to the political and strategic orientation adopted during the three cycles of reforms on student fees (1996–​2011) Student organizations involved in the protest campaigns 122 of 2008 and 2010 Student politics in action 181

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The Contentious Politics of Higher Education The student movement in social movement studies: an introduction The research that this volume reports upon analyzes four episodes of student contestation over higher education (HE) reforms, which have recently taken place in Chile, Quebec, England and Italy. More notably, the book explores the institutional and political context in which such episodes occurred, their dynamics and trajectories of mobilization, and their political impacts on HE and on the political arena at large. The authors argue that, to explain the evolutions and effects of social movement campaigns –​how and why they obtain concessions –​we must look at the relations between the state and the market in the policy field of HE, and how these relations shape mechanisms and processes that promote or hinder alliances and oppositions in the policy field and the political system at large. In doing so, the interplay among social movements, political parties and public opinion is examined. Drawing on an extensive literature on the consequences of social movements (for example, Bosi et al., 2016b), we explore the ways in which actors such as vice-​chancellors, intellectuals, personalities and public figures react to (and interact with) student actions; the extent to which students modify or align with specific dynamics of competition in the party system; and how student movements and the public opinion interact over the course of an ‘eventful’ episode of contention. The authors observed that, in both Chile and Quebec, as student demands were supported by significant social constituencies and the government proved unable to appease the protests, the opposition

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parties presented themselves as allies. These parties committed themselves to delivering reforms that would (at least partially) meet student demands, while students attempted to gain influence in decision-​making bodies by joining political parties and/​or participating in elections. Tuition fees and the costs of HE became central issues of electoral debate in the forthcoming elections in these countries. These processes led these new administrations to deliver reforms (concessions) that were somewhat aligned to the protestors’ demands. By contrast, in England and Italy, the student campaigns had (at least in the short term) lesser impacts on public opinion and the party system, which remained relatively indifferent to their demands. Protestors failed to build solid alliances while opposition parties of both countries endorsed the reforms proposed by conservative governments. Both administrations successfully neutralized protest campaigns as students did not become a threat to government stability nor to the electoral prospects of the main political parties. The confluence of these factors minimized the potential impact of student protests in terms of policy outcomes. By and large, this book addresses and fills two gaps in social movement studies. First, at a theoretical level, the interactions between social movements and public policies have been analyzed only sporadically (Amenta et al., 2010); while attention has grown in recent years, it remains a poorly investigated aspect in the field. Second, the student movement is not among the empirical phenomena on which social movement studies have mostly focused their attention (see, for instance, Tarrow, 1998; Caruso et al., 2010; Klemenčič, 2014). Looking at the interactions between HE policies and student movements (or, as will be explained later, student politics more broadly), the authors then aim to contribute towards filling theoretical and empirical gaps. The first gap of social movement research is theoretical. Social movement studies grew especially within political sociology, with attention paid to the political participation of societal actors, and comparative politics, with a focus upon the impact of democratic models of protest activities. In political science, social movements have often been seen as actors ‘at the gate’ (Tarrow, 2016), that is, located on the input side of the political system, while public policies belong to the output and the outcome of the Eastonian ‘black box’. Attempts at bridging the two fields have been rare (again, Amenta et al., 2010, but also Kolb, 2007). Some analyses looked at ‘policy regimes’ –​such as the welfare state –​as a specification of the political opportunities approach (Cinalli and Giugni, 2013) investigating their impact on actors and forms of protest. Inverting the causal relation, other studies focused on the effects of movements on specific policies –​for instance, here as well,

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the welfare state (Amenta et al., 1992) or citizenship (Koopmans and Statham, 1999). In resonance with Lowi’s (1972) influential statements that ‘policy matters’, researchers looked at the different constellation of actors mobilized at the local level on distributive versus regulatory policies (della Porta, 2004). In recent times, some reflections were also prompted by the emergence of critical junctures (as opposed to incremental changes) in public policies (della Porta, 2016; Tarrow, 2016). As we will see in what follows, the authors’ research bridges the analysis of the specific characteristics of HE policies as a context for student protests with that of the effects of those protests on those specific policies. The second, and more empirical, objective that this book pursues is to gain an in-​depth knowledge of recent cases of student mobilization. Despite the relevance of (some) student movements to theorizations on contentious politics  –​which discussed, among other issues, the role of political opportunities and of resource mobilization (Touraine, 1968; Feuer, 1969; della Porta and Diani, 2006, ch. 1; Rootes, 2013) –​ research on them remained episodic and occasional (della Porta, 2010; 2018a and 2018c. The different timings of student protests in different countries (linked to shifts in domestic policies) have discouraged the development of cross-​national studies, except in instances of global moments of protest such as in 1968 (for example, Ortoleva, 1988; Tolomelli, 2008; Klimke and Scharlot, 2008). In this regard, a comparative analysis of student politics can be seen as a subfield of comparative politics. The fast and short waves of protest that usually characterize student movements add up to a high turnover of university activists, which produces organizational discontinuity (della Porta, 1996 and 2010; Caruso et al., 2010). Not by chance, there have been only a few attempts to theorize about the subject of student movements (Van Dyke, 1998a; Gill and DeFronzo, 2009). This limited attention is certainly not justified by a lack of relevance of student movements. To be sure, education has traditionally been a contentious issue. The right to attend educational programmes was one of the core demands of labour movements in the 19th and 20th centuries all over the world. The origins of the welfare state are closely related to the idea of minimum levels of compulsory instruction. Public education systems have been one of the components of the welfare state, although scholars have paid far more attention to other aspects such as public health and pension systems. From a historical perspective, the granting of access to HE for the lower classes was the culmination of the extension of demands that consolidated access to education (and state provision of it) as social right (Callender, 2014). HE policies have

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been shaped by various waves of student mobilization (Brooks, 2016). Students have often been important actors in contentious politics, mobilizing on all main cleavages in society and often stimulating spin-​off movements, as well as affecting institutional politics at large. Student protests are therefore affected by public policies at least as much as they affect them. The authors’ research focuses on these complex interactions, aiming at understanding the development of student protests within neoliberal universities. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to set the stage for the empirical chapters by discussing some contributions to the analysis of transformation in HE policies and student politics, linking them to research on the policy outcomes of social movements. In what follows, the authors’ approach to the study of movement impact, with specific reference to student mobilizations, will be introduced. Secondly, some transformations and variations in HE policies, considering the neoliberal turn in the field as both constraint upon and target of student protests, will be addressed. Looking then at student politics, both organizational structures and the action strategies within them, as well as protest outcomes, will be discussed. In conclusion, the authors’ empirical research, as well as the structure of the volume, will be presented.

Exploring the political impact of student movements: a processual approach While social movement studies have been slow to address the effects of contentious politics (concentrating attention rather on its causes and modalities), a growing body of literature has developed more recently on the topic (Bosi et al., 2016b, for a review). Assessing the outcomes of movements is not easy; not only do several actors contribute to define such outcomes, but even movements themselves are compound actors, endowed with various types of resources and using different strategies of protest, but also persuasion (della Porta and Diani, 2006, ch. 9). Outcomes can moreover be planned and unplanned, as well as being more or less favourable to the social movement itself. This considered, a success is the positive outcome of a challenge at procedural or substantive levels (Gamson, 1990) –​which is often not so easy to assess. Research on movement outcomes has indeed considered dimensions both internal and external to the movements. Internally, each wave of protest tends to change the material and symbolic resources available for specific movements and broader movement families. As for external impacts, social movements can achieve acceptance and be recognized

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as a legitimate counterpart to their opponents, in other words, they have procedural impact, and/​or they might obtain advantages and concessions according to their claims, that is, they have substantial impact (Kitschelt, 1986). Movements might also produce structural impact, by affecting political institutions, and sensitizing impacts, by influencing the political debate but also by building new norms and collective identities (Giugni, et al., 1999; Kriesi, 2004). Social movement studies have linked the success of movements to exogenous and endogenous factors; favourable opportunities and strong resources have often been cited to account for successful impacts. On the one hand, the perspective usually defined as ‘political process’ (Tilly, 1978; McAdam, 1982; Tarrow, 1994) has paid systematic attention to the political and institutional environment in which social movements operate. Such environmental conditions have often been summarized under the heading of ‘political opportunity structure’, combining the degree of openness of formal political access, the degree of stability or instability of political alignments, the availability and strategic posture of potential allies, and political conflicts between and within elites (Tarrow, 1994). Characteristics relating to the functional division of power and to geographical decentralization have also been taken into account to explore which stable or changing features of the political system influence the growth and success of less institutionalized political action in the course of protest cycles. On the other hand, resource mobilization approach theorists (McCarthy and Zald, 1977)  have identified in the presence of leaders acting as political entrepreneurs and in the availability of organizational and personal resources some of the most important factors influencing the rational calculations on which basis people decide whether to get involved in collective projects or not. Research has also highlighted the role of interpersonal, as well as inter-​organizational, networks in the circulation of resources and the creation of the solidarities that encourage action in the pursuit of collective goals (Marwell and Oliver, 1993). Building upon these traditions, but also adapting them to the specificity of our object of study, the concept of political opportunities will be explained by focusing on the policy area of HE. In doing so, the authors aim to overcome two limits of the political process approach. The first is the tendency to extend the number of dimensions considered as relevant, making the connections between causes and consequences quite difficult to tackle. By focusing on one policy area and its evolution during protest campaigns, we claim that it is possible to better single out opportunities and constraints. Secondly, analyzing policies also means taking into account the interaction between the

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state and the market by considering a political economy dimension that the political process approach has left by and large unexplored (Cini et al., 2017c, della Porta, 2017). As Flacks (2004) has noted, contemporary work in social movement studies established only a few connections between macroeconomic conditions and political opportunity. This literature has tended to crowd out concerns with the political economy from the explanations of mobilization processes (Buechler, 2000). For Hetland and Goodwin (2013), the result of such a lack of interest in political economy has impeded developing causal mechanisms linked to capitalist developments. Indeed, one of the most influential scholarly works of the last two decades in social movement studies, Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al., 2001), paid little attention to this dimension. The time seems ripe to reverse this trend and bring the analysis of social structure back to social movement studies. A number of scholars have been moving in this direction in recent years (Barker et  al., 2013; Hetland and Goodwin, 2013; Peterson et al., 2015). Insofar as market relations colonize an increasing number of aspects of social life to their profit-​led logic, various struggles for the decommodification of social relations emerge. This seems also to be the case of the global wave of student protests that have arisen recently against the processes of university marketization. Student protests, taking place in several countries across the five continents including South Korea and India in Asia, Chile and Mexico in South America, Canada and US in North America, South Africa and Nigeria in Africa, and Italy, UK, and Germany in Europe (Klemenčič, 2014; Brooks, 2016), have questioned the commodification of social relations and services in the field of HE. In this book, the authors aim to show how and to what extent the recent wave of student protests has been set in motion by market-​ oriented changes. In this respect, we depart from the interpretations provided to understand the movements of the 1960s, which emphasized the emergence of cultural and post-​materialistic grievances (Rootes, 2013). It is observed that several reforms, started in the 2000s, have introduced market mechanisms in the HE sector, including policies of tuition fees and competition between universities. Triggered by the announcement and implementation of such reforms, a global wave of student unrest has arisen since 2008 to oppose these commodifying trends. Therefore, it is suggested that the reappearance of students as political actors is related to the emergence of a range of distributional conflicts stemming from the implementation of the neoliberal agenda in HE.

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The Contentious Politics of Higher Education

This takes us to another innovative epistemological aspect of our research. Most of the analyses of movement outcomes have exhibited a deterministic assumption, considering outcomes as strongly constrained by opportunities and resources. Considering this vision too static, the authors look instead at protests as eventful –​that is, the aim is to investigate how protest actors (in particular, social movements) develop their own resources in action. In a recent essay on Charles Tilly’s enormous contribution to research on repertoires of protest, Sidney Tarrow (2008, p 226)  described his initial work as moved by a ‘structuralist persuasion’, inherited from Barrington Moore Jr. Among the structural preconditions for the development of social movements (as sustained campaigns of protest mobilized by ad hoc associations) are long-​term changes such as the increasing power of the state, the parliamentarization of national politics, the processes of urbanization, and proletarization. Tilly (2008, p 2) himself commented that ‘in those distant days’, ‘method meant statistical analysis’ and explanation ‘ignored transformative processes’. Even if focusing on normal, everyday events, in later work, Tilly increasingly favoured the discussion of eventful histories over event counting. Explaining the evolution of repertoires of protest, he moreover added to external circumstances (among which were regime and opportunity structures) the history of contentious politics itself (Tilly, 2008). In a similar vein, concepts such as transformative events or ‘eventful protest’ have been coined to stress the effects of protest on social movements and activists themselves. Protest events tend, in fact, to fuel mechanisms of social change; during protests, organizational networks develop, frames are bridged, and personal links foster reciprocal trust. In his work on the history of the French labour movement in the 18th and 19th centuries, William H. Sewell (2006) has defined the concept of eventful temporality as recognizing ‘the power of events in history’ (Sewell, 2006, p 262). As a ‘relatively rare subclass of happenings that significantly transform structure’, events have transformative effects insofar as they ‘transform structures largely by constituting and empowering new groups of actors or by re-​empowering existing groups in new ways’ (Sewell, 2006, p 271). With reference to eventful temporality, the concept of transformative events has been developed to single out events with a high symbolic (and not only that) impact. As McAdam and Sewell observed: no narrative account of a social movement or revolution can leave out events … But the study of social movements or revolutions–​at least as normally carried out by sociologists or political scientists–​has rarely paid analytic attention to

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the contingent features and causal significance of particular contentious events such as these. (McAdam and Sewell, 2001, p 101) These two scholars therefore called for analysis of the ways in which events ‘become turning points in structural change, concentrated moments of political and cultural creativity when the logic of historical development is reconfigured by human action but by no means abolished’ (McAdam and Sewell, 2001, p 102). Especially during eventful protests, collective experiences develop through the interactions of the different individual and collective actors who, with different roles and aims, take part in them (della Porta, 2008). To understand how student mobilizations evolved and which outcomes they produced, the authors had therefore to look not only at the pre-​existing opportunities and resources of movements but also at the dynamics which were triggered by the protest campaigns themselves. To do this, we built upon a relational perspective as well as a field-​oriented approach, which looked at the interactions of different actors –​institutional and not –​during what was defined as a neoliberal critical juncture. In social fields, various actors cooperate, compete, negotiate and fight with each other (Bourdieu, 1984 and 1988; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). A field is divided between people who dominate and people who are dominated. Constant, permanent relationships of inequality operate inside this space, which at the same time becomes a space in which various actors struggle for the transformation or preservation of the field. All the individuals in this universe bring to the competition all the (relative) power at their disposal. It is this power that defines their position in the field and, as a result, their strategies. (Bourdieu, 1998, pp 40–​1) Organizational fields are made up of ‘those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products’ (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983, p 152). In the field of HE we focus on student movements, conceived of as collective efforts by students to prevent or achieve social change (Gill and DeFronzo, 2009). A student movement is defined as ‘a relatively organized effort on the part of a large number of students to either

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bring about or prevent change in any one of the following: policies, institutional personnel, social structure (institutions), or cultural aspects of society involving either institutionalized or non-​institutionalized collective actions or both simultaneously’ (Gill and DeFronzo, 2009, p 208). Looking at recent waves of student protests in four regions –​Quebec, Chile, Italy and England  –​ the authors embed these movements within a broader concept of student politics, looking at movement but also non-​movement dynamics, especially within student unions and associations. These four cases cover different HE systems, from those where the role of the state is still prominent (Italy, Quebec), to others in which the market has acquired greater relevance in recent decades (England, Chile). Moreover, we study recent campaigns of contention with both more limited (England, Italy) and more significant (Quebec, Chile) impacts on policy making. Thus, from a systematic comparative perspective, the aim is to understand the rise of four student mobilizations, their causes and their policy outcomes. It is maintained that the different pace and form of the marketization process heavily affected the ways in which students mobilized in terms of action repertoires, political goals and demands, and organizational structures. In this sense, exploring the variety and the institutional differences in the fields of HE helps us assess the variety of the student movements embedded in such fields (see also Cini, 2019a).

Neoliberal universities as constraints and targets Recent student protests in many countries, while sharing some characteristics (such as, especially, the egalitarian and democratic frame) with those of previous decades, targeted a distinctive set of policy reforms. In the book, the authors argue that opposition to the neoliberal reforms of HE has been a common political trait of the recent student protests all over the world, to the extent that these protests emerged as a challenge to the process of marketization. However, to succeed they needed to adapt to the specific characteristics of the HE policy field they contested. In the last few decades, neoliberal policies have brought about a major shift in the paradigm that informed education policies during the so-​called embedded liberalism period (Harvey, 2005). Drawing on the assumption that the private sector approach is superior to the public sector approach, the new HE paradigm promoted the ‘discipline of the market place, the power of the consumer and the engine of the competition’ as defining principles for the sector

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(McGettigan, 2013). Neoliberal reforms have produced profound distributional consequences, as they altered the state/​family balance in the funding of HE by increasing the weight of families’ expenditure while reducing state funding. Even reforms aimed at improving the administration of universities and their management (such as performance or accountability-​based incentives, league tables and international rankings, and competitive grants) tended to put some academic institutions under financial stress, pushing them to compete for fees and investments. This was seen by many as the rationale for introducing or increasing tuition fees or privatization of the functioning of HE, even if often universities remained nominally in state hands. The very nature and mission of HE institutions has been challenged by the reforms of the last few decades. Neoliberal conceptions brought about institutional changes that impacted on the constraints and opportunities for student protests. Among them were:  (a) the commodification of services, with the introduction of tuition fees and loans or the abrupt increase of tuition levels; (b)  privatization, opening to new, mainly private, providers of educational credentials; (c)  managerialization, with mechanisms of  competition and funding allocation conditional on performance of criteria defined externally and the introduction of cost-​benefit and efficiency principles; (d)  marketization of curricula; and (e) precarization of labour relations. Common trends in the reform of HE included first an increasing commodification, with the search for private investment and increasing tuition fees. Until the 1970s, state funding was the main or unique source of financing for most universities of the European continental model. A distinctive feature of the neoliberal program for HE consists in the diversification of the sources and modalities of financing. As universities are obliged to self-​generate, to a large extent at least, their own incomes, tuition fees become important sources of finance. The neoliberal reforms of HE have been characterized by a greater competition into the provision of student education; supplementing the public sources of funding of universities with private sources, especially tuition fees; and granting institutions more autonomy from government steering. They included cuts in public funding for universities and increase in the search for university income from private sources. The global financial crisis that began in 2007 only reinforced such reforms. (Klemenčič, 2014, p 398)

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As Smeltzer and Hearn (2015, p 353)  noted, as public funds are drastically reduced, ‘universities are increasingly operating like businesses and are perpetually in search of monies via increased tuition fees and private investments’. To do this, they invest more and more in marketing, brand management and promotion (Smeltzer and Hearn, 2015). Privatization is a related trend, implying also the proliferation of private –​de facto, for profit –​institutions in competition with public ones. This transforms the function of the state from a provider of public services (such as education) to a regulator of (quasi-​)market competition, with the state contributing to financing HE and regulating the quality of the study courses offered by the universities. However, according to the spreading public management approach, HE ‘has its own market characteristics, producing private goods with some public goods characteristics, such as the coming together of demands and offers of education goods–​looking at students as consumers and universities as producers’ (Agasisti and Catalano, 2006, p 246). In this vision, managerialization is a related trend in the internal governance of the institution, with an increase in the number and decisional power of managers and top level administrators in the university governing bodies at the expense of academics. Confined to marginal decisional bodies, professors as well as students exercise limited power over the administrative staff (Ginsberg, 2011). So, the structure and processes by which decisions are made at institutions of HE, including the role of different groups within the institution as well as the specific decision-​making style being practised (Forest and Altbach, 2006); the role of leaders responsible for managing the institution; the faculty responsible for providing teaching and research; and the administration, in the handling of support services inside the institution, are all aspects of major importance in the field of HE. While until the 1970s the dominant idea was that universities were self-​governing bodies, in the neoliberal approach, universities must be responsive to numerous stakeholders, and quickly and efficiently adapt to their requests. Especially relevant are the demands of adaptation to labour market changes, and a claim of rational administration of resources in a context dominated by austerity. University leaders are therefore expected to take over increasingly more responsibilities, freeing academics from tasks for which they are not prepared or are not willing to assume. As managerialization also went together with a marketization of curricula, the very conception of the role of the university changed, from an entity that creates culture and knowledge to one that

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prepares for market requirements. If in the Humboldtian vision the university was a place of creation and diffusion of culture, in the ‘new managerialism’ approach universities are considered as producing goods such as teaching, research and services (Agasisti and Catalano, 2006). Changes in courses, curricula and academic programmes aim at meeting the demands of the labour market and the business sector, or at responding to the requests made by supranational bureaucracies (for instance, the European Higher Education Area, within the so-​ called ‘Bologna’ reforms). These trends tend to penalize especially those disciplines, such as arts and humanities but also social sciences, that are less attractive to potential private funders, as they do not easily offer economic returns. As for internal labour relations, a precarization of labour conditions follows the drop in public spending and the increase in competition. This includes changes in the internal composition of faculties in favour of less expensive positions, while a decrease in the number of professorial positions (assistant, associate and full professors) results in the rise of precarious categories such as adjunct professors, external lecturers, postdoctoral researchers, and the proliferation of temporal contracts (Cini and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017). Moreover, measures such as the extension of probation periods, and the conditionality of renovations or promotions on the approval of external grants, function as mechanisms of precarization of both tenured and research positions. The outsourcing of various services contributes to a decreasing protection of labour. Within these common trends, the university policies are, however, still very differentiated, with high cross-​national divergences (Brooks, 2016). There are two ideal university systems that the existing HE systems (including the ones studied here) tend to approximate to different extents: ‘state-​dependent’ and ‘market-​dependent’. First, the degree of decommodification, defined as ‘the extent to which commodities are not exclusively exchanged on market principles’ (Willemse and de Beer, 2012, p 107), varies: it is low in liberal welfare regimes and high instead in universalistic welfare regimes. In sum, in market-​dependent university systems (usually within liberal welfare regimes), the state is expected to play a minor role in the provision of education, leaving ample room to the private sector, and while public expenditure tends to be low, tuition fees are high. Whereas, in state-​dependent university systems (especially within universalistic welfare regimes), the state aims at emancipating people from market dependency; public expenditure tends to be high, while the presence of

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Table 1.1: Ideal types of higher education Dimensions of higher education regimes

Market model

Statist model

Funding system

Private

Public

Field organization

Competitive

Cooperative

University leadership

Academic managers

Academics

Logic of curricula delivery

Market-​oriented

Academic

Labour relations

Precarious

Standard

the private sector tends to be minimal; tuition fees are low or inexistent and there are generous subsidies to students. These two ideal types differ on all the main dimensions that have been singled out, with empirical cases approximating one or the other at different degrees on the various dimensions (see Table 1.1). Empirically, degrees of privatization vary not only in time but also in space, coexisting to a large extent in specific countries that all see a (very variable) mix of public and private universities. Thus, scholars have distinguished a market model ‘in which HE institutions (like real companies) set their own prices for their teaching and research services without public intervention’ from a statist model in which ‘the state finances and centrally controls education production and regulates university activities by determining the prices (tuition) and admission to academic courses’ (Agasisti and Catalano, 2006, p 248). In terms of access, while in a neoliberal model fees make access to university socially selective, a statist model aims at opening universities to all, offering grants to reduce the effects of economic inequalities. The level of fees and the availability of grants have an impact on social selectivity in accessing HE. While tuition fees impose a financial burden on students and their families, state-​funded grants or scholarships can alleviate it, benefiting good students from low-​income families. Where these scholarships take the form of vouchers, however, universities will compete for students through market campaigns. Loans might also reduce the immediate economic burden of fees, but as they become increasingly similar to other products available in the financial market (for example, through high interest rates) or are directly managed by private banks, they tend to produce long-​term indebtedness, and even insolvency among students. All in all, recent reforms of student financing in many countries show a trend towards increasing loans while at the same time reducing the amount of grants. Where the propensity to take risks is unequally distributed among social classes, loan systems

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can increase, rather than reduce, social inequality with regard to access to HE. While fees are generally on the increase, in many countries (especially in continental Europe), they remain low, with attempts to increase them (as in some German states or in Scandinavia) failing in the face of resistance from various fronts. Limits to universal access can also be introduced through thresholds for entering (standardized tests, or type of secondary education) or numerus clausus. As for university governance, contemporary university systems and, more specifically, universities themselves can also be classified based on the groups or coalitions who play the dominant roles in decision making (Cini, 2016). Anglo-​American universities (despite significant distinctions within and among them) are today mainly ruled by a distinct ‘managerial class’ (Berry, 2005). In most British universities, authorities and key members of governing bodies are composed of managers, laypersons (with no academic background) and senior professors. They govern the universities by making decisions on the management of public and private funding, by hiring and firing personnel, by launching new programmes and shutting down old and unproductive ones. The top managerial staff constitute the dominant actors in this model of university governance. By contrast, for instance in continental European systems, the formal and substantial power of universities has been traditionally held by the senior academic staff. Professors represent the most numerous and significant component of the university decisional bodies, namely the academic senates and the administrative boards. In recent years there has been a centralization of power in the hands of monocratic authorities such as rectors and heads of schools or departments. In contrast, in systems of HE such as in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, professors –​formally or informally –​ still maintain control over the development of the university body and academic careers, the management of state funding, and other minor financial activities. Finally, the degree of marketization of curricula and of precarization of labour can also differ widely, influenced as it is by the degree of de-​regulation and liberalization of (labour) markets and the amount of public investment. The authors’ research compared two cases with high commodification levels in the higher educational sector (Chile and England) with two cases of low(er) commodification (Quebec and Italy) (see Table 1.2). While impactful and less impactful cases were found in both systems, it was observed that the different characteristics of the HE systems constrained oppositional strategies.

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The Contentious Politics of Higher Education

Table 1.2: Higher-education sectors and the impact of student protests Less impact

More impact

Commodification of HE: weaker

Italy

Quebec

Commodification of HE: stronger

England

Chile

During the Pinochet dictatorship, the university system in Chile was the laboratory for neoliberal reforms, opening the system to private universities and the establishment of a public loan scheme. The private sector rapidly consolidated, fragmenting and hierarchizing the system. This also impacted upon the value of diplomas on the market. While formally not-for-profit, several private universities are business enterprises in competition with each other for students and funds. University governance remains highly concentrated in the hands of monocratic authorities. An authoritarian management style remains widespread, with very little institutional channelling for collective claims. Lacking a significant rupture with the past, the post-​dictatorship governments introduced only mild reforms. England is the paradigmatic case of neoliberal reforms, with high levels of competition, commodification (with high fees), managerialism in governance, and precarity in labour conditions (with spreading fractionalization of teachers’ contracts and high levels of exploitation for the teaching of even fee-​paying PhD students). The culture of evaluation and reference to stakeholders is widespread. The university field is highly fragmented with elite, mid-​level and low-​ level universities. In Quebec, a system of public universities, with low fees for locals, was built within a minority-​nationalist project (as francophones are the majority in Quebec, but the minority in Canada) in a system in which the language divide traditionally cleaved the Canadian educational system. Notwithstanding the trend towards cuts in public financing and the increase in fees, HE remains however mainly public. Long-​lasting democratic traditions are reflected in a generally tolerant attitude towards dissent. In Italy, notwithstanding significant cuts in public budget devoted to universities, some increase in fees, and increasing selection with regard to access to some faculties, the university system remains mainly public. In terms of governance, the main governing bodies are still comprised mostly of academics, even with some centralization of power and involvement of external stakeholders. Precarization is growing, but to some degree checked by rules related to public employment.

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Curricula reforms, based on the 3+2 model, did not bring about adaptation to market needs and marketization was also limited due to scarce attention given to education by the business world. For a long time, late democratization was reflected in a weak recognition of representation of collective claims.

Student politics: universities and critical masses Protest campaigns and their outcomes are not only influenced by institutional characteristics but also by the tradition of collective action and its evolution. Student politics, as a set of organizational structures, action repertoires and master frames used by students to promote their claims, are historically rooted. The memory of previous student struggles influences new ones, by providing positive and negative experiences to reflect upon, as well as heroes and villains. Moreover, even though students are by nature transient actors, as they are bound to leave the university and move on to professional life, the organizational structures form residues, layering out from previous waves (della Porta, 2018a and 2018b). While certainly influenced by the HE systems, student politics has a degree of autonomy. As in other policy fields, we can distinguish, in different balances, traditions of protest politics and traditions of associational politics. While it is not argued that a specific balance is superior in terms of capacity of impact, it will be suggested that impactful campaigns account for specific resources and constraints of student politics. Neoliberal reforms have posed specific challenges to student politics, but they have also generated new claims and strategic adaptation. University students have traditionally engaged in contentious collective action. New generations of political leaders have emerged out of student movements, often associated with broader hopes of renewal and regeneration (Guzmán-​Concha, 2017a). The events of 1968 pointed toward the student body as a key actor committed to a varied programme of progressive change, which included issues such as the fight against bureaucracy, impersonality, oppression and imperialism (Lipset, 1976). The most common depiction of students as radical political actors stems from images of rallies and clashes with the police in the streets of Paris or Los Angeles in those years. While waves of student protests have since followed, with different degrees of impact, and students have been active in old and new social movements, it has only been since the early 2000s that scholars have singled out a new global wave of student protests targeting HE. Mobilizations against tuition fees, the marketization of HE and cuts in public spending in

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HE, as well as rising student debt, developed in Austria, Croatia and California in 2009, Ireland in 2010, England, Nigeria, Colombia and Chile in 2011, Quebec and South Korea in 2012, Spain and Italy in 2010, and South Africa in 2015. Protests have addressed the financing and autonomy of universities (with privatization and reliance on student fees); governance structures and managerialization; the precarization of labour conditions with the outsourcing of non-​academic staff; and the casualization of teachers and research (Cini and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017). In fact, it has been noted that ‘the dynamics of student protests vary significantly across space, but most share grievances associated with the international trend toward the marketisation of higher education’ (Klemenčič, 2014, p 398). Student movements have been interpreted in various ways. At the micro-​level, student activism has been linked to specific characteristics of youth, such as the availability of time and limited responsibilities (Allerbeck, 1972), but also to enthusiasm, idealism, and exposure to new ideas (Lipset and Altbach, 1967). Students have been considered as highly emotional rebels, unable to handle ambiguity, devoted to an ethic of absolute ends, irreverent, adventurist and radical (Lipset, 1976). In general, it has been noted that ‘the propensity to collective student political engagement lies in the characteristics of studentship as a life stage … unburdened by care for family or full-​time work, the “typical” student has the leisure of time and peace of mind to engage in political action if so inclined’ (Klemenčič, 2014, p 399). As youth movements, student movements reflect specific generational characteristics. Not by chance, 1968 came to represent a generation characterized by having come of age in a moment of affluence and reduced inequalities, with ‘post-​materialist’ values (Inglehart, 1977) and broad political interests (Downton and Wehr, 1997). Student activists were also said to be children of left-​wing fathers (even more than of left-​wing mothers), often intellectuals, with middle class (or even upper class) families, with permissive and critical education (Lipset, 1972. They also expressed the moral dissonance or frustration of a generation (DeFronzo, 1970), as youths criticized their parents for their unaccomplished promises of justice and progress (Giugni, 2004a). More recently, the so-​called millennials have been described as characterized by specific values: pluralist and tolerant, even if with low trust in political institutions (Brooks, 2016; della Porta, 2019a and 2019b). At the macro level, interpretations of student movements have pointed towards transformations in the broad system of interaction between the state and the market in which the university system is

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embedded. Protests have been seen to respond to historical changes (Martinelli and Cavalli, 1972). Democratic and socio-​economic trends  –​such as those that, in the 1960s, brought about a massive increase in the number of students –​have been mentioned as promoting protest, by spreading anti-​authoritarian values and claims for better infrastructure (Rootes, 1995). The student activists of the 1960s were opposing bureaucratized universities, experimenting with radical politics and developing anti-​capitalist and anti-​bourgeois discourses (Lipset, 1976). Student protests in the 1960s have also been interpreted as a re-​appropriation of the libertarian and democratic origins of the labour movement, against an impersonal and technocratic society –​a final class conflict of the old industrial society and a first of the new programmed one (Touraine, 1968). Others have seen the events of 1968 as revealing the contradictions of the transition from material to intellectual labour in advanced countries (Habermas, 1987) or as the unintended outcome of the ‘excess of living knowledge’ (Vercellone, 2007; Roggero, 2010), by which a new intellectual proletariat would acquire distinctive opportunities to destabilize capitalism. Student activism has been often related to the emergence of new middle classes and the expansion of the public sector. As Lilian Mathieu (2008) noted, 1968 was oriented not mainly toward cultural liberalization, but rather towards an anti-​capitalist and anti-​imperialist frame. Student protests have in fact often addressed the right to study as part of a broader claim for social justice. Moreover, recent protests against neoliberal policies have claimed education as a public good –​a common right –​and rallied against precarity in work and life (on the French movement, see Geay at al., 2008a). Student movements also have a strong political dimension, often reaching outside of the educational system. Calling for more democracy, students have confronted authoritarian regimes in countries such as Spain, Iran and Indonesia, pushing for the opening of political institutions and creating free spaces. Historically, they have contributed to claims for free education but also national sovereignty (Altbach, 1966b; van Aken, 1971; Cini, 2019a). Student political activism has resulted in democratization (either restoration or further consolidation) as well as the expansion of the welfare state. Over the course of the 20th century, and in successive waves, students participated in broader struggles along with other actors such as labour unions, women and peace movements, and left-​wing parties. At the intersection of quests for modernization and opposition to a post-​industrial social model, they also addressed –​in cases like the Italian one –​a blocked political system (Melucci, 1982, pp 101–​2). Student movements have often

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accompanied –​sometimes even started –​cycles of protests, as has been the case, for instance, in Italy, with protests in the late 1960s, or the so-​called ‘Movement of the Panther’, linked to the peace movement against the first Gulf war, or the ‘Movement of the Wave’, linked to the global justice movement (Tarrow, 1989; della Porta, 1996 and 2008; Piazza, 2014). In the US, the campus protests of the 1960s were linked with those against the war in Vietnam and for civil rights (Lipset, 1976). As Delgado and Ross (2016, p 144) noted, ‘[s]‌tudents are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society’. On many occasions, students quickly found allies in the political system and contributed to more general mobilizations (Rootes, 2013). At the meso-​level, the very characteristics of university life are said to facilitate mobilization through intense networking. In fact, ‘academic institutions as distinct intellectual and social environments provide space for students to freely and critically exchange and develop their ideas and articulate political aspirations. The multiple and overlapping social networks that constitute university environments are fertile grounds for the cultivation and organization of student interests’ (Klemenčič, 2014, p 399). Student unions, dormitories and classes are producers of networks, and union events and offices help networking by ‘drawing like-​minded actors to the same locations, at the same times, and thereby increasing the likelihood that they will meet and form ties’ (Crossley, 2003, p 45). As Loader et al. (2014, p 1) note, university campuses are important sites for the politicization of young people, as the milieu of student societies nurtures the habitus of the student citizen, offering spaces for ‘creative development and performance of the political self, affiliations to particular fields and access to cultural and social capital’. The university campus has historically favoured political and social engagement, by often representing a training ground for those who aspire to a political career but also exposing non-​political peoples to political ideas (Loader et al., 2014). It is in fact in this environment that cliques are formed around ideological positions (Ibrahim and Crossley, 2016). Universities have been seen as sites that favour the formation of radical subcultures (Roger, 2018). In the US, universities have formed distinct ‘academic opportunity structures’ for feminist subcultures, whereby activists have found different resources and opportunities to advance their claims within them. Reyes (2015) claims that Latino politics takes distinct forms depending on the specific academic context in which it is played out, leading to three divergent forms of political expression:  deliberative, divisive and

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contentious. In this sense, college institutions shape the resources and constraints available for Latino groups to craft their collegiate lives, which in turn influence how they bring ethnic politics to life. By embedding the goals, structure and history of groups into the structure of the university, Roger (2018) and Reyes (2015) suggest that certain institutional conditions associated with university life are likely to foster the creation and diffusion of specific ideologies within various subcultures and subgroups. These works take inspiration from Rojas (2006, 2010), who showed that the institutionalization of black studies was the response of universities to political turmoil and the mobilization of black communities, in and off campuses, since the 1960s. But they also draw on previous works (for example, Soule, 1997; Van Dyke, 1998b, 2003) that highlight the relevance of local opportunities and threats, previous histories of activism and resources. While these works examine cross-​campus variation of activisms in the US context, this work is concerned with cross-​national differences produced by student activism. In line with this political process approach to student politics, the authors claim that the various neoliberal transformations of HE have affected the life and conditions of university students, shaping their ways of doing politics. In particular, by changing the role, functions and governance of universities, the neoliberalization of HE systems change the ways students conceive of themselves, their position in society, and their relationship to politics. In neoliberal HE systems, students’ free and autonomous time is drastically reduced, as it has been observed in the Anglo-​Saxon university (Smeltzer and Hearn, 2015). Spaces and opportunities for aggregation are reduced while the student body becomes increasingly heterogeneous in terms of social background, age (with older students), country of origin (higher internationalization), conditions as paying versus non-​paying students, and full versus part-​time students. Furthermore, praising ‘security’ and ‘civility’, ‘university administrations concerned about the negative impact of visible political dissent on the university brand seem to be policing freedom of expression more than ever’ (Smeltzer and Hearn, 2015, p 353). These diversities within the student body would make it more difficult to develop a collective identity by uncovering shared grievances and common emotions (Klemenčič, 2014). These processes would drive students towards conformist behaviours, with an increasing push against politicization. This trend, however, would not necessarily go against student unions. The collective representation of interests would still have some value

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for the governance of HE institutions. In the neoliberal university, students are also stakeholders, with some resources (or capital) to invest in the power game, and student governments can supply relevant information, expertise and legitimization of policy outcomes (Klemenčič, 2014, p 399). However, student representative organizations –​including student unions, councils, parliaments, and governmental bodies –​vary broadly in terms of influence and structure, between neo-​corporatist and pluralist systems of student representation. Pluralist and corporatist institutions of representation have been contrasted. In fact, in the Nordic countries, with a strong and longstanding tradition of student unionism, expressed through automatic or mandatory union membership and ample material resources, national student associations are powerful, being also often linked through formal and informal networks to various government actors. Organizational structures for student politics are related to action strategies, which vary along a continuum between conventional and disruptive repertoires of collective action. Literature on social movements usually distinguishes between conventional and unconventional repertoires of action (della Porta and Diani, 2006). In colleges, conventional means of participation are usually predominant. Students formally engage in institutional university politics, through elected representatives or delegates, at various levels, and often on a regular or daily basis. Students also act by promoting and launching media campaigns, organizing public debates with different stakeholders, and taking part in meetings with public authorities, representatives and officials. But these activities are generally pursued by small groups, while rank-​and-​file students remain in passive roles. Occasionally, however, students rely on unconventional repertoires, that disrupt the daily life of communities and institutions, impeding the performance of their core functions (Piven, 2006). Blockades and the occupation of buildings, especially, opens spaces for converging, assuring the availability of ‘free time’ and ‘free space’ to think and fight (Lewis, 2013; Ross and Vinson, 2014). Furthermore, students can organize themselves autonomously, along lines that include ideology, common interests, causes and affinities. Students active in these groups can converge, or not, with traditional institutions of student government such as unions, associations and clubs. The degree to which these dimensions, the institutional and the non-​institutional, proximate or diverge, is an empirical question. The discussion outlined in the previous paragraphs can be summarized  –​ in an ideal fashion  –​ as having two major

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Table 1.3: Political impact of student politics –​variations in four regions Union politics: less institutionalized

Union politics: more institutionalized

Movement politics: coordinated

Chile

Quebec

Movement politics: fragmented

Italy

England

dimensions:  union politics and movement politics. While the first dimension refers to the institutions of student (self) government and the ways they relate to universities and the state; the second dimension describes the modes and strength of student activism. The four regions studied in this book exhibit different configurations of student politics (see Table 1.3), with various modes of interaction between protest politics and associational politics. Italy has a strong tradition of activism which brought about some effects in terms of student representation in institutional politics, but with low institutional recognition and material resources. The organizational structure is fragmented, with a significant portion of politicization taking place outside the institutions of student government, and national coordination is divided along ideological lines. Some allies emerged recently within the institutions of HE, especially between students and precarious researchers and, on some occasions, between students and representatives of the technical and administrative personnel. In England, there is a developed system of student representation, but with professionalized and depoliticized attitudes (McVitty, 2016). Furthermore, the dominant paradigm of governance considers students as consumers, and their unions as service providers, while political activities are discouraged (Hensby, 2016). This adds up to the infrequent tradition of student protests, which has set the English universities, with few exceptions, apart from continental Europe’s movement traditions. While Chile has a long tradition of student protests for student right to public education, the brutal dictatorship and the pacted transition, by tending to avoid a break with the past, meant a significant cessation of experience of political participation for the students (Guzman Valenzuela, 2016). Although student institutional representation remains weak, with low resources, student federations have managed to remain a legitimate arena for the various politico-​ideological groups that inhabit the student body. In Quebec, there is a high level of recognition of student bodies within institutional governance, with high coverage of the student constituency

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and significant material resources, which are at times invested in protest activities. In addition, there is a sustained history of politicized movement activities, with nine general strikes since the 1960s. These have contributed to frequent regeneration of activist traditions. In sum, the student campaigns studied in this book could mobilize different resources, relying upon different traditions and trajectories of participation and representation. The presence of protest resources or associational influences did not per se determine the success or failure of the campaigns, but certainly influenced their forms and trajectories.

The empirical research In this book, the authors analyze the relationship between student movements and policy change in the HE sector by singling out the processes and mechanisms that are related to changes in the various phases of policy making. To this end, four episodes of recent student activism occurring in diverse socio-​political contexts and institutional arrangements are studied and compared. The case selection has been theory driven. A  first choice was to select relevant protest campaigns. To be able to understand when they were impactful and when not, campaigns which had, by and large, a similar degree of disruptiveness were compared. In each country, one significant episode of recent student mobilization was identified: the Quebec Maple Spring (2012), the Chilean Winter (2011), the anti-​ tuition fees movement in England 2010, and the ‘Wave Movement’ in Italy (2008–​10). All these campaigns have occurred in recent years, in the post 2008 financial crisis context. While they differ in several characteristics, in all of them protesters have framed their claims in terms of the struggle against the marketization of universities. In the four cases, students targeted the government and framed their struggles in terms of specific claims (tuition fees, bills proposed by government authorities), so permitting us to assess the extent to which these demands were satisfied by political authorities and whether or not concessions were made. Moreover, in the four cases students put forward demands not properly addressed (or not addressed at all) by political parties, nor by other actors with access to political institutions. The causes of these protests are described and analyzed from a historical perspective, relating them to broader changes in the HE field. Secondly, acknowledging the existence of different models of HE, campaigns have been chosen, each with contrasting impact levels. At a general level, the HE fields of the four cases selected (England, Italy, Quebec and Chile) have tended to converge towards the policy

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recommendations of the neoliberal agenda. Yet, they differ significantly in the ways and depth of their transformation. While Chile and England have clearly embraced a market-​oriented model in their HE systems, Italy and Quebec are examples of systems where the role of the state has remained stronger in terms of provision, funding and regulation. In these latter cases, measures such as liberalization of the sector (allowing private institutions), multi-​stakeholder governance or an increased role of external agencies, which are emblematic of the neoliberal agenda, have not been fully implemented so far. These differences allow us to single out if and how impactful campaigns adapt to different contexts. For the empirical analysis, data from several sources has been triangulated. First, the research used in-​depth interviews with social movement activists in order to understand their strategies, frames and demands. In each country, about a dozen activists from these protests were interviewed, chosen within a theoretical sampling oriented to cover the different movement areas. Politicians and experts were also interviewed. By allowing the gathering of reflections of the interviewee, interviews constitute a fundamental tool for generating empirical knowledge through asking people to talk about certain themes (della Porta, 2014). In social movement studies, the relative scarcity of systematic collections of documents or reliable databases gives in-​depth interviews even more importance. Normally, in-​depth interviews are preferred, especially where the researcher aims for a detailed description; attention is paid to the process and interest taken in the interpretations interviewees give of the process itself. Not only do in-​depth interviews provide information about (and from) rank-​ and-​file activists, on which few other sources are available, but they are also of fundamental importance for the study of motives, beliefs and attitudes, as well as the identities and emotions of movement activists, since they put human agency at the core of analysis (Blee, 2013). In general, in-​depth interviews are best suited ‘for establishing the importance of agency or ideational factors, such as culture, norms, ethics, perceptions, learning, and cognition’ (Rathbun, 2008, p 291). In this research, in-​depth interviews have in fact been a rich and flexible instrument of data collection on movement and union politics. Additionally, the authors have analyzed written organizational documents. In this investigation a combination of discourse and frame analysis was used to understand the cognitive dimension of collective action (Lindekilde, 2014). Acknowledging the limitations of documents and in-​depth interviews, these have been triangulated  –​within a comparative historical analysis perspective  –​with existing research and statistical databases. As with other methods for empirical analysis,

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comparative historical analysis based on secondary sources is certainly not free from potential bias; knowledge is in fact extracted from a selective reading of an often-​partial source. Without aiming at strong testing of hypotheses, however, the use of secondary sources is certainly useful to contextualize and double check both protest event analysis and oral history accounts. The relevance of the moments of transition ensures the existence of abundant social science literature, also often allowing for triangulation of accounts by different authors. Indeed, following Ritter’s lead, we used all three categories of secondary sources:  historical accounts of a country, texts focusing specifically on the research topic, and texts dealing more specifically with factors considered as causally relevant (Ritter 2014, p 108). In sum, student leaders and activists have been interviewed, as well as university authorities, policy makers, and experts in HE policy in the four regions. The authors have read government white papers and bills, and reports and policy documents from political parties, think-​tanks and experts. Pamphlets, leaflets and documents produced by student organizations (both unions and politico-​ideological groups), many of which have been uploaded to the internet by these organizations, have been collected. And the authors have looked at local newspapers and other sources to observe the reactions to events such as student occupations or government announcements. This information has been qualitatively analyzed to uncover the political dynamic between challengers, authorities and the public and to identify the relations between possible causes and observed outcomes (or lack thereof). The information so collected has been used to construct an analytic narrative of the main interactions within the policy fields. The methods mentioned were used in different combination in the various parts of the research. First, the analysis of the various relationships between movement politics and policy change requires a perspective on the changes experienced by HE systems in recent decades. For each region, the route of the most recent reforms since their inception up to the present time have been described and explained –​in particular up to the most recent large episode of contention. This part of our study relies on secondary data and previous studies in each region. Students’ courses of action (or strategies) during the episodes of contention and their evolution over time are investigated using data from interviews, documents and newspapers. This allows the comparison of the four regions on features such as tactics, intensity of protest activities, and the construction of the perceived arena of adversaries and allies.

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To identify and describe the potential effects of student mobilizations in the policy process, we use primary data from interviews with students, policy makers and experts. In particular, interviews with policy makers and experts are aimed at identifying whether and how they perceived pressures from students, and what their reaction was to them. Moreover, to identify policy effects, we pay attention to the legislative process in parliaments, in particular to bills sent to parliament and bills proposed by MPs during and after the episode of contention; ministerial decrees or executive orders, during and after the episode of contention in each region; and potential changes in public expenditure in HE.

This volume Besides this introduction, the volume consists of a further five chapters, in which we illustrate and discuss the characteristics, the institutional context, the politics, and the impact of student protests in the four regions under investigation. In each chapter, we provide a brief introductory section, four empirical sections on the specific cases, and a concluding and summarizing section. Chapter  2 introduces the main characteristics of the student mobilizations in the four regions investigated. The aim is to emphasize the dynamic aspects of the authors’ framework at an early stage in the manuscript, as the protest campaigns and their interactions with the broader environment can be seen as a crucial component of the explanans. A description is offered of the trajectories of the mobilization campaigns, the organizational efforts of activists to mobilize their fellow students, the interactions between movement actions and governments, the reactions of political parties and university authorities, and the main student demands. Chapter 3 offers a historical overview of the trend of marketization affecting the HE sectors of Chile, England, Italy and Quebec in recent decades. In particular, the first part of the chapter illustrates the main transformations experienced by the HE sectors of the four regions, as triggered by several waves of reforms over the last few years. Bearing in mind the relational strategic framework of the book, this part also offers a description of the resistance to such reform waves. It is observed that in three of the regions studied, students reacted against proposed increases in tuition fees (Quebec, England) or their consequences (Chile), while in one case their protests were against cutbacks and governance reforms (Italy). The second and final part of the chapter explores in detail the most recent round of HE reforms

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in the four regions, which constituted the triggering factors of the student mobilizations under investigation. Chapter  4 addresses the different dimensions of student politics and their differences in the four cases. Student organizations differ significantly across countries. Previous research has singled out different models of student representation in decision-​making instances, as well as the different traditions of activism and politicization of the student body. We argue that these differences must be considered to understand the capacity of students to become significant and/​or influential political actors –​even if they rarely exert an influence in a continuous manner. The four cases studied in this book cover four configurations that result from the combinations of (fragmented or coordinated) movement politics and (more or less institutionalized) union politics. In this chapter, besides providing an historical narrative of student activism in the four regions, we explain how these four configurations have shaped the options for students to generalize a platform of demands and mobilize in each region. In Chapter 5, an assessment is made of the extent to which student mobilization campaigns achieved their goals. To explain why student mobilizations had more impact in Chile and Quebec and less in England and Italy, we look at the triangle formed by social movements, political parties and public opinion. The chapter offers an historical narrative of the impacts in each case. The concluding chapter summarizes the empirical results presented in the previous chapters from a comparative perspective by locating them within previous research on social movement outcomes. In light of the findings, we reflect on the impacts of neoliberal policies in contentious politics and point at the relevance of coalitions for a sustained impact of mobilization campaigns. But beyond the policy outcomes, the discussion also points toward the student movements’ effects in terms of empowerment, the triggering of spill-​over movements, and transformations in electoral and party politics. After summarizing the main contributions of the book, we reflect on the potential lines of inquiry that can be further pursued by scholars.

27

2

Student Campaigns Introduction Although differences between countries continue to be pronounced, national HE systems are becoming more alike in the sense of being more market-​oriented, even in countries with a strong welfare tradition. Fighting back against these processes, student protests arose unexpectedly –​to a certain extent –​in several countries across the five continents, with particularly intense waves in countries such as South Korea and India in Asia, Chile and Mexico in Latin America, Canada and the United States in North America, South Africa and Nigeria in Africa, and Italy, England, and Germany in Europe. Thus, recent years have witnessed the rise and proliferation of student mobilizations as a collective response to the expansion of neoliberal capitalism and its policies in the field of HE (Cini and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017; Cini, 2019b). Historically, students constituted the fundamental segment of various political movements, ranging from the nationalist European movements in the 19th century, to the environmental, urban, anticolonial, and peace movements in the second half of the 20th century, until the more recent mobilizations associated with the ‘Arab Spring’ and the ‘Occupy’ movements. Students have often played a clear political role in modern society (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015). However, it is with the 1968 wave of global contestation that the collective power of students fully materialized in HE institutions (HEIs) in the form of activism. The 1968 protests marked the era of the politicization of the student condition, as such (Altbach, 1991). While university systems in many parts of the world had expanded significantly over the 1960s, taking in larger and more diverse student bodies, university policies and practices remained elitist and traditionalist. Contesting the authoritarian and hierarchical way in

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which universities were organized and governed, student protesters around the world demanded a more democratic and accessible HE, more rights and freedom on campus, greater involvement in university governance, and a more coherent and relevant curriculum. Through such mobilizations, students aimed also at putting forward an alternative conception of society based on values of equality, solidarity and social justice (Breines, 1989). The greatest impacts of 1968 mobilizations were a general democratization of university institutions, with more student involvement in governing bodies, the development of new curriculum areas, and greater attention paid to ensuring student rights and freedom on campus (Cockburn and Blackburn, 1969). From then onwards, student politics has played a central function in HE, marked by the expansion and further institutionalization of student unions and governments, established to formally represent the student body before various organs, both locally and nationally. Over the last three decades of the 20th century, the collective power of students has thus mostly materialized through representative and institutional activities (see Klemenčič, 2014). Only sporadically have students adopted protest as a means of influence. Furthermore, in several HE systems student unions have progressively been transformed into service providers, managing and carrying out commercial activities on campus (such as gadget shops, clubs, canteens, and gyms) to increase their financial autonomy from HEIs and national parties and unions (Brooks et al., 2015a). At the turn of the 2000s, following a marketization trend that can be perceived in several countries, universities and governments considered students as individual consumers, or targets of top-​down government policies. This may explain why the global wave of student protests in the 2010s has attracted a significant scholarly and political interest. Opposing key neoliberal reforms of HE, the student protesters constituted expressions of a countertendency. Facing the process of marketization, these protesters started to mobilize to fight back against its implementation. Their main demands were an end to the introduction (or increase) of student fees and the return to free education in a publicly funded system (Brooks, 2016). Yet, these mobilizations have also shown important differences in terms of both protest organizing and institutional/​ political reaction. In this respect, the student mobilizations in Chile, England, Italy and Quebec represent four exemplary cases of this variety. In each region, we undertake an in-​depth study of one significant episode of contention in which students addressed claims to the state. In England, the trigger for the protest was a 2010 law allowing individual universities to triple

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their tuition fees, while in Italy it was a financial measure cutting public funding for HE in 2008, followed by a new public management reform of university governance in 2010. In Chile in 2011, students reacted against rising levels of indebtedness caused by a high-​interest loan programme, Programa de Credito con Aval del Estado (CAE) involving commercial banks, opposed the high price of tuition, and protested low state involvement in education. In Quebec, student unions went on strike in 2012 against the proposal by the governing Parti Libéral du Québec (PLQ) for a 75 per cent increase in tuition fees, from C$2,168 per year in 2011 to C$3,793 by 2017. This chapter introduces the main characteristics of the student campaigns in the four regions investigated. For each case the authors illustrate the trajectory and timeline of the campaign, identifying the rise, peak, and decline of the mobilizations; the political strategies adopted by the student organizations to affect the nationwide policy process, as well as their main demands and goals; and the interactions between the student protesters and the governments, along with the reactions of political parties (potential allies and opponents) and university authorities.

The Chilean Winter of 2011 The student protests of 2011 represent the largest and most significant episode of social unrest in Chile since the restoration of democracy in 1990. Of the four episodes of contention studied in this book, the Chilean episode clearly has the largest protests. While the magnitude and duration of the Chilean Winter were unprecedented, there were previous episodes of intense youth activism. The most notable example is the so-​called Penguin Revolution of 2006, which anticipated the activist commitment and radicalism witnessed among students in 2011. However, both high school and college students usually take to the streets during the early months of the academic year to protest on issues related to the lack of scholarships and the national policy of student financial assistance. At the beginning of 2011, a delay in the allocation of maintenance and food scholarships affected a significant number of beneficiaries in various universities. As explained by one of the leaders of the University of Chile Student Federation (FECH) at the time, “this was a problem because around 20,000 students didn’t have money to pay their rents or buy lunch … so there were some skirmishes by the end of March and April around this issue … As student leader you are not allowed to not to [sic] give a response to the problem of another student that didn’t receive his scholarship.”

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(CHI 1) In April, students from private universities rallied against the attempt of a private investment company (grupo Norte Sur) to purchase a part of the Universidad Central de Chile (UCEN). Camila Vallejo, FECH president at the time, declared to the online newspaper EMOL (2011) that ‘these are fundamental principles that we are defending now, which have been violated. We are generating unity in the student movement to challenge this model that affects us all’. By then, students had been on strike for a number of weeks and had occupied schools and administration offices. UCEN was at that time a private university that was self-​governed by its academics1. For the students, the sale of the university meant its transformation into a sort of for-​profit college, like most private universities (despite this being prohibited by law), jeopardizing its particular mode of governance. In April, the Confederation of Chilean Students (CONFECH) announced a national day of protest to be held on 12 May. The idea was to create momentum for the yearly presidential address to the parliament of 21 May, when the president of the republic announces the government’s legislative initiatives. The protest was considered a success, as some 15,000 marched in Santiago under the slogan ‘there is no future without quality public education’ (Vera, 2011). To the traditional demands related to insufficient and poorly delivered scholarships and loans, CONFECH added a number of more complex issues. These included (a) an increase of public spending in education, including supplementary funds for public and state universities, a restructuring of the system of loans and scholarships that would focus on the three poorest quintiles, and the repeal of the indirect fiscal contribution (aporte fiscal indirecto [AFI]); (b) a reform of the admission system inspired by ideas of equality, including alternative mechanisms to the University Selection Test (PSU), which was considered an instrument that reproduced socio-​economic differences; and (c) the democratization of university governance, including the repeal of the dispositions of the DFL2 that impeded the participation of students in governance. More than 20,000 gathered outside parliament on the 21 May. Camila Vallejo, CONFECH’s spokesperson at that time, announced new rallies and threatened an indefinite strike if the government did not meet their demands. However, President Sebastián Piñera did not respond to their requests (Urra, 2012). At the beginning of June, secondary students joined in the movement, with the memories of the 2006 Penguin Revolution as a background (Donoso, 2013). This was a series of protests staged by

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secondary students, which lasted for about two months, demanding free public transport passes, the abolition of the Organic Constitutional Act of Teaching and the end of the municipalization of education (both approved during the dictatorship). The expansion of the protests to schools was a sign of escalation, but also made the demands of the movement more complex and variegated. Secondary students demanded free education, the proscription of for-​profit schools, and greater public investments to improve the public school system. On 9 June, 26 schools were occupied by pupils, and by the end of July some 140 schools were occupied in Santiago alone (Guzmán-​Concha, 2015). In June most federations in public universities went on indefinite strike and many faculties and institutes had their buildings occupied. At this moment the mobilizations reached a high point (Durán, 2012). In the marches on 16 and 30 June over 100,000 people demonstrated in Santiago and massive rallies were held in all the major cities. The students were joined in these rallies by the main national labour union, Workers’ United Center of Chile (CUT), public sector workers, MPs from opposition parties, chancellors and faculty members of the main public universities, and even well-​known television personalities. These events contradicted the expectations of the government that the movement would fade away after a few demonstrations –​like previous student protests had done until then. It was already evident that these were the largest demonstrations since 1990. The education secretary accused student federations of being an ‘ideologized minority’ and that students ‘ha[d]‌gone too far’. Public opinion surveys showed that presidential and government approval were hit by a campaign that communicated successfully and persuaded vast sectors in society. Proposals such as the prohibition of for-​profit institutions, the unfairness of the high levels of tuition, and the rejection of the very idea of charging tuition for education were understood and supported by broad sectors of society. Students were endorsed by celebrities, sports persons, religious leaders, vice chancellors and politicians from parties of the centre and the left of the spectrum, which strengthened their position and the legitimacy of their demands. Acts of solidarity with students multiplied as the response of Piñera and his ministers did not leave room for negotiations. Leaders of the movement at the time recognize that the stubbornness of the government in this early stage helped to expand the protests. Federations were left with no other option than to continue and intensify their campaigns. As one of the leaders of the movement stated:

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‘if the government had avoided its hard ideological basis, it could have delivered responses that might have somehow appeased the protesters, maybe not us [those leading the CONFECH] because we were a group more ideologized and opposed to right-​wing ideas, but maybe with a bold reply they could have created problems for us. But they didn’t. It is difficult to say it now, but such a response could have prevented the movement from escalating.’ (CHI 2) As the conflict continued, the government adopted a repressive strategy oriented to exhaust the students by radicalizing some fringes of the movement, which would eventually affect the legitimacy of their position (Durán, 2012). This occurred when Mr Piñera and his government faced historic lows in approval and the President was forced to dismiss his Secretary of Education in mid-​July. Joaquín Lavín was removed from Education amidst accusations of a conflict of interest; he admitted having made a profit after liquidating his equity investments in a private university, Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD). The new Secretary of Education Felipe Bulnes declared that students were right in claiming reforms, but demanded the termination of school occupations and of the strike. The movement received instead approval rates above 70 per cent with regard to public opinion according to renowned pollster Adimark (Guzmán-​Concha, 2015). In late July, and responding to a request from CONFECH, the chairs of the four parties of the Concertación cancelled an appointment with the President in the presidential palace. This request aimed at preserving CONFECH’s role as a main interlocutor, avoiding the opening of parallel negotiations (Guzmán-​Concha, 2012). In turn, the government announced a new set of reforms on 1 August. While some measures were aligned with the demands of the movement (such as the recentralization of public schools in the Education Ministry, abolishing the radical decentralization initiated by the dictatorship that placed municipalities in charge of public schools), students rejected the whole document as it did not address their core claims. Spontaneous protests took place around some campuses that same evening. Student organizers feared that after two intense months of protests, the national day of protest on 4 August would show that, finally, the movement’s momentum was gone. The governor of Santiago –​ appointed by the President –​had already announced that he would not authorize further demonstrations. The demonstration was then met by fierce repression; anti-​r iot police impeded students from gathering in Plaza Italia, the usual meeting point of most demonstrations, from the

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early hours of the morning. Students were picked up by police agents in indiscriminate arrests on their way to Plaza Italia. Police also used tear gas and water cannons to achieve their objective. As the day progressed, downtown Santiago became a site of clashes between the protestors and the police. There were between 900 and 1,200 demonstrators arrested nationwide, and 90 police officers wounded that day. Repression was so aggressive and unexpected that the student federations, using mainly social networks (Twitter and Facebook), called for a popular protest to take place that same evening to denounce the violence used against them. Recovering a piece of the protest repertory that had remained in the memory of protest movements, students called for a cacerolazo, that is, the banging of cooking pans, used first against Allende in the 1970s, but later against Pinochet in the 1980s. In a cacerolazo protesters can stay at home and bang pots from their backyards or balconies, and as during the dictatorship this form of protest was very convenient, ensuring low risks and high impact. Noise was spread all over the city. That evening the cacerolazo was the way in which many people expressed their outrage with the ways President Piñera was handling the education problem; citizens in several neighbourhoods –​especially middle-​class areas with a high student population –​banged pans in the streets, parks, or on their balconies (Guzmán-​Concha, 2012). Indeed, ‘cacelorazo’ was the world’s trending topic on Twitter that night and the protest was widely covered in the media. Thus, the government strategy backfired and resulted in strengthening students’ morale and determination. Numerous expressions of solidarity, widespread indignation and a recognition in public opinion that the government had gone too far that time, converged to trigger a revitalization of the movement. Although the protest continued intensively, after several months students started to show some signs of fatigue. For one of the leaders of CONFECH ‘the government gave up and assumed the movement was sunk cost and said ‘we are going to be inflexible, we are not going to move one millimeter’ … and Piñera was on TV in September saying that there were 90,000 students at risk of losing the academic year, so since that moment the pressure was no longer on them but on us. Since a movement is about putting pressure on someone and if you are not putting pressure on anyone anymore the mobilizations don’t make sense. But explaining this was a catharsis, it was super complicated.’ (CHI 2)

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According to the leader of one of the main groups within FECH, the decline in the mobilizations, combined with the acknowledgment that the government was not going to make concessions, was a challenge. According to the leader: ‘we thought that the first thing was not giving up the main demands, not to say that this is something that doesn’t have a solution and by no means we were going to say that we had an agreement with the government, because that agreement was not possible, and the only possible agreement was counterproductive for us. But it was important to see some concessions, progresses on some issues, not great progresses, but something to offer to our people in the faculties, to give them reasons to keep mobilized, don’t let them get frustrated. Why? Because they are young and after months mobilized without any concession and any victory, frustration can deactivate whole generations. In a certain moment we agreed with Camila and one sector of la Jota on that … And Giorgio and his people were in the same stance, of not burning all your bridges, of thinking of a 2012 with mobilizations, of not giving up our main demands, and FEUC [Students’ Federation of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile] adopted that approach.’ (CHI 1) The demonstration of Sunday 21 August was purposefully designed to confront the ‘bad’ press coverage of the movement. Student federations believed that the media over-​emphasized the acts of violence perpetrated by tiny groups of protestors (usually after every demonstration), highlighting the troubles caused by protests to ordinary citizens, car drivers and small shops, especially in the downtown areas of large cities. They also believed that this was a strategy to attack the movement, by pitting protesters against citizens. Hence, the demonstration was conceived as a family day with music concerts performed by pop singers and bands. The weather complemented the purposes of the organizers, as the sun shone and warmed the air during a cold winter Sunday in Santiago. According to the organizers, half a million attended the event in the O’Higgins Park, in the city centre. The attempts of the government to divide the movement between the good guys (the peaceful demonstrators) and the bad guys (the violent fringes that vandalized public equipment and harassed the police) did not work. Thus, “there was a huge majority that said that we couldn’t keep rallying as before because we were exhausted, so let’s demonstrate

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our strength and transversality, and that’s why that demo was so massive … all the left attended, there were a lot of families, a lot of communists [and] left socialists.” (CHI 1) During the struggle networking intensified. The field of student politics is heterogeneous, with various political groups competing –​ sometimes sharply –​for leadership. Internal diversity has jeopardized the emergence of larger coalitions in the past. Piñera’s administration always expected that the spiral of escalation would debilitate the movement, with some groups opening up to negotiations and others confronting the government at all costs. Its efforts were to trigger and intensify internal divisions among protestors. The plan failed however as the main federations and the political groups that controlled them at the time acted to prevent this scenario. Over the duration of the conflict in 2011, they appeared acting in a choral manner, very coordinated in their messages and with little public disagreement over how to deal with the government. The relations between the main public leaders of CONFECH helped in keeping this image of unity, despite the tensions within the movement. According to one of the authors’ interviewees: ‘we didn’t arrive [at] political agreements but we had some agreement [as to] how to deal with the media in our role as spokespersons. We had very open conversations about how negative … the most radicalized positions from both sides [were] … these were very frank talks, but as I say they were talks between persons, not between groups, those didn’t work. … for example, we would talk in the coach back to Santiago after the CONFECH meetings, after the student councils … these talks were not formally determinant in specific decisions, but I believe that they were important in decreasing internal hostility, I believe that we shared this concern that it was counterproductive that our internal quarrels were known by the public.’ (CHI 1) To be sure, some campuses underwent a process of radicalization. In some universities there was discontent with the leadership of their federations and CONFECH. This process was facilitated by the lack of institutionalization of federations themselves (lack of proper student councils and weak student centres) in several universities. In FEUSACH (Student Federation, University of Santiago), for example, there was growing discontent with the federation leadership (controlled by the communists), which grew over time, leading to episodes of open

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confrontation and even violence. Mistrust of the federation’s president grew, so the student council appointed observers who would supervise his interventions in CONFECH meetings. This, in turn, made the debates in CONFECH meetings more difficult. There were long discussions over single words, periods or commas. According to a member of one of the various left-​wing groups that emerged in this university during the strike, some students became very angry with the federation. She remembers one incident: ‘one day they were determined to raze the federation offices … and we noticed that we had reached such level of tensions, that the level of hate was exacerbated, we realized that the federation was isolated and that the student council was close to be[ing] torn apart. So, we decided to meet with other student centres and decided that we would call the councils [using a provision in the federation statute]. … we said we are not interested in [the extreme left] taking power via a coup d’état.’ (CHI 4) This student and the group to which she belonged considered that the most important goal was to defend the very existence of the federation. ‘[W]‌e remembered what happened in the Pedagógico [Metropolitan University of Education Sciences, Santiago], when the federation broke up and they stayed without [a] federation for ten years; we don’t like this federation but we don’t want to fall into anarchy, so we re-​organized the student council and kept working in that way … we didn’t like [the] anarchy that took over other federations, which represented the incapacity to debate in the same space.’ (CHI 4) In the assemblies, some groups voiced their criticism against those politico-​ideological groups that were leading the main federations and CONFECH, namely the Communist Youth, the Nueva Acción Universitaria (NAU; a centre-​left group based exclusively in the Pontifical Catholic University of Santiago, PUC), and Autonomous Left. This dynamic was facilitated by the fact that none of the large groups controlled many federations in 2011. In CONFECH, the left was relatively weak and the number of federations controlled by independents was significant (Mella Polanco, 2016). But the larger groups of the left acted to prevent ruptures wherever these could be

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avoided. The communists, NAU and the Autonomous Left, but also other discontented groups and independents, were very aware of the need to preserve coherence and unity, even formalizing agreements to avoid sectarian coups. By the end of August, the conflict with the government evolved very rapidly into a stalemate. Student leaders realized that any substantive gain would be very complicated, if not impossible in such a situation, and they were not able to present minor gains as victories, as their constituencies would not have allowed them to make such a move. More generally, the protests had revealed that no institutional mechanism was available to resolve internal disputes. Thus, already in August student leaders proposed a popular referendum and questioned the 1980 Constitution (Guzmán-​Concha, 2012) which, written by the military and approved under their rule, did not provide for direct democracy procedures (though municipalities could hold referendums on local issues). After the short break related to the commemoration of the national day (on 18 September), it was evident that the mobilizations had entered a phase of retreat. Fewer and fewer people participated in the occupations of schools and campuses, and students in the departments and faculties in strike started to worry about the consequences of such a prolonged stoppage of academic activities for their studies. Would they forfeit the year? One more year paying tuition, increasing the debt, postponing graduation? The government threatened the unilateral cancellation of the academic year and the underfunding of schools whose budgets depended upon students’ attendance. Thus, university authorities, municipalities (in charge of public schools), principals and teachers put pressure on student councils to end the strike. Some universities, in agreement with their students, arrived at specific arrangements that allowed classes to restart but provided authorized suspensions to engage in national days of protest. Student centres in some schools or faculties held referendums over the interruption of the strike. The CONFECH leaders knew that they had to find a way to withdraw the strike without giving an impression of defeat. The question was how and when. Eventually the mobilizations would dwindle in a non-​organized manner, at different paces depending on the campuses. The low ebb did not however prevent the leaders from further attempts to challenge the government’s reputation. One of the key figures of CONFECH explained that they decided to take advantage of the invitation sent by a Chilean academic working in France to participate in a number of public events in Paris, Brussels and other

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European cities. The mobilizations were fading at that time, and the European tour represented an opportunity “to throw shit on the government … to further damage the government” (CHI 1). In sum, in a few months, specific and localized conflicts relating to the allocation of scholarships and the governance of a private university, escalated to a generalized questioning of the education system, which then became a major criticism of the political system. Student struggles thus highlighted the limitations of the democratic system which emerged out of the transition in the late 1980s.

The 2010 student protest campaign in England At first sight, the relatively high level of antagonism exhibited by the student mobilization of 2010 appears to be surprising, marking an explicit discontinuity with the moderate protest culture of British students, unable until that moment to challenge the long-​term process of HE marketization (Byrne, 1997). Even in the years of the global wave of student protests of the 1960s, English students showed a low capacity for disruption, putting forward very moderate political demands and goals (see Chapter 4 for a more grounded historical explanation of this). Yet, in the 2010 student campaign, several factors, both contextual and conjunctural, contributed to change these dynamics. In October 2010, the centre-​r ight coalition government announced the adoption of a set of neoliberal measures in the field of HE, comprising cuts in public funding for the humanities departments, the tripling of tuition fees, and the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) (see Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion). In response to this, from the second half of October in many universities all over the UK, especially the 19 colleges forming the University of London (UL), a first wave of mobilizations started to take shape, made up of student assemblies, public rallies, marches on campus and teach-​ ins. No protest events fell beyond the spatial-​political ‘perimeter’ of the university campuses until the first national demonstration against the coalition government, which the National Union of Students (NUS) called for on 10 November. The periodization of the 2010 campaign can be divided into three political phases identified as the rise, peak, and decline of the mobilization, respectively. October 2010, marking the upsurge of the mobilization after the publication of the Browne review, was the period of organization and planning of the campaign mainly carried out at campus level. November-​December 2010 constituted the period of the protest peak, identified by the occurrence of all the national protest

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events and by the high level of confrontation with the government in the media and on the streets. Finally, January-​March 2011 represented the period of the decline of the mobilization, exemplified by the return to ‘local’ politics (at campus level) and by a further fragmentation of the protest field. The 10 November 2010 demonstration, in which more than fifty thousand students came to London from all over the country, was a great political success, officially determining the entry of a new subjectivity, the student movement, into the British political arena of the time. Opposing the austerity measures and, more generally, the neoliberal policies, the student movement was indeed the first serious political challenge to the British government since the time of the economic crisis in 2008. The most significant event of the 10 November demonstration was the occupation of the Conservative Party headquarters in Millbank, carried out by more than two hundred students from the most radical protest groups. These activists, detaching from the authorized route of the demonstration, attacked the Conservative Party HQ, broke windows, caused some injuries, and clashed with the police, who, taken by surprise, did not manage to block them. Outside of the building more than two thousand students besieged the HQ in a display of approval for the action. This occupation represented a true watershed for the student movement of 2010, marking out and determining its successive practices of action, its agenda, and ultimately its political development. Indeed, the occupation of Millbank was the cause of the most significant political split in the movement, the one between the NUS and the rest of the students taking part in the mobilization. Shortly after the event, the NUS leadership in fact distanced itself from the occupation by condemning the violence and by defining the group who had executed the action as a ‘minority of idiots’.2 The immediate political condemnation of the occupation by the NUS produced, though, an unexpected and negative reaction among most of the students, who, despite not having taken part in it, had approved of the action, and who thus soon realized to what extent the NUS leadership was more interested in safeguarding its public image as a respectable political interlocutor for the government than in representing the voice of students. As Michael Chessum, then an activist at University College London (UCL), declared in an interview to The Guardian (Vasagar and Taylor, 12 November): ‘We went off script, the script that said a few thousand people would turn up, complain a bit and go home and the cuts would go through pretty much as planned. That has changed. Now students really feel they can stop this’. The then

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President of the University London Union (ULU), Claire Solomon, was even clearer in this respect, when stating in the same newspaper that: ‘We reject any attempt to characterize the Millbank protest as small, “extremist” or unrepresentative of our movement. We celebrate the fact that thousands of students were willing to send a message to the Tories that we will fight to win’.3 All fifteen students we interviewed confirmed this interpretation. Among them, the then vice-​president of the NUS confided to us that “after Aaron Porter’s statement of condemnation, the NUS no longer was considered part of the movement, and so, after that day, many of us continued to take part in the mobilization only as individuals and no longer as an organization.” (EN 7) All the student activists we interviewed admitted that at the time they fully approved of the occupation of the Tory HQ. In other words, they denied that it was a violent act, and, above all, they clearly deplored the ‘bureaucratic and spineless behaviour’ of the leader of the NUS. A student at her first political experience in 2010 and student representative at Sussex University in 2014, explained to us when recalling her personal experience of 10 November 2010 in London: “I was there and the media representation was pretty different from the reality. Smashing a window is not violence for me. Violence is only against the people.” (EN 8) The demonstration of 10 November thus constituted the chief catalyst for the emergence of a national student movement which, forged through that event, increased its political force and numerical strength, becoming the first among UK social movements to be about a subject capable of explicitly contesting neoliberal policies after about a decade of total silence on these issues. Yet, the events of 10 November had an even more paradoxical effect within the student movement, which, if from that moment on entered the national public sphere as a legitimate actor, at the same time, and precisely due to such events, lost the only national organizational structure upon which it could have relied to run a national protest campaign: the NUS. This might explain why, in the time between the demonstration of 10 November and the parliamentary approval of the law providing for the increase of tuition fees (on 9 December), only three other national protest events took place in London, called for by two newly formed quasi-​national networks of activists, the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) and the Education Activist Network (EAN). As effectively reported by an activist at UCL: ‘These organizations were the ones organizing the most militant and activist events and politics. The split with NUS

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occurred when Aaron Porter issued a statement against the Millbank occupation after the demo. When he condemned the protest, he was out of step [with] the majority feeling of the movement. And NUS became insulated and at the margins of the movement. And the protests started to be led by the most radical leftist organizations.’ (EN 1) While NCAFC–​formed on 6 February 2010 after a conference at UCL, where a few hundred students gathered to launch a national organization–​was mostly centred on student issues and needs, EAN, created only three weeks after NCAFC, and following a near-​identical formation process, embraced in its ranks not only students, but also teachers and union members. By contrast, NCAFC brought together different political tendencies within the student movement (both anarchists and Trotskyists), but with no base in the trade unions. As Mark Bergfeld, one of the founders of EAN, pointed out in an interview released to The Guardian: ‘the main difference is that our campaign is one of students and staff, and workers in the real sense -​we have real trade union support’.4 Yet, both NCAFC and EAN exhibited a Trotskyist ideological orientation and were politically affiliated to two national Trotskyist parties, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) and the Socialist Worker Party (SWP). While the AWL was more ‘movementist’ and encompassed a looser network of militants, the SWP, larger in terms of size, adhered to a more rigorous Leninist conception of party. These characteristics mirrored those of their university-​based ‘front organizations,’ NCAFC and EAN. NCAFC encompassed students with different political orientations, opposing the idea of creating a formalized national organization and instead taking decisions by consensus, based on the principle of horizontality. By contrast, EAN embodied a more homogenous and rigid political orientation, exhibiting a more formalized organizational structure, and taking decisions through a more hierarchical decision-​making process. After the defection of NUS, NCAFC and EAN tried thus to fill the political void in the organization of the protest campaign by calling for national demonstrations on 24 and 30 November, and 9 December. In other words, the 2010 student mobilizations were made possible by the activation of informal and radical networks of student activists and militants. On 24 November, 130,000 school and university students walked out of classes and took over the streets of London and several other cities across the UK. On 30 November, more than 30,000 students marched through London in what the BBC described as a ‘cat

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and mouse chase’ between protesters and the police; several groups of students tried to reach Parliament from different directions, avoiding some attempts by the police to cordon them off in small and closed areas of the City. By this point over 38 universities had been occupied, and within another week over a dozen further universities would be occupied. On 9 December, the day of the parliamentary discussion of the bill, about 35,000 students from around the country stormed Parliament Square and tried to besiege Parliament to impede the vote on the rise in tuition fees; about 48 students were injured in clashes with the police and 39 other students were arrested after the demonstration. Besides the opposition to the increase in tuition fees, cuts in public funding, and abolition of EMAs, most of the student activists and the main student organizations agreed upon two main goals: the return to a system based on free education and the democratization of the university governing bodies. All the student activists we interviewed confirmed this convergence.5 One of the occupiers in 2010 and student education officer for the student union at UCL in 2011/​ 2012 confirmed that at UCL the students supported a system of free education self-​governed by the people who worked in and lived daily at the university. In his words, “we are for free education. Academics should, then, govern the university through the departments. Students and academics should be together organized at the departmental level with a sort of federated university. You do not need the managers.” (EN 2)  In the same vein, a student activist from the University of Birmingham made clear how the real objectives of the 2010 protests were to oppose the process of university managerialization and support the democratization of the governing bodies: ‘Universities are run by professional managers who are not even attached to the university life, they have a neoliberal view of the university for a business purpose. We wanted a different way of governing our universities where students [and] staff together could decide all the policies of our university. The spirit of the protest was to democratize the university and this spirit is still present in the protests of today.’ (EN 3) A student activist at the University of Sussex put it more bluntly by arguing that the university “should be public, and we should not pay for it. Universities should also be autonomous. The academic community must govern itself.” (EN 4) More notably, in challenging the coalition government’s conception of students as ‘consumers’ (McGettigan,

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2013), the student protesters brought forward an alternative idea of ‘student empowerment’ across all the university occupations. This understanding of the occupation as a ‘constituent moment’ aimed at the enforcement of alternative university norms was explicit among all the student activists who took part in the university occupations of 2010 who we interviewed. For instance, an interviewee, at the time a student occupier at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), remarked that in the occupation they “wanted also to create an alternative space to show that education could be something different from casualization, marketization, and so on” (EN 5). For this to happen, one of the main tasks was to organize events and activities “where you can have lectures from sympathetic academics, events, [and] conferences” (EN 2). What he was implicitly referring to here was a different way of experiencing university life. In sum, this section illustrated the mobilization capacity, the main demands, and political strategies that English students adopted in their protest campaign in 2010. More notably, the English organizational field of students of 2010, consisting of radical and informal student groups, was characterized as being highly politically fragmented and organizationally loose. Although these groups expressed firm and radical views on how English HE had to be reformed, their organizational weakness and competing attitude prevented them from being perceived as credible political actors capable of both creating a national system of alliance and negotiating with the British government.

The Maple Spring in Quebec In Quebec we observe a strong tradition of student unionism, which developed alongside the expansion of the university system in the province over the 1960s and 1970s. Students organize in nationwide associations which distinguish themselves for their varying disposition to engage in lobbying or protest/​confrontation, as well as for their proximity to the Parti Quebecois (PQ). In the context of our comparison, the 2012 protests in Quebec constitute an episode of significant contention triggered by growing pressures to raise tuition fees, materialized in a governmental plan announced in 2011. Over history, student associations have engaged in several significant strikes; all of them have been related to tuition and scholarships. This indeed was the case of the strikes of 1968, 1974, 1978, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1996 and 2005. The 2012 strike was the response of the student associations to the announcement by the governing party, PLQ, of a 75 per cent increase

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in tuition fees, from C$2,168 per year in 2011 to C$3,793 by 2017. The symbol adopted by the campaigners was the carré rouge, that is, the ‘carrément dans le rouge’6 which had already been used by the group Quebec Without Poverty (Collectif pour un Québec sans pauvreté) in 2004 and for the Coalition de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante élargie (CASSÉÉ), the umbrella coalition formed by the Association for a Student Syndical Solidarity (ASSÉ) in 2005 (Lemay and Laperrière, 2013). Most accounts converge in highlighting the importance of the preparation stage for the success of the protest campaign (Poirier St-​ Pierre and Éthier, 2013; Ancelovici and Dupuis-​Déri, 2014; Savard and Cyr, 2014; Katz, 2015). The minister of education Michelle Courchesne had already announced the intentions of the government in February 2010, when he spoke about a ‘growing consensus’ on the need to raise tuition fees (Katz, 2015). This announcement raised the alarm in the ASSÉ. It had been barely three years since the last increase of tuition fees (a C$500, five-​year increase), which student associations had unsuccessfully resisted. The ASSÉ started planning a campaign to oppose the hikes, by taking into consideration the failure to organize a general strike to oppose them in 2007 and the limited gains from the 2005 general strike. Activists organized in ASSÉ drew two conclusions: ‘first, for success to be achieved a unified movement was needed, and, second, broader alliances would have to be organized. In order to facilitate the collaboration of smaller local student associations, the main organization reorganized itself as a coalition’ (Solty, 2012). The Coalition large de l’ASSÉ (CLASSE) was formed in December 2011, with an open invitation to join to all general and vocational colleges (CEGEPs) and university associations, irrespective of their affiliation to the provincial associations. The conditions to join included a strike mandate voted for by an assembly, the centrality of the general assembly and the support for the long-​term goal of free education. The coalition enabled the ASSÉ to increase its membership to some 100,000 persons at the peak of the strike (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013, p 91), thus becoming the engine of the 2012 mobilization (Katz, 2015). According to ASSÉ’s student organizers, in 2010 the left was divided in its historic strongholds at the L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), while assemblies in local student associations struggled to achieved the quorums of attendance. In this context, the goal was to rebuild the associations which were supposed to play key roles in a strike (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013), through actions of old style activism:  printing and distribution of pamphlets in cafeterias, public debates, and talks with students. As explained by former ASSÉ

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press attaché Renoud Poirier St-​Pierre and former executive council member Philippe Éthier, the Charest administration made a great contribution to reactivating the spirit of mobilization among the student base. The announcement of hikes in fees was part of a larger plan of the Charest administration that included increases in the sales tax (TVQ), electricity rates (Hydro-​Quebec) and a new flat healthcare tax of C$200, plus day care charges and school taxes. The PLQ agenda moved toward a flat fee on all public services, as recommended by the Comité Consultatif su l’Economie et les Finances Publiques in 2009. The PLQ was determined to change the so-​called ‘culture of free public services’ and ‘immobility’ of Quebec society, thus moving away a step further from the état-​providence created by the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s (Ancelovici and Dupuis-​Déri, 2014; Katz, 2015). The neoliberal agenda of the PLQ attempted a ‘cultural revolution’ in Quebec. While ASSÉ attempted to rebuild the student base, in 2010 the student federations Federation of University Students (FEUQ) and Quebec Federation of CEGEP students (FECQ) launched a petition, supported by some 30,000 students, against the tuition fee hikes. The petition was submitted to Parliament, but found no response. On March 2011 the government finally disclosed the amount of the increase in fees:  C$1,625 over five years. In November, the three student associations organized a one-​day demonstration in Montreal that gathered around 30,000 students. By the end of the year, the assemblies were packed again and the committees of mobilization (the groups in charge of organizing the strike in each association) were working frenetically (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013). Not even the irruption of the Occupy movement and its Montreal branch in October 2011 would distract student activists from preparing for the 2012 campaign. As a student organizer explained to us: ‘a lot of people might even consider that Occupy happened before the student movement; but, in reality, the student movement had been building for several years before it became a public thing in the spring of 2012, when everybody was going on strike, the protests started to happen … [student organizers] didn’t have time for this little side thing that was happening, it was less important I think to some of the people that were organizing.’ (QUE 2) In order to prevent the events of 2005, when the FEUQ announced a deal with the government before the local associations had any chance to consider it, ASSÉ proposed to FECQ and FEUQ an entente minimale,

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that is, a common minimum agreement. This agreement consisted of three clauses: (1) all national associations refuse to negotiate if the government excludes one association from the table (clause de solidarité); (2) the national executive committees refuse to recommend any deal to their members, thus allowing the local assemblies to decide (clause de non-​recommandation); and (3) all national associations refuse to denounce or criticize the actions of other national or local associations (clause de non-​dénonciation) (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013, p 59). These pacts were strongly debated within FEUQ and FECQ. Ultimately the FECQ ratified them while FEUQ did not. The entente minimale was the first success of the ASSÉ strategy of preparation for the strike. As Jérémie Bédard-​Wien, spokesperson of CLASSE, explained in the fall of 2012: you cannot build a strong social movement in a few weeks or months … so we used that time effectively to increase pressure. As time wore on and the government didn’t respond to our pressure we were able to justify direct action, we were able to justify larger protests and on November 10, 2011 we held the final protest prior to the unlimited general strike, which drew in about 30,000 people, which was quite an achievement at that time … we hadn’t foreseen the big protest that would happen. At that moment, as the government did not respond to the ultimatum that was issued during the protest, we were able to say to students ‘we have tried everything and now we have to move on to the next step’. (Cited in Taylor, 2012) Through the escalation of actions, students expected to accumulate strength and legitimacy for the strike kick-​off. But this step required careful strategizing too. The student organizers had planned that unions in the most combative CEGEPs and campuses had to vote on the strike first, thus creating a domino effect (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013). Associations voted for a strike mandate that was conditional on other associations joining in. Once a minimum threshold of 20,000 students had voted for the strike, the associations would initiate the stoppage of activities. As one of the members of ASSÉ explained to us: ‘It’s just a symbolic number. Basically, all student associations have the autonomy to go on strike whenever they want, especially because the strike is not legally binding, or there is no law that says that a strike needs to be this or that way,

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because a student strike doesn’t really exist legally. … And student associations, to defend their legitimacy, usually have self-​binding procedures in their charters, or in their by-​laws, to make sure that people accept the legitimacy of the strike vote. So, the 20,000 threshold is basically a way to reassure students that you won’t go on strike alone.’ (QUE 1) The most radical associations mobilized to secure the success of the strike: ‘in Afesped, the political science and law studies student association … we decided to vote three or four months in advance in order to concentrate our mobilization on other campuses. So once we won our vote in November, we created what we called a Flying Mob Squad … and basically we coordinated with the mobilization committee of ASSÉ to say, ‘If another campus needs people, we have an internal list, and people from our mobilization committee would go to other campuses and mobilize’. We had about 20/​25 persons involved [on a] day-​to-​day basis that gave at least one or two days a week to go out on other campuses and try to mobilize.’ (QUE 1) The first college to vote the strike was the CEGEP of Valleyfield on 7 February 2012. The campaign to convince students was intense during the days preceding the vote. CLASSE sent activists to inform students, promote the strike vote and ensure a positive result. The general assembly started and the question of the strike was on the agenda. The show of hands was dramatic, especially for CLASSE organizers that were waiting for the results in Montreal; it was as if the whole campaign until that moment depended upon this vote. Eventually, the assembly decided to support the call to strike with a difference of 12 votes, 460 in favour versus 448 against the strike (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013, p 22). The next day, the CEGEP Marie-​Victorin voted on the strike with 78 per cent support, and later the CEGEP Mont-​ Laurier did the same with 58 per cent support. This resulted in a total of about 20,000 students by 13 February, as planned. Nadeau-​Dubois reflects on the vote in Valleyfield: ‘even today I don’t know what would have happened if we would have lost that first vote in the CEGEP of Valleyfield. I don’t know if the movement would have taken off. What is clear, is that its development would have been significantly different’ (Nadeau-​Dubois, 2013, p 35).

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Our interviewee explains further the careful strategizing involved in the strike kick-​off: ‘we knew we had 10,000 strong at UQAM easily. … And then, we evaluated:  we had two or three thousand students in other departments at University of Montreal and University Laval. And then the rest would have to be reached with CEGEP students, so there, it’s a [seven or eight] thousand gap, so, it’s two or three CEGEPs that we needed at that point. This was our first wave. We looked at that, and we planned, ‘Okay, so these should be the student association[s]‌that vote first, the most mobilized one, and once we reach that, we reach the threshold, and then the second wave can begin to vote. Of course, like when we designed that kind of plan, it’s mostly that we monitored the different things: this is the ideal order, and then we call the executive and we talked about it. Local student associations have the autonomy to decide otherwise, so everything went according to that … all these associations were affiliated to the CLASSE.’ (QUE 1) The sequence of events from the first vote in Valleyfield developed as expected. According to the original plan, the strike should have lasted for eight weeks, while the most militant groups thought that it could be extended up to ten weeks (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013). According to data collected by students themselves,7 the number of students on strike rocketed upwards between 13 February (the starting date of the strike in Valleyfield) and the week between 19–​26 March. In six weeks, strikers reached a peak of more than 300,000 persons. This figure roughly corresponds to the entire membership of the three largest associations involved in the strike (CLASSE, FEUQ and FECQ). Despite all the planning and expectations, the massiveness of the movement and the militant commitment of students took CLASSE by surprise. In fact, as an activist noted: we expected the strike to end in early April. March 22 was a very important date for us. We had a big demonstration held by all four national student unions [CLASSE, FEUQ, FECQ and TACeQ]. This was a day in which we would demonstrate the obvious public support and mobilization around the tuition hike and would see Charest finally

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negotiate an end to the conflict. This did not happen. (Cited in Taylor, 2012) According to Savard and Cyr (2014), four phases of the strike can be distinguished in the evolution of the protest. The first phase was the construction of the strike, which would last between 13 February and 6 March. In this phase the movement was in expansion, with most of the demonstrative actions aimed at gaining more support from students. The few disruptive actions that occurred in this period were met by severe repression, which in turn radicalized the student base. Overall, this phase concluded with a strike consolidated across Quebec and students committing to the goal of repealing the hikes. On 5 March, the number of strikers went beyond the symbolic threshold of 100,000 students. The greater part of the effort required for this achievement was made by CLASSE. The second phase was offensive, and ran between 7 March and 11 April. It was characterized by an increase in the frequency of demonstrative actions that targeted the state and the economy. The main goals at this stage were to make the authorities react, and to capture attention and garner support from society at large. The milestone of this phase was the 22 March demonstration, which became the largest demonstration in Quebec’s history, with some 300,000 participants. From that point onwards, CLASSE had to improvise a strategy to cope with the unexpected lack of reaction from the government. Moreover, actions of protest became more autonomous, with several actions initiated spontaneously by the local associations and groups of students. All the actions in this period were intended to create a momentum for the 22 March demonstration. The protest event was a success, with record-​breaking attendance which coincided with the peak number of strikers (302,652). CLASSE expected a response from the government immediately after this demonstration, but this did not occur. While the students remained without a strategy to deal with the deadlock, they still called for a week of ‘economic disruption’ starting on 26 March. In a week, 17 actions took place (blockages of roads, ports, companies and ministries). As disruptiveness increased, strikers started to face opposition from within the ranks of students and from the educational institutions themselves. The first injunctions, at the end of March, radicalized the movement. Assemblies voted not to hold more assemblies until the government had submitted a proposal, which in practice meant that the vote for the strike could not be revised –​unless the deadlock ended. This strategy put further pressure on university

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authorities and the government, while preventing injunctions from demobilizing the strike. The number of student strikers at the end of this period remained above 17,000. The third phase, between 12 April and 10 June, was a defensive one, as students faced intensified repression, and their actions were aimed at defending the movement and sustaining the strike. The extension of the strike found students without a clear strategy. Opponents of the strike, university and CEGEPs leaders, and some students, filed court injunctions that forced professors to teach their classes and forbade strikers from picketing on campus. This occurred in the CEGEP of Valleyfield and the Université du Québec a Outaouais. Students, however, resisted the court orders, with CLASSE sending groups of activists to collaborate in picketing the campuses. Anticipating clashes between students and police special forces, the administrations abandoned the idea of enforcing the restart of classes. One of the milestones of this period was the clashes on occasion of the Salon Plan Nord in Montreal on 20 April, an event organized by the government to promote the extractive industry in the northern territories. Protestors managed to disrupt the speech of Premier Charest, but were met with fierce repression. However, after ten weeks of strike, on 23 April the government agreed for the first time to negotiate with the student associations. Students attributed this shift to the relative failure of the injunctions, the effect of the clashes in the Salon Plan Nord, and the success of the demonstration on 22 April –​ attended by about 300,000 persons according to CLASSE. Despite the opening of negotiations, some associations decided to demonstrate anyway. After a night rally ended up with attacks on bank offices, the government announced that it would exclude CLASSE from the negotiations. Enacting the agreement of the ‘entente minimale’, the federations abandoned the negotiating table. Furthermore, the government reaction triggered more night rallies on successive days. On 27 April, the government made an offer, which consisted of implementing the hikes in tuition fees in seven years instead of five. The C$254 increase per year amounted to a total C$1,788, resulting in an increase higher than the original (C$1,625). The proposal included the creation of a council to ensure better management of universities (a proposal that came from FEUQ), an increase in the funding of grants and loans, and the commitment that the grants of those with scholarships would be topped off to cover for the difference. The offer was rejected. Night demonstrations were then called by local associations as a sign of radicalization from the student base. Other groups converged with

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students in these rallies, among them Profs Contre la Hausse, Mères en Colère, Occupy Montreal, and the anarchist CLAC (Convergence des Luttes Anti-​Capitalistes). The involvement of new actors in solidarity with students gave the strike the characteristics of a wider, popular movement (Sorochan, 2012). The second round of negotiations occurred while protestors clashed with police forces in Victoriaville, on the occasion of the general council of the PLQ, which resulted in two students being severely injured and dozens arrested (Solty, 2012). On 5 May, after 22 hours of negotiation, an ‘agreement in principle’ was signed by the parties. The deal included the creation of a committee to oversee the management of university funds and search for cost savings on student fees at each separate institution. This was to achieve the savings required to reduce administrative fees, in order to compensate for the lack of an increase in tuition fees (in the hope that the fee reduction would be enough to partly offset tuition increases of C$1,625 over a seven year period). But while the government announced that ‘the crisis is ended’, student leaders were more cautious. Martine Desjardins (FEUQ) said the agreement was the ‘start of the end’, but for CLASSE the deal was far from being satisfactory. Student associations brought the deal to their members but, following the provision of the entente minimale, they did not recommend its approval. Political commentators recognized that this agreement was the best that students could get from the Charest government, suggesting that if they persisted in the rejection of the deal, the stalemate would only be resolved with new elections (Gurney, 2012). Nevertheless, the governmental proposals were rejected by the large majority of strikers: 158,224 rejected the deal, 98 per cent of the total 161,551 students (Savard and Cyr, 2014, p 79). On 14 May the Minister of Education, Line Beauchamp, resigned and Michelle Courchesne took her post. On 16 May, the government announced Bill 78, which suspended the winter term, criminalized organizers of demonstrations of more than 50 persons that did not provide their itinerary to the police forces, introduced steep penalties for those who broke the law, and authorized institutions to cease the collection and payment of union fees of those organizations that engaged in illegal activities. The bill was considered an attack on the core of the student unions; their economic resources and their capacity to mobilize risked being compromised. CLASSE denounced the authoritarian character of Bill 78 and called for civil disobedience. A demonstration on 22 May was a response to this call, gathering some 200,000 protesters in open challenge to Bill 78. This

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massive opposition seems to have prevented the police and government from actually formally accusing students (or the associations) under the new law. The emergence of the movement of ‘les casseroles’ and the popular assemblies in neighbourhoods, in Montreal and other cities in Quebec, was a direct consequence of this new repressive turn from the government (Drapeau-​Bisson et al., 2014). People spontaneously took to the streets banging pots and organizing in popular assemblies to denounce Bill 78. On 22 May, 72 groups of ‘les casseroles’ were identified in Montreal. This development, like many others during the movement, was neither controlled nor devised by the organizing core of the strike (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013). Bill 78 contributed to a broadening of the movement’s claims to include civil rights and liberties (Drapeau-​Bisson et al., 2014). Attorneys and law professors questioned the law and supported the right of free expression and assembly of students. The Quebec Human Rights commission condemned Bill 78 for undermining the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Sorochan, 2012). Moreover, the relatively spontaneous self-​organization of local communities in response to Bill 78 evolved into the ideals of radical democracy and local power of various sectors within and outside the student movement (Drapeau-​Bisson et al., 2014). The final phase, between 11 June and 7 September, was of demobilization. In this period, participation in protest actions declined sharply and most actions encountered police repression. Night rallies were less massive, and only a few thousand attended the demonstrations of 22 June and July called by CLASSE. After 18 weeks of strike, the activists were exhausted, while many students started their summer jobs. The government called for provincial elections on 1 August, which were held on 7 September, with the victory of a simple majority won by the PQ in the National Assembly. CLASSE did not see the prospects of new parliamentary elections as promising. As Dufour and Savoie (2014) pointed out, for ideological and practical reasons, CLASSE was not able to use elections in its favour and, officially, it adopted a position of neutrality (Nadeau-​ Dubois, 2013). The coalition has traditionally criticized the student movement-​political parties nexus, and especially the historical liaison between the federations and the PQ. Conversely, the federations were better equipped for negotiations with public institutions and lobbying. The call for elections was seen by them as an opportunity to regain centrality after long months in which CLASSE was the dominant actor. One of the students at the core of CLASSE summarized the situation thus:

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‘when the government passed Bill 78 in May, they suspended classes for the summer. So, during June, July and the beginning of August, we didn’t have any class. So the strike was kind of suspended, the equivalent of a lockout, so it was a little bit demobilizing. Students would not go as much to their general assembly, and they were beginning to be tired … there weren’t classes anymore, so it was a little pointless to make the traditional picket line and that kind of stuff. And then on August 1st, the government launched elections. And basically it was meant to break the strike. It was a strategy made for that, and in the first speech of the Premier, what he said was something like “Eh, the streets have talked, now it’s time for the people to talk. And I believe they will choose order and stability”.’(QUE 1) The PQ campaigned with the promise of abolishing the hikes in tuition fees and freezing them to the levels of 2012, which attracted some segments of the student population. The FECQ leader Leo Bureau-​Blouin won a seat for the district Laval des-​Rapides for the PQ, becoming the youngest member of the national assembly (MNA) in Quebec’s history. Members of the federations campaigned on the ground, and went door-​to-​door in key districts (Fidler, 2012). The PQ presented itself as the only viable option for those who wanted to abolish the fee hikes, as one of our interviewees admitted: ‘So, the PQ promised to cancel the tuition hike … a lot of people thought, [to] continue the strike, would impede the chances for the PQ to win. So, a lot of people decided, or at least a crucial amount of people decided, to vote against the strike, in order to wait for the election to happen. This created the conditions under which the strike collapsed. Basically, we lost every single vote to continue the strike except for three or four student associations. And by September 7th, the day of the election, there was only about 5,000 students that were still on strike.’ (QUE 1) The lack of willingness of the government to negotiate with the student associations extended the conflict and led to a deadlock that was resolved with a call for provincial elections –​held in September. The strength of the student movement and its ability to navigate a long conflict, and the inflexibility of the government, had however triggered the longest student strike in modern Quebec.

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Student mobilizations against Laws 133/​2008 and 240/​2010 in Italy In the same period, the Italian students undertook two distinct, but interlinked, protest campaigns in concomitance with the processes of enactment of two national laws, Law 133/​2008 introducing significant cuts to the public system of funding for HE, and Law 240/​2010 providing for the restructuring of the university governance towards a managerial pattern. The first student campaign lasted three months, between October and December 2008, the second one also three months, between October and December 2010). Although both the student protests of 2008 and those of 2010 had the government as their main political target, the crucial difference between them rested on the combination and type of allies which students could rely on. If in 2008 Italian professors expressed a general feeling of opposition to the cuts to HE, in 2010 they had a more nuanced position towards the managerialization of the governance, bringing them in several cases to react negatively to the student mobilizations (Cini, 2017a). Researchers were not involved in the mobilizations of 2008, while they played a crucial role in those of 2010. In short, while Italian professors held a passive and/​or negative position towards the student protests of 2008 and 2010, the researchers got involved in those of 2010. Unlike England or Quebec, Italy has historically exhibited a strong tradition of student activism, displayed both in the university and in the more general mobilizations (that is, youth and urban movements, or peace movements) experienced by Italian society throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly to Chile, Italian students have traditionally shown a high level of politicization fostered and manifested by the adoption of various strands of Marxist ideology within the movement organizational field (such as Maoism, Leninism, Stalinism and Autonomism; see Raparelli, 2009), more oriented to address the broader issues of capitalist society rather than student matters. Considering these traditions, it was not surprising to observe how the mobilization dynamics of the 2008 and 2010 student campaigns reflected this more politicized culture, exemplified by the students’ attempts to generalize and further politicize an issue of university funding by making alliances with grassroots movements and unions. ‘Noi non paghiamo la vostra crisi!’ (We will not pay for your crisis): this was the slogan chanted in the student protests, which took place in many Italian cities and universities from October 2008. More specifically, this slogan indicated the refusal by the generation of students attending Italian universities in 2008 to suffer the effects of

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the economic crisis, epitomized by the cuts affecting the sector of HE provided for by Law 133 (€1.5 billion in 5 years). The three main measures regarding the Italian university system provided for by Law 133/​2008, and contested by the students, were: cuts to the fund for ordinary financing (‘Fondo per il Finanziamento Ordinario’ –​FFO), the turnover and recruitment of new professors (one recruitment for five retired), and the transformation of universities into private foundations. By chanting ‘we will not pay for your crisis’, Italian students tried to make manifest their unwillingness to undergo a generalized process of social downgrading affecting the condition of their generation (Raparelli, 2009; Roggero, 2010). As in the other cases, the Italian student campaign of 2008 also consisted of three phases corresponding to the rise, peak and decline of the mobilization, respectively. The upsurge of the mobilization dated back to September 2008, when student collectives and groups throughout several Italian universities started calling for public meetings and assemblies to inform students about the state of public funding for the university sector, and the government’s announced measures to implement significant cuts. This work of information and socialization was preparatory to the first political actions and participation of students in public events in October 2008, outside the university campuses. The months of October and November represented the peak of the 2008 campaign, consisting of six national protest events, the largest of which occurred in Rome. The first national protest event was held on 17 October, the day on which the three biggest grassroots unions –​ Confederazione Cobas, Comitati Unitari di Base (CUB), and Sindacato dei Lavoratori (SdL) –​organized a general strike that mobilized more than 350,000 people. On the same day, an unauthorized demonstration of 20,000 students departed from the official demonstration of the unions and blocked urban traffic for several hours, finishing in front of the Ministry of Education. On 30 October, a national protest was called as the largest Italian trade union confederation, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) promoted a general school strike to oppose cuts regarding the public school system provided for by Law 133. On the same day, thousands of university students took to the streets in many Italian cities, including Turin, Naples, Palermo, Florence, Catania, Milan, Venice, Padua, and so on. The third, fourth and fifth events of the national protest were all held in November. The first of them was, perhaps, the first real national event of the campaign called for and organized exclusively by the university student organizations on university issues. In tens of cities, non-​authorized marches, generally departing from the occupied

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faculties and universities, moved across city centres, blocking urban traffic and, in some cases, occupying railway stations. The second and third national events occurring in November were the general strike of the university promoted by CGIL (14 November) and the national assembly of the movement at La Sapienza (15–​16 November). If the general strike involved by far the largest number of university students taking part in a protest event in the period (more than 200,000 students took to the streets in an unauthorized demonstration which blocked traffic in the city), the weekend of assemblies and workshops at La Sapienza represented the most significant event for the nationalization of the student movement. For two days, more than 4,000 students representing almost all Italian universities debated how to reform (or – a​ s they claimed – t​o ‘self-​reform from below’) the university system. To this end, three workshops (on welfare, education, and research respectively) and a general assembly were organized. Finally, the last and concluding event in which university students were nationally mobilized was the general strike promoted by CGIL for 12 December –​ a political event which also marked the decline of the national student mobilization and the return to campus politics. On that day, student demonstrations and public rallies were carried out in many Italian cities to oppose the cuts in spending for HE and in support of a public and more egalitarian university system. After the general strike of 12 December, student participation in national political events gradually dropped and, thus, the student movement lost its momentum. On the one hand, ideological divergences between the various organizations on the way to keep going with the mobilization started to play a major role. Such frictions prevented the movement from developing a unitary structure of coordination nationwide that was able to organize further events and keep students mobilizing (on this, see Chapter 4). On the other hand, the incapacity of the two-​month campaign to effectively change the government’s orientation on the HE cuts heavily demotivated a broad share of students from taking part in further mobilizations. From December 2008 onwards, the movement became thus smaller in terms of number and mainly student activists participated. In short, the combination of these factors caused the decline of the 2008 student mobilization. A second protest campaign followed in 2010–​11, as the third Berlusconi government proposed a reform of the governance of Italian universities (Law 240), aimed at modifying the institutional governance of universities, fostering the centralization of the university leadership, the managerialization of decisional bodies, and the reduction of the

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power of the collegial organs (Regini, 2014). One can divide this campaign into two distinct temporal phases, based on political scale and scope. Similarly to the 2008 campaign, the first phase, which lasted for about three months (October–​December 2010), exhibited the occurrence of all the national events (demos, occupations and rallies) targeting the government and its law proposal. The second, and more local, phase of the campaign (January–​June 2011) witnessed the proliferation of episodes of student activism at the campus level, mostly targeting the university leadership eager to implement the government’s reforms. To implement the changes concerning the institutional governance of the universities, the law provided for a process of statute revision that each university was obliged to accomplish locally in the subsequent six months through the designation of ad-​hoc committees of professors (January–​June 2011). The establishment of committees for the revision of the university statute triggered processes of student activism and of researchers’ mobilization, aiming to oppose locally the managerialization of academic governance and to demand greater democratization (Cini, 2017c). In 2010 one of the protest targets was thus also the local academic oligarchy, explicitly accused of supporting the implementation of the managerialization process. Throughout the protests, which lasted well into the first half of 2011, Italian universities became the stage of ‘contentious episodes’ between opposing forces. While the students’ aim was to oppose the implementation of this process by disrupting the institutional activities of the universities, with reference to their governing activities, the academics who held executive positions reacted by accelerating the implementation of this process and, at the same time, attempting to restore the institutional order in their universities. This confrontation transformed Italian universities into spaces of conflict in which the impact of the unfolding of power relations between these two groups was visible for many months. While in 2008 two sub-​national networks of student groups led the protest campaign, Uniriot and Atenei in Rivolta, in 2010 there were four networks, with Link and Red-​Net being added to the first two.8 While the student groups affiliated to Uniriot predominantly adopted disruption as a means of political influence, the groups composing Atenei in Rivolta, albeit not disdaining disruptive tactics, deployed institutional action strategies also. The predominant action strategy adopted by the student groups affiliated to Link was instead coalition building (Cini, 2017c) –​as also implicitly remarked by a student activist of Studenti Indipendenti (a local chapter of Link in Turin), in her

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interview: “Without students in the hall of the Rectorate while we were discussing the reform, there would not have been any student success. Four student representatives without the bargaining power of the streets obtain nothing.” (IT 1) In other words, although adopting disrupting tactics, these groups also considered institutional politics as equally valuable to political effectiveness within the university decision-​ making bodies. “Without the pressure of the streets we would not have been able to gain anything”. By contrast, Red-​Net gathered all the student groups with a Marxist-​Leninist orientation, which considered disruption as the only possible strategy to bring about change even at the university level. For this reason, these students were very critical of university and student politics, seeing them as a domain of institutional mediation, neutralizing social conflict and its most radical actors. For Red-​Net, the main political aim of a successful student movement was the ongoing production of radical and mass conflicts able to overthrow all existing power relations. There were no other intermediary aims or minor goals to be achieved, no alternative academic institutions to be thought about, without first the full destruction of all the existing capitalist institutions and their power relations. With respect to their political goals and their conceptions of HE, the other sub-​national networks of student groups were much less radical than Red-​Net. For Uniriot, the best strategy the student movement could adopt in order to radically transform the Italian universities was the promotion of a ‘self-​reform from below.’ This reform did not have to be understood as an alternative policy proposal, but rather as an open-​ended political process capable of prefiguring ‘new university institutions’. As it was clearly stated in the Manifesto for Self-​Reform, launched during the national assembly of the movement at La Sapienza University in Rome on 15 and 16 November 2008: By self-​reform we mean an open-​ended constituent process, transformable and implementable, which organizes the power of conflict and self-​organization in the production of knowledge. The self-​reform is neither a mere bill of rights nor an attempt to bureaucratize the non-​representativeness of the movement. By contrast, the self-​reform is the opening of a process which is already present in the practices of the movement, it is a phase of consolidation of the forms of movement self-​organization and a resurgence of the conflict within the university.

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For them, this meant a struggle for the construction of a public and democratic, yet non-​state, university governed by the students themselves. Unlike Red-​Net, Atenei in Rivolta, and Uniriot, Link did not aim to radically change Italian universities, but rather to bring about procedural and substantive changes to the advantage of students and of the other weak academic components. Link aimed at defending the public nature of HE and of its main (public) good, knowledge, from the attacks of Berlusconi’s government, prone to privatize the sector, and of the university leaders, keen to managerialize academic governance, both at the local and at the national level, to accrue their power. Opposing such a neoliberal design, the student activists of this group opted and put forward a state-​funded yet deeply participatory conception of HE; for them, students and junior academic staff should become the key and leading figures of a new process of democratization of Italian universities. In sum, this section illustrated the timeline, the strategies and the goals of the student campaigns of 2008 and 2010 in Italy. In both campaigns, the student activists and their organizations deployed a very diversified array of tactics, ranging from the most conventional to the most disruptive, to halt the process of marketization of Italian HE. What is more, they did not only contest the extant system and the government’s reforms, but they also put forward radical and alternative conceptions and practices of HE to show that a more equal and democratic model of HE was possible, even in times of economic and political crisis (see also Cini, 2019b).

Conclusions We have illustrated the temporal trajectories and the main characteristics of the recent student mobilizations, occurring in the four cases under investigation, that oppose measures promoted by national governments to foster a neoliberal model of HE. In exploring the goals, strategies and action repertoires of such mobilizations, we note similarities and differences between the actors involved in the protests within and across the four regions. To begin with, students have various traditions of activism in the four cases studied, which have informed contemporary movements. Furthermore, in the four cases the mobilization campaigns have shown a surprisingly high (especially for England and Quebec) confrontational orientation, exemplified by the adoption of very disruptive protest tactics, such as street blockades, and railway and university occupations. Similar also were the main demands and goals

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pursued by the students, who were concerned with the negative consequences of the process of marketization affecting their universities and their lives, and the support of the restoration of a stronger public system with a more democratic outlook. Yet, some key differences across the four cases were identified in the various capacities of students to build unitary protest fronts and to make alliances with other social and political actors, such as leftist political parties and trade unions –​a capacity which was higher in the Quebec and Chilean cases, and lower in the Italian and English ones. In Italy, the students mobilized between 2008 and 2011 to stop the processes of dismantling of public HE and of managerialization of university governance. Albeit showing some differences in terms of goals and strategies even among themselves (especially between distinct student groups), Italian students exhibited a firm opposition to the neoliberal plan of the Berlusconi government by putting forward, at the same time, alternative conceptions of HE, based on values of democracy and self-​government. In England in 2010, after decades of passivity and silence, an unexpectedly large number of students, mostly without prior political experience, revolted against the coalition government’s announcement of the tripling of tuition fees and, more broadly, its plan to implement a fully marketized model of HE. Yet, in both countries, lacking a national organizational structure capable of effectively organizing mobilization and confrontation with the government, the few and radical student groups involved in these protests ended up fuelling processes of disruptive escalation in their tactical repertoires which soon brought them to political stalemate and failure. In Quebec and Chile, the students presented themselves instead as united against government plans and managed to agree upon a common platform of demands, although they were not always able to follow a similar course of action and the coalitions they created would dissolve later. After the large mobilizations of 2011 and 2012, differences among diverse factions emerged, making their cohesion and the repetition of massive campaigns of protest more difficult. In both cases, a crucial factor behind this process was the government’s attempts to address some of the students’ demands, which in both cases occurred after elections defeated the right-​wing parties and led to changes in government. While this attempt was more limited in Quebec, it was enough to deactivate a significant fraction of protesters, signalling also the subsequent disagreements among student federations regarding the HE summit of February 2013. In Chile, the centre-​left opposition promised to deliver a radical, comprehensive reform of the HE sector

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which seemed to be aligned with the broader aspirations of the 2011 movement. While CONFECH managed to retain its role as unique voice of the students, the displacement of the conflict to the electoral arena in subsequent years undermined the capacity of students to play a more significant role in terms more akin to 2011. Keeping in mind these similarities and differences, in the following chapters we will account for the consequences of the protest campaigns described in this chapter.

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3

Higher Education Policies Introduction In contrast with the dominant research trend in social movement studies, which has traditionally devoted little attention to the political economy of contemporary societies (della Porta, 2015), the authors contend that the effects of political-​economic changes are key to better understanding the rise, variety and decline of student mobilizations. Transformations occurring in the institutional forms and modes of regulation of capitalism, especially those related to state institutions and their policies, have indeed been fundamental in setting in motion, and shaping the formation processes of social movements (Cini et al., 2017). Considering this, the chapter addresses long-​term and short-​term political-​economic changes occurring in the field of HE related to the recent wave of student protests. The four regions under investigation cover different HE systems, from those where the role of the state is still prominent (Italy and Quebec), and the commodification trend is not so strong, to others in which the market, along with the commodification of the sector, have acquired greater relevance over recent decades (England and Chile). The authors maintain that the different pace and form of the marketization process (see also Table 1.2 in Chapter 1) have heavily affected the ways in which students mobilized in terms of action repertoires, political goals and demands, and organizational structures. Exploring the variety and the institutional differences in the field of HE helps us assess the variety of the student movements embedded in such fields. The economic crisis of 2008 represented a decisive watershed for further propelling the marketization process of HE, as governments overtly pursued pro-​austerity and privatization agendas in various policy fields, including pensions, social protection, healthcare and HE.

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CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION

Austerity measures, following the crisis, have introduced neoliberal reforms in HE fields in countries where they previously did not exist, and accelerated their implementation elsewhere. This process has been characterized by one or more of the following measures: (1) the introduction of greater competition in the provision of student education; (2) the supplementation of public sources of funding of universities with private sources, especially tuition fees; and (3) the attribution of greater institutional autonomy from government steering (see Klemenčič, 2014, pp 397–​9). Neoliberal reforms produced profound distributional consequences, as they altered the old state/​family balance in the funding of HE by increasing the weight of families’ expenditures (tuition fees) to compensate for a retrenchment of state funding. Even reforms whose alleged aims are improving the administration of universities and their management –​such as performance or accountability-​based incentives, national and international rankings, and competitive grants  –​put institutions in a marketplace framework, conditioning their behaviour and decisions (Cini and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017). In addressing these issues, a historical overview of the trend of marketization affecting the HE fields of Chile, England, Quebec and Italy over the last 30 years is offered. We focus on two political-​ economic dimensions of HE whose changes have triggered collective responses at various levels, intensities and scales:  (1) financing and autonomy of universities; and (2) governance and managerialization. To do this, the chapter is structured in four sections, ordered by those regions that have experienced more intense marketization processes (Chile and England), to those that have experienced less intense marketization processes (Quebec and Italy). The first part of the chapter illustrates the main transformations occurring in the HE sectors of the four cases, as prompted by reform processes since the 1980s. The second and final part of the chapter explores in detail the most recent round of reforms in the four regions, which constituted the triggering factors of the student mobilizations under investigation. We observe that in three of the cases studied, students reacted against proposed increases in tuition fees (Quebec, England) or their consequences (Chile), while in one case their protests were against cutbacks and governance reforms (Italy).

The formation of the neoliberal university in Chile In Chile we see a case of rapid development of neoliberal reforms of the education system during a relatively short period of time. Until

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Higher Education Policies

1973, the state had a leading role in the guidance of HE policies. In exchange for public funding and recognition, private institutions such as the Catholic University had to accept guidance by the state. The changes introduced between 1967 and 1973 (the so-​called ‘university reform’) expanded the role of the state; university enrolment grew threefold in the given period, from 55,653 to 146,451 students. Moreover, the reform improved academic conditions, including the expansion and professionalization of academic personnel and the replacement of the old academic schools with the creation of disciplinary departments and research centres, following the Anglo-​ Saxon model (Fleet and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017). After the coup d’état in 1973, the government intervened in the universities by appointing generals as rectors and expelling professors and students suspected of links with left-​wing parties. Furthermore, in the context of severe public spending cutbacks, resources for HEIs were reduced. In 1981, the military decided to undertake an ambitious reform programme that, in a way, took on board the problems of disordered growth and the need for modernization of the system that the pre-​1973 ‘university reform’ was not able to resolve. But it did so by taking inspiration from a neoliberal, market-​like conception of HE. Thus, the reforms of the 1980s put an end to more than a century of strong presence of the state in HE (Bernasconi and Rojas, 2004). The main reforms of the dictatorship in the 1980s consisted of the introduction of the principle of universities’ self-​funding, which forced them to impose tuition fees, and the opening of the system to private providers. Moreover, a separation between university and non-​university study programmes was established, which fostered the appearance of Professional Institutes and Centres of Technical Formation (respectively IPs and CFTs in Spanish). The regional seats of the two state universities were transformed into 14 small independent universities, in an attempt to challenge the strong politicization of campuses. Each public university was given new charters by which they were granted greater autonomy, although their governance remained highly hierarchical and centralized in the figures of non-​elected principals and the board of directors. Moreover, as academic personnel were no longer given the status of public employees, universities gained latitude to establish their own policies of remuneration. In 1980 there were only eight tertiary education institutions, all universities and all receiving public funding. But one decade later the landscape was radically different. By the end of the decade, private HEIs had proliferated. In 1991 there were a total of 302 institutions,

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and only 22 universities received public funding. Among the 280 institutions not receiving public funding, there were 40 universities, 79 IPs and 161 CFTs. But this expansion primarily occurred from 1988 onwards, when the requirement of authorization from the Interior Secretary was cancelled –​a clear measure of the government’s political control over HE. Given the expansion of the  system, and in a last minute attempt to further advance its basis, the dictatorship approved a new constitutional law of education, the Ley Orgánica Constitucional de Enseñanza (LOCE). This constitutional law regulated the three levels of the educational system (primary, secondary and HE), establishing minimum standards for the first two levels and the requirements for the creation of educational institutions in all three levels. One of its main provisions included a radical decentralization of public schools, which were transferred to municipalities. In HE, LOCE established a new mechanism to certify and legally recognize HEIs and study programmes:  a special agency (Consejo Superior de Educación) was put in charge of accrediting new institutions and programmes. Accreditation became a ruled, compulsory procedure for all new institutions. Similarly, LOCE sanctioned that all universities must be not-​for-​profit institutions  –​unlike IPs and CFTs, which were not subject to this obligation. Before the Pinochet reforms, universities received direct transfers of state subsidies regulated by law. The 1980 constitution introduced the concept of subsidiarity of the state in the provision of education. With the reforms of 1981, all universities started to charge tuition fees as a mechanism to compensate declining state subsidies. In turn, state funds were structured in three main sources: direct fiscal contributions (aporte fiscal directo, AFD), which were aimed exclusively at financing the pre-​1981 institutions; AFI, which was accessible to all institutions irrespective of their nature, as vouchers with which students rewarded their preferred educational institutions; and student loans financed by the state and administered directly by the universities, which were reserved for pre-​1981 institutions. Finally, public-​funded research was to be channelled through a new agency (CONICYT, Comisión Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología) which had to distribute research grants to individual scholars under a competitive basis, irrespective of their institutional affiliation (Bernasconi and Rojas, 2004). The University Credit Fund (Fondo de Crédito Universitario), the first official public loan scheme for HE, was created in 1987. According to the original policy design, universities were expected to finance the issue of new loans with the repayment of old ones. Therefore, state subsidies were planned to gradually diminish over the years to finally

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disappear in 1994, when it was expected that the system would be consolidated. This optimistic forecast was far from being realistic. In the first years of the 1990s, severe underfunding threatened access and continuity of studying for many students. In 1994 the government replaced the previous scheme with the University Credit Solidarity Fund (Fondo Solidario de Crédito Universitario, FSCU). It assigned more resources to this fund, reversing the declining trend that was its main characteristic since its inception, and establishing new conditions for repayment: loan repayment would start two years after graduation, with debtors paying up to 5 per cent of their annual income. Moreover, the debt would be written off in any case after 12 years. Although the FSCU alleviated the situation for students in traditional universities, those enrolled in the private universities, IPs and CFTs remained excluded from any public mechanisms of financial aid. In the decade between the 1981 Pinochet HE reform and the re-​establishment of democracy in 1990, the military transformed the shape of HE in Chile. At the beginning of that decade, public universities accounted for less than a third of the total enrolment in HE. The Pinochet reforms were not reversed by the new democratic governments, as the main trends delineated by his administration were consolidated. The role and position of public, state-​owned universities within the HE system (HES) continued to fall despite an expansion of enrolment in public universities over the 1990s and increases in their budgets, which did not compensate for the losses of the 1970s and 1980s. Conversely, enrolment in private universities increased more than fivefold in the first decade after the restoration of democracy, in spite of the lack of public aid for these students.

The recent round of neoliberal reforms in Chile In 2005, the centre-​left administration of Ricardo Lagos created the CAE  –​the state-​guaranteed loan (Law 20,027). This loan was to benefit students registered in private institutions (created after 1981). Enrolment in private universities represented 44 per cent of the total that year. In turn, enrolment in public institutions had declined to 26 per cent, three points less than in 2000. Overall, enrolment in private tertiary institutions accounted for 74 per cent of total enrolment in HE, an increment of three points in relation to 2000. CAE loans are awarded by private banks that obtain this franchise by a public tender organized by the INGRESA committee, which is the public institution in charge of the assessment and allocation of these loans, linking lenders  –​banks  –​with borrowers  –​students (World

69

n

CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION

Bank, 2011; Olavarría and Allende, 2013). Additional incentives were created to ensure lower risks for the banks, as the 5.8 per cent interest rate was not considered enough to cover fee rises. The scheme foresaw that the state would repurchase at least 25 per cent of the loans assigned, while also paying a surcharge of 6 per cent of the amount invested in the loans (Kremerman and Páez, 2016). In addition, HEIs would guarantee part of the loans taken out by their students –​ranging between 60 and 90 per cent –​while students continued their studies. The government would provide guarantees of repayment against the risk of default, in proportions that varied from 20 per cent, while students continued to study, to up to 90 per cent, 18 months after they finished their programmes. The rationale to involve the banks in this scheme was that the state was unable, due to financial restrictions, to subsidize students enrolled in private institutions. This was recognized by the Secretary of Education at the time of CAE’s creation.1 According to the World Bank (2011), between 2006 and 2010, including new and renewed loans, 213,350 students from 71 HEIs (including IPs and CFTs) benefited from this scheme. In this period, a total of US$1.4 billion worth of loans had been given, with an average yearly loan size of US$2,600. In relation to the costs of tuition in HE, a study by Salas (2010) indicates that between 1999 and 2009, universities increased their tuition by 38.3 per cent. But the intensity of these increments varied across institutions; while private pre-​1981 universities increased their tuition by 47 per cent, public universities did so by 38 per cent on average. Interestingly, private universities (post 1981 reform) increased their tuition fees by 21.3 per cent, well below the system’s average. CAE spread very rapidly, and already in 2010 it was the state programme with the largest number of beneficiaries (216,126 students). It accounted for the highest share of public resources; more than half of the total financial aid for students was allocated to CAE, as seen in Table 3.1. In contrast, the FSCU (that benefits students enrolled in traditional pre-​1981 universities only) amounted to 13.9 per cent of the total financial aid. The remaining resources funded various scholarship programmes2 that were created to address some of the needs of a growing student population. As shown in Table 3.1 loan programmes represented more than two thirds of the public resources for financial aid in that year. Table 3.1 also shows that the composition of public subsidies to HE has changed. Direct fiscal contributions (AFDs) allocated only to traditional universities (pre-​1981) have shrunk, and while in 1990 they were more than 50 per cent of the budget, in 2016 they represented little more

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newgenrtpdf

Table 3.1: Higher-education budgets –​proportions (%) by type of subsidy (1990–​2016)*

1. AFD 2. Free Education Bill

1990

2005

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

51.2

45.6

21.5

20.4

19.1

18.4

18.3

15.2

12.2

– 18.2

4. Student Aid

25.7

  4.1 FSCU**

25.7

–

–

–

–

–

–

–

29.5

7.27

3.1

2.9

2.4

2.1

2.0

1.8

1.4

34.3

64.6

68.1

72.5

73.3

74.0

75.3

49.7

22.7

13.9

12.9

7.6

6.8

6.4

5.7

0.4

11.9

71

  4.2 Bicentenario Scholarships**

–

6.7

9.3

19.3

19.3

17.0

19.4

1.9

  4.3 Nuevo Milenio Scholarship**

–

1.2

5.8

5.45

7.2

7.3

8.6

7.3

5.1

  4.4 Other Scholarships**

–

3.8

4.2

4.8

8.4

9.8

10.7

10.5

7.4

  4.5 CAE**

0.0

0.0

31.3

33.1

29.9

30.2

31.3

32.4

34.9

4.Other subsidies

0.0

12.8

10.9

8.7

6.0

6.1

5.7

7.7

7.2

Total

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

(Total–​CAE)

100.0

100.0

68.7

66.9

70.0

69.8

68.7

67.6

65.1

74.3

77.3

54.8

54.1

62.4

63.1

62.3

61.9

64.7

(Total–​CAE–​FSCU)

* Public funding for research not included (FONDECYT, FONDEF and Proyectos Milenio, which are administered by the Ministry of Economy). ** Percentages calculated over the total. Source: CENDA

Higher Education Policies

3. AFI

CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION

than 10 per cent of the HE budget. In contrast, student aid programmes represent by far the largest item of public spending, almost 80 per cent (whereas they represented 27.7 per cent in 1990). While student aid now occupies the largest share of the budget, programmes dedicated to serving students enrolled in traditional and public universities have instead proportionally decreased. One third of the 2016 HE budget went to CAE subsidies, while the public loan scheme for students enrolled in traditional universities (FSCU), which was a quarter of the budget in 1990, represented less than 1 per cent in 2016. When the 2016 free education bill is excluded, the fastest growing programme over recent years is CAE. According to the National Centre for Alternative Development (CENDA) figures, CAE subsidies experienced real increments of 32.4 per cent in 2015 and 34.9 per cent in 2016. Moreover, in the 2016 budget, the amount allocated to CAE is even larger than the amount for the free education programme (US$635,205,688 versus US$536,620,149). Overall, these figures show that the state prefers to finance universities through student aid, rather than through direct unrestricted subsidies. What is more, CAE had a negative effect on enrolment in public universities, while since its inception the number of students in private institutions has increased. The proportion of students enrolled in state universities was 26 per cent of the total in 2005, but if we consider that this figure was already 29 per cent in 1990, we can conclude that the size of public enrolment in the system was relatively stable in the first 15 years after the end of the dictatorship. Since 2005 the decline of enrolment in public universities accelerated; however, less than 15 per cent of students attended public universities in 2015, a drop of 10 points in ten years. In contrast, and while enrolment in private institutions grew little since 1990 (when it represented 71 per cent of the total), the expansion accelerated again starting in 2005. Overall, while students enrolled in private tertiary institutions doubled between 2005 and 2015 (from 380,226 to 850,174), the number of students in public institutions increased by a modest 4.7 per cent (from 163,039 in 2005 to 170,748 in 2015) (CNED, 2017). This occurred against a general trend in which enrolment in tertiary education multiplied 5 times over the last 30 years, from a coverage rate of 14.4 per cent in 1990 to 55 per cent of the population aged 18–​24 years old in 2014 (Menéndez, 2014). In sum, policies adopted in the early 2000s have facilitated the meteoric expansion of the private sector within the HES. This has occurred against the backdrop of increases in state subsidies and student indebtedness which, eventually, benefited private universities and the banking system, respectively.

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The reforms initiated during the second Bachelet administration can be seen, as a policy officer in the Secretary of Education put it, “as the introduction of [new] hygiene standards to a mixed system in which the private sector will continue to have a significant role, and where the options to recover a role for the public sector [depend] on institutional changes in the steering wheel.” (CHI 10)

The formation of the neoliberal university in England The institutional configuration of the English HE system after the Second World War resembled that of most Western countries. Enrolment levels were low at about 5 per cent, access was largely limited to the elite and students were entitled to generous subsidies covering their living expenses. Similar to other European university systems of the 1950s and 1960s, the English university system was therefore deeply ‘elitist’ (Trow, 2006). To break down this model of the ‘ivory tower’ the Robbins report (1963) recommended widening student participation within the English HE sector. More notably, the report identified a wealth of untapped ability in the population and argued that as a matter of principle all applicants with appropriate qualifications should be admitted to university. By logical extension this meant that the system needed to undergo a massive expansion, setting a target of 560,000 full-​time students in HE by the year 1980, compared to the status quo of 216,000 at the time the report was conceived.3 This ambitious goal was to be reached by expanding enrolments at existing institutions, granting university status to technological colleges as well as colleges of education, and building six new universities. In the early 1980s, England4 was the first European country to begin a radical process of privatization of the public sector. Two aspects of this process have been pursued and implemented by all British governments since the 1980s in the HE sector: the privatization of the channels of public funding, the political aim of which was to pass from a state-​led system to a regime of funding based on private contributions (businesses and families), and the implementation of new public management (NPM) principles into the system of university governance (managerialization process), including the evaluation of teaching and research, which had a political aim of making English universities competitive on the global market. The combination of these two aspects acted as the hallmark of the building project of the neoliberal university in English HE. The main reason for this radical policy shift was the takeover of political power by the Conservative government led by Margaret

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Thatcher in 1979, that immediately set up and implemented a neoliberal agenda of reforms for the UK. In this respect, the HE reforms of the 1980s did not represent an exception; on the contrary, they constituted one of the pillars of Mrs Thatcher’s neoliberal project, aimed at promoting the market-​oriented American model of HE in the English system (McGettigan, 2013). A political adviser of the coalition government in 2010 who contributed to the reform of tuition fees and is today director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), an independent think tank on HE, provided us with a similar interpretation in his historical reconstruction of the period. Even though ‘marketization’ is publicly considered as ‘toxic’, he did admit that English HE is today fully marketized and that further marketization is needed to make HE more efficient and valuable. In his words: ‘When I  worked in government, we never used the word marketization. We never claimed that our goal was marketization. Even though we adopted [this kind of view] by conceiving students as consumers. Students deserve more information about the universities to choose better. Marketization provides more student choice. Most people go to universities to get more money with good jobs. After all the university policy is placed in the business department. Marketization is a toxic word, we don’t use it. Even though we are aware that with these reforms we achieve an outcome of more marketization. There is still a lot to do to make HE a real market. I guess to Conservatives the principle of profit-​making universities is acceptable.’ (EN 12) In tracing the history of English HE and of its transformations after the Second World War, Claire Callender (Professor of HE Studies at UCL) identifies two main phases, strictly associated with a shift in the forms of capitalism (and of the state): one associated with the rise and development of the welfare state and Fordism, the other with neoliberal capitalism (and the neoliberal state). Through the 1980s and the 1990s enhanced marketization emerged through several policy and statutory changes and, despite changes in government, has continued to the present day. According to Callender (2014, p 168), ‘What steers policy today are the private individual financial benefits of higher education and a marketised system of higher education’. She continues, ‘What have shifted since the Robbins Report are ideas about the social purpose of higher education; who benefits and who

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pays for higher education and, with that, the balance of public and private contributions to higher education’. (Callender, 2014, p 180). In other words, the focus of HE policy and policy rhetoric moved from the public and social benefits of HE to an emphasis on markets and the private, individual financial benefits of HE. While in the 1960s the key beneficiary of HE was society, today it is individual students. What is more, this shift from a public to a private-​orientated approach to HE, was shared, albeit for slightly different reasons, by both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. In her interview, an expert in HE based in an English university argued: ‘Higher education came to be understood as a private good rather than as a public good. On the right of the political spectrum this view also supported the idea that if higher education is a private good from which people benefit then those people should pay for it. On the left of the political spectrum there was the idea that since middle class people attend in larger proportions higher education than working class people, it is unfair that the latter fund higher education with public taxes. So there was an attack both from the right and the left of the political spectrum on public funding for higher education. So it was quite difficult to maintain public funding. Nobody was happy with this idea of public funding. Additionally, vice-​chancellors made pressure for having more funding. Therefore, all these things came together and caused the introduction of tuition fees and loans.’ (EN 13) The conception of HE as a private good, and therefore as an individual and family cost, has also been the dominant policy orientation among British vice-​chancellors over the last 30  years. A  former president of the organization Universities UK5 (UUK) indeed confided to us, “I’m in favour that people who attend universities should pay for their own education. It’s a positional good.” (EN 14) For many of our interviewees, the process of marketization represented a major and irreversible change in the field of HE in recent English history. These neoliberal transformations have heavily affected all the dimensions of HE we analyzed in Chapter 1 (see Table 1.1). With respect to university governance, for instance, the governance of English universities moved away from a model of ‘self-​academic government’ in which the role of academics was dominant, to an approach of ‘self-​ managerial government’ where the role of ‘academic managers’, who

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run the university as a business organization, is central (Cini, 2016). As a senior manager of the University of Birmingham stated: ‘Being a good academic is not enough to be a good university leader. You have also to understand politics and money. In our universities, for instance, we compete for all our income now. Not losing money in the things we do is crucial. There has to be a clear understanding of the business of the university in which we work. To a certain extent, it is true that we are becoming [like] business people in the universities.’ (EN 15) In this sense, English universities are today forced to compete in what a senior manager of UCL has laconically defined as a ‘neoliberalized environment’. In his words: ‘I believe we live in a neoliberalized environment. … What do I  mean by that? The external environment in which we operate is now a market-​environment. We compete for students, because through them we get more funding; we compete for students from the European Union and [from] out of the EU; more generally, we compete globally as universities; in the UK, we compete for grant funding; and we compete for staff. So, this means that the external environment in which we operate is embedded into neoliberalism. The environment is almost perfectly neoliberalized. This is a big change compared to ten years ago, when most of our grant was certain, guaranteed directly from our government. Now it’s mostly competitively run.’ (EN 16) Unlike HE sectors in continental Europe, such as Italy, France or Germany, the pace and the novelty of these changes have in fact brought about the establishment of a marketized sector whose features have constituted an important landmark for the neoliberal reforms in other European countries over the last 20 years (see Capano et al., 2017). England can thus be considered as the first experiment of marketization of HE, based on the American model, in the European area.

The recent round of neoliberal reforms in England Dismantling the system of public funding for HE did not mean –​ for the Conservatives –​dismantling the English system of HE and

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its quality. Considering the process of expansion of HE which was taking place in the 1980s, and the financial implications of such expansion in a context of declining GDP, the main objective of the Conservative governments was precisely to maintain a high quality standard of HE by replacing the public system of funding with a private one, mostly consisting of student fees and loans. Confirming such a policy goal, EN 12 confided to us that when implementing the HE reforms of the 1980s “we did not want to reduce the amount of funding for each student and the numbers of students. We wanted to protect the funding.” To do this, Thatcher intended to bind HE to the financial market. For a professor at the UCL Institute of Education: “the government was over-​borrowing. So, the idea was to reduce the public expenditure on HE by maintaining the same quality standard.” (EN 17) The policy goal of widening student participation in HEIs in a context of economic decline with the introduction of student loans and fees proved to be relatively successful from the 1990s onwards.6 On 1 December 1994, there were over one and a half million students at UK HEIs of whom 60.4 per cent were full-​time, 8.3 per cent were on sandwich courses, 29.2 per cent were part-​time and the remainder (2.1 per cent) were employing other modes of study (including the writing up of theses and dissertations). 78.6 per cent (1,231,988) of students were undergraduates. 80.8 per cent of these students were studying for a first degree, 19.2 per cent were on other undergraduate level courses. Male students were slightly in the majority, making up 50.3 per cent of the student population.7 As one can observe in Table 3.2 below, the British system of HE reached the threshold of the universal system of access of Trow’s typology (above 40 per cent of the age cohort of 19 years old) at the end of the 1990s after the implementation of the first round of student fees introduced by the first Blair government Table 3.2: Higher education initial participation rate (HEIPR)8 for first-time participants in courses at UK higher education institutions and English, Welsh and Scottish further education colleges (1999/​2000–​2005/​6) Academic year

1999/​ 2000

2000/​1

2001/​2

2002/​3

2003/​4

2004/​5

2005/​6

HEIPR (male and female) %

39 (39.3)

40 (39.7)

40 (40.2)

41 (41.2)

40 (40.3)

41 (41.3)

43 (42.8)

Initial entrants (thousands)

239

239

244

255

257

268

283

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(1997): from 39 per cent in the academic year 1999/​2000 to 43 per cent in 2005/​2006. More impressive are the data following the economic crisis and the introduction of the law providing for the tripling of tuition fees. In the academic year 2010/​11, 2.56 million students were studying for a qualification or for credit at 164 UK HEIs. Over two thirds (67.1 per cent) of the HE students were following a full-​time programme. A  higher proportion of female students (56.4 per cent) than male students (43.6 per cent) were studying in HE in the UK. This gender imbalance was more pronounced among students studying part-​time, of whom 61.1 per cent were female. Among other undergraduate students, nearly two thirds (64.3 per cent) were female.9 The data show that between 2008/​9 and 2015/​16 there was a fall in the total number of UK domiciled10 undergraduate students in HE, from 1,673,655 in 2008/​9 to 1,509,560 in 2015/​16. However, this overall change masks significant variations when the data are broken down by mode and level. There has been an overall rise in the number of UK domiciled first degree students (that is, students pursuing bachelor’s degrees), from 1,198,385 in 2008/​9 to 1,342,770 in 2015/​16. This total includes a rise among those studying full-​time (from 1,001,995 to 1,172,855), and a drop in those studying part-​time (from 196,395 to 169,915). By contrast, the number of UK domiciled students pursuing other undergraduate programmes (not bachelor’s degree students) has fallen significantly, from 475,265 in 2008/​9 to 166,795 in 2015/​16).11 Overall, by the academic year 2011/​12 the participation rate had risen to 49 per cent but fell back to 47 per cent in 2013/​14 because of the introduction of full student fees (Boden et al., forthcoming). Over the last three decades British governments have successfully reached the goal of widening student participation in HEIs in a context of increasing marketization. Yet, widening student participation has never meant the reduction of the gap, in terms of university access, between students with different social backgrounds. On the contrary, the privatization of the system of funding, exemplified by the introduction of student loans and fees, has accentuated the disparities of access between pupils and prospective students with a middle class background and those with a working class one. Exploring this process, Callender and Mason (2017, p 27) indeed noted that ‘the gap in attitudes between lower and upper-​class students widened, and fear of debt negatively contributed to lower-​class students’ anticipated HE participation relative to other social classes’. The fact that they also found out that ‘debt aversion seems more likely to deter anticipated HE

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participation among lower-​class students in 2015 than in 2002’ (2017, p 26) seems to confirm the hypothesis that the introduction of student fees has played a significant role in explaining such a difference.12 In short, debt averse attitudes contribute to lower HE participation by lower class students. The first decade of the 2000s marked a decisive turning point in the marketization of HE, as governments of all political hues enacted laws outsourcing services, cutting public funding, implementing the managerialization of governing bodies, and introducing tuition fees and student loans (McGettigan, 2013; Cini and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017). With respect to the funding system, this period clearly represented an acceleration of the privatization trend, culminating in the 2010 reform of tuition fees. In 1998, the New Labour government led by Mr Blair enacted a law which, for the first time in the history of English HE, introduced a system of tuition fees for university students, capped at £1,000 per year. In other words, New Labour continued the path of commodification of English HE that the Conservatives had kicked off in the early 1980s. In this sense, there was no significantly distinct political orientation with respect to university funding between the Conservatives and the New Labour Party of Tony Blair. Comparing the political orientations towards HE of the two main parties over the last two decades, a professor of higher education policy based in London indeed pointed out that at the time there was very little difference: “The Tories have finished off what Labour started with Tony Blair. Labour started the marketization. In many senses, what the Tories are doing now is just a continuation of what Labour introduced.” (EN 18) In this sense –​for another professor of higher education in a London-​based university –​“there was a unified policy agenda that has brought about the process of marketization without questioning it. There has never been a serious public debate about this process.” (EN 19) EN 13 pointed at some peculiar aspects of this process in her account of this period. She claimed: ‘there is a lot of consensus about the meaning and purpose of higher education in today’s UK. Both parties have put forward policies aimed at cutting public funding to HE. So, nothing controversial on substantive matters. The two main parties were very influenced by the vice-​chancellors on the quest for more [private] money to be brought into the universities. Both parties had a neoliberal project of HE. There is not a single important voice very critical

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towards this agenda: neither at the political level, nor at the institutional level, nor at the economic and/​or social level. Beginning with Thatcher, all the political reforms of the last 30  years have been underpinned by these views.’ (EN 13) In continuity with such a policy of privatization, the Labour Party produced in 2003 a White Paper, ‘The Future of Higher Education’, that regarded increasing university fees as one of the key measures to promote a first-​rate system of HE. In 2004, the ‘Higher Education Act’ put forward that proposal, introducing a system of variable (and higher) tuition fees, establishing a £3,290 per year cap (instead of the former £1,000) on the amount that universities can charge to students. It was within such a normative framework13 that, on 12 October 2010, the Browne Review or Independent Review of ‘Higher Education Funding and Student Finance’ was released. The review, whose name derives from the chair –​Lord Browne of Madingley –​ recommended wide-​ranging changes to the system of university funding, among which was the removal of the cap on the level of fees that universities can charge and a cut to the teaching budget up to £700 million, with funding concentrated in priority areas such as medicine and engineering. In Browne’s view, a better HE system could be achieved only if universities were allowed to charge their students the level of tuition fees considered necessary. On 14 November the coalition government introduced legislation to implement the Browne proposals, with some modifications. First, the government announced the implementation of a plan of cuts in public funding for humanities departments (80 per cent of all university teaching revenues), maintaining instead the same amount of provision for the so-​called priority subjects. Second, and most importantly, the most significant modification provided for by the government’s proposal concerned the increase in tuition fees. Instead of removing the cap on the level of fees that universities could charge  –​as suggested by the review  –​the government’s proposal established a £9,000 cap per year on tuition fees. 14 Finally, the government’s plan envisaged another highly-​contested proposal: the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA). The EMA is a means-​tested scheme devised to make college education more attractive to students from poorer backgrounds: it is a weekly payment of up to £30 for 16 to 18-​year-​olds having a household income of less than £30,810. Most of the students who benefit from this scheme are in further education (FE).15

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In sum, England represented a paradigmatic case of early adoption of neoliberalism, with policies of deregulation, privatization and commodification of areas previously protected being implemented in a very radical manner. The cost of tuition has been growing over recent decades, with universities suffering budget cuts that date back to the 1980s. Moreover, measures of managerialization and performance assessment have been applied since then. Decisive policy changes advancing HE liberalization also occurred under centre-​left governments –​although protests have been more intense under centre-​ right or conservative governments (Cini and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017).

Higher-education transformations in Quebec: a not-​fully-​marketized sector? In the federal state of Canada, education policies are legislated at the provincial level (that is, the state level). Over the last 50  years, the provincial state in Quebec has acquired competences that are normally the privilege of national states, and in some areas its competences exceed those of other provinces in the country. For example, immigration, taxes, healthcare and education are devolved to the provincial, Quebec level. The origins of the contemporary HE system in this province are to be found in the Quiet Revolution, the revolution tranquille of the 1960s. The concept refers to an intense reformist period led by the premier Jean Lesage from the PLQ, which included profound changes to the economy, society and construction of a modern welfare state. Moreover, the period is characterized by a revival of a nationalist sentiment, with demands concerning language and recognition for the francophone culture acquiring great centrality in public debate. The emergence of a strong pro-​sovereignty movement in this period is related to the socio-​economic inequalities of the region, in particular, the position of perceived backwardness experienced historically by the francophone population (Graefe, 2016). Lesage promoted the secularization of society, which included the creation of national educational institutions. His government placed education as a national priority in the project of modernization, and set up a Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education. The commission was headed by a Catholic clergyman, Msgr Alphonse-​ Marie Parent (1906–​70), who served as chairman from 1961 to 1966. The Parent commission delivered a lengthy report that contained a number of recommendations for public policy, which the government implemented in large measure. The government created the Ministry of Education (1964) and took control over the school system, drastically

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reducing the number of establishments in the hands of the Catholic and Protestant churches (Dufour, 1997). The Parent report established that education should be seen as a social right, which included the commitment to accessible French language HE, and the creation of a tuition fee system of post-​secondary colleges (Collège d’enseignement général et professional, CEGEPs). As many as 21 CEGEPs were created in 1967, offering two-​year programmes leading to university and three-​year programmes of technical education leading directly to the labour market. The system continued its expansion throughout the 1970s; there are 48 CEGEPs at the present time, with only five of them being English language colleges. Until the 1960s only three francophone universities existed: Université Laval, Université de Montréal and Université de Sherbrooke. Moreover, there were three English language universities: McGill, Bishop’s and Sir George Williams (which after its merger with Loyola College would become Concordia University in 1974). All of them had the status of public universities and as such they were funded by the provincial government. The Parent report suggested that, to meet the demands for FE of a growing population (in the context of the baby boom) and to contribute to national development, the university system should be expanded. Thus, the government created the Université du Québec network of institutions in 1968. The network started with four campuses (Montreal, Trois Rivieres, Chicoutimi, Rimouski), but currently there are ten universities distributed across the province. One of the main goals of this network is to ensure the geographical accessibility of universities to all Quebecers.16 Drawing on the recommendations of the Parent report, the government adopted the goal of making HE financially accessible, and while CEGEPs were established as tuition fees, a small fee was introduced for university education. Imposed in the 1960s, tuition fees were considered a transitory measure that was required to ensure the expansion of the university system. However, it established a horizon, a goal to be achieved in the medium to long term, which became one of the main aspirations of student unions ever since. Tuition fees were nominally frozen between 1968 to 1990. In 1986, during the government of Robert Bourassa (PLQ), the Gobeil report recommended increasing tuition fees three or fourfold, depending on the programme. This report proposed a radical departure from the principles that had guided the development of the welfare state in the 1960s, as it suggested a vast programme of state retrenchment and privatization of public companies and services (Ratel and Verreault-​ Julien, 2006). In 1990 the same government ended the tuition fee

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freeze, introducing a C$280 increase per year over four years, which students unsuccessfully resisted. Between 1989 and 1994, tuition fees increased from C$567 to C$1,668 (Maroy et al., 2014). In 1994, the PQ government of Lucien Bouchard announced a freeze in tuition fees, which the same administration would however contradict in 1996 when it announced a 30 per cent increase. The PQ, a political party that embraced social democratic principles in the 1970s, had in fact then aligned with the rhetoric of zero deficit for public budgets. Massive opposition from student associations succeeded in halting the tuition fee hikes this time (Ratel and Verreault-​Julien, 2006). Tuition fees remained frozen until 2007.

Higher-education reforms in Quebec in the 2000s Since the 1990s, with the Quiet Revolution’s promise of free university education fading into the past, provincial governments have attempted to raise tuition fees. As governments of different colours have embraced the need to augment the contributions of families and students to finance the HE system, student aid programmes and tuition fee levels have become major issues in the HE discussion. In 2005, in the context of a PLQ government that was committed to run a public budget of austerity, the Quebec government proposed changing C$100 million of grants into loans. Students, led by CASSÉÉ, the antecedent of CLASSE, opposed this shift with strikes and demonstrations. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the mobilization levels were significant, with the longest strike in Quebec history until that point (6 weeks) and the largest student demonstration on 15 March 2005 (100,000 protesters). An agreement was then reached when the Canadian Millenium Scholarship Foundation agreed to fund scholarships and to even increase them in Quebec in exchange for the partial withdrawal of the provincial government proposal (Maroy et al., 2014). While FECQ and FEUQ supported the agreement, CASSÉÉ refused it. The associations affiliated to the coalition continued the strike, but they were not able to achieve further changes. For the coalition, ‘the changes this [reform] will bring are not simple readjustments: this reform is a general attack on the accessibility of education, on the autonomy of students and students benefiting [from state support] and an obvious gift to financial institutions’ (CASSÉÉ, cited in Armstrong, 2014). In 2007, the PLQ administration announced an increase in tuition fees, by C$50 per semester over the next five years (C$500 in total). Students associations protested the measure but were not able to mobilize in large numbers against it. In 2010, the government reiterated

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its intention to address the so-​called problem of ‘severe underfunding of the university system’ with further increases in tuition fees. This announcement would materialize with the presentation of the public budget in 2011, despite student associations declaring their opposition and demanding negotiations with the government. As the government did not consent to discuss the matter with student representatives, by the end of 2011 CLASSE was determined to initiate a strike at the beginning of 2012. The policy of low tuition fees in the Quebec university system favoured the expansion of HE in social strata that had been less likely to attend university (Maroy et al., 2014). As Maroy and his colleagues put it, ‘the number of students increased continuously from 1966 to 1990, especially in French speaking universities. Between 1991 and 2001, enrolment stagnated and even declined. Higher tuition fees in the early 1990s were followed by a decrease in the student population of francophone universities. Since then, growth has resumed, but at a lower rate’ (Maroy et al., 2014, p 189). The policies adopted since the 1960s have indeed improved access to university education (Laplante et al., 2016). Access to university education has been a central issue in the structuration of the HE system since the 1960s. The goals of democratic and egalitarian access to a university system that were considered a key component of a strategy of socio-​economic development and nation building became inscribed in the collective imagination of Quebec society. The state itself actively attempted to fulfil this goal, at least until the 1990s. Student activism emerged in the context of this national project, borrowing ideas and inspiration from the French anti-​fascist model of militant trade unionism. In this context, it has played the role of vanguard for the realization of these ideals, staging eight general strikes before 2012 (1968, 1974, 1978, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1996 and 2005). All of these strikes have been related to tuition fees and the system of bursaries and loans, achieving the withdrawal of proposed hikes and the expansion of student aid schemes (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013). Thus, student associations have been a powerful factor in the HE system, and arguably have contributed to the building of a pattern of (relatively) low tuition fees in Quebec, within the context of North America, to date. According to official statistics, Quebec has the second lowest tuition fee average in Canada (C$2,851 in 2016), well below the C$6,373 average, with Newfoundland and Labrador being the province with the lowest tuition (C$2,759). The highest tuition fees are in Ontario (C$8,144) and Nova Scotia (C$7,218) (Statistics Canada, 2016).

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The lobby of university principals, CREPUQ (Conference Des Recteurs Et Des Principaux Des Universités Du Québec), has also played an important role in HE. Founded in 1967, it represented universities to the provincial authorities and was a privileged interlocutor with the government. In addition to lobbying, CREPUQ developed a tight coordination among universities in regard to various issues such as exchange and international programmes, credit recognition, library loan agreements in Quebec and Canada, and negotiation of group licenses, among other things. The body was supportive of the proposal of tuition hikes by the Charest administration in 2010–​11, and had long been aligned with the notion that the main problem of the university system was a situation of underfunding provoked by the tuition fee freezes of the past (Katz, 2015). The 2012 strike made evident important differences among universities within this body, in particular between the group of so-​called chartered universities on the one hand –​that is, those institutions whose existence has been sanctioned by special laws –​and the ten institutions that belong to the Université de Québec network on the other. While all universities in the province are public and receive public funding, the universities created before the 1960s and especially the Anglophone ones have different origins that in turn affect their governance. These universities want to preserve their distinctiveness and autonomy, granted by special charters. In turn, the institutions in the Université de Québec network demand treatment according to their public role in delivering university education across the province. Furthermore, research-​intensive institutions demand policies and subsidies that allow them to compete in the global market of HE. Anglophone universities would be better positioned to attract foreign students and researchers than francophone institutions. These divides show a growing process of differentiation in the university system that the recent student protests made visible and accelerated. One of the representatives of the Bureau de coopération interuniversitaire, a professor in a leadership position in a highly prestigious French-​speaking university, described the process that leads to differentiation as follows: ‘we need a little more money to be competitive. The question is, it will be impossible to have 18 universities among the top 1 per cent. So, are we looking for the 18 universities within the first 5 per cent in the world, 10 per cent? I don’t know. Or, are we looking to keep McGill and University of Montreal in the top 100 of the world? So,

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if we want, and if McGill wants, to stay in the top 1 per cent, same thing for University of Montreal, we will need more money, that’s for sure. … So, the question is: should they give equally to each university, telling [them] that they will be all good? But we need also in the country, the province, a top university, a really top university. And top universities will cost more than the average university. … We don’t really care from where the money will come, from the government or from the students.’ (QUE 3) The political consensus around the notion of free university education as a desirable policy goal, forged in Quebec during the period of the Quiet Revolution, has been challenged. However, a new consensus based on alternative ideas such as the just contribution of families and students to HE has been difficult to achieve. This has created tensions that can also be observed in other fields of social policy that have been the target of neoliberal reforms. Expressions of these tensions are found in the opposition of student associations and trade unions to successive plans of austerity and reduction of the public deficit since the 1990s.

Higher-education transformations in Italy: a not-​fully-​marketized sector? Unlike other countries (UK, Chile and Spain), the admission system to Italian universities has never been ‘conditional’ in the sense of allowing the admission of new first year students based on the performance of applicants in standardized tests.17 Nor has admission ever depended on average marks during secondary school, or on a combination of these two (selection based on merit at the end of high school). Despite the absence of these mechanisms of selection, only a tiny minority of the age cohort of 19-​year-​olds was allowed to enrol in Italian universities in the two decades following the Second World War. More notably, only pupils graduating from humanities and scientific high schools were formally admitted to university. The majority of these came from families with a middle or an upper class background. As a result, and like other university systems in continental Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, the Italian university system was structurally ‘elitist’ (Trow, 2006). However, from the late 1950s onwards, the Italian university system began undergoing a process of massification without any significant change being made to institutional arrangements (Capano et  al., 2017). Only at the end of the 1960s did the then Italian government

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Figure 3.1: Number of first-year university enrolments 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000

0

1971/72 1973/74 1975/76 1977/78 1979/80 1981/82 1983/84 1985/86 1987/88 1989/90 1991/92 1993/94 1995/96 1997/98 1999/00 2001/02 2003/04 2005/06 2007/08 2009/10 2011/12 2013/14

50,000

Source: Istat, Survey on Universities, Years 1971–97; MIUR, Survey on Universities, Years 1998–2014.

adopt some legislative measures to tackle the issue of massification by gradually initiating a process of liberalization of university access (Ortoleva, 1988). In this regard, the Codignola law was introduced (no. 910) on 11 December 1969, granting all those with a high school diploma of any kind access to all university faculties and liberalizing individual courses of study, while allowing students to freely choose and arrange personalized plans of study (Palermo, 2011). Compared to the 1950s, Italian universities became more democratic; every person with a high school diploma could now enter any university and elaborate his/​her own study plan regardless of the strict official programmes provided by the Ministry of Education. As Figure 3.1 shows, after the liberalization of university access in 1970, the number of first year students enrolled has increased, following a gradual yet constant trend with slight up-​and-​downs over the course of the entire period (1971–​2014). Since the academic year 1974/​75 (228,173 students), the increase in the number enrolled has never been less than 7 per cent per year. In the year 1990/​91, the number enrolled went beyond, for the first time, the threshold of 300,000 (318,419). The peak of the entire period (360,238) was achieved in the year 1993/​94, when the increase in terms of first year enrolments reached almost 70 per cent vis-​à-​vis 1971/​72 (212,098). Only with the onset of the economic crisis in 2008/​9 did the number of students enrolled gradually start to decrease year-​on-​ year, reaching the lowest value of 252,457 in 2013/​14 (approaching the number enrolled in the academic year 1983/​84, 251,799).

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Figure 3.2: Percentage of students enrolling at university, aged 19–​25 years, by gender and total (1971/​72–​2013/​14) 60 50 40 30 20

2013/14

2011/12

2009/10

2007/08

2005/06

2003/04

2001/02

1999/00

1997/98

1995/96

1993/94

1991/92

1989/90

1987/88

1985/86

1983/84

1981/82

1979/80

1977/78

1975/76

1973/74

0

1971/72

10

Enrolment rate: 1971/72–2013/14 (Male) Enrolment rate: 1971/72–2013/14 (Female) Enrolment rate: 1971/72–2013/14 (Total) Source: Istat, Survey on Universities, Years 1971–97; MIUR, Survey on Universities, Years 1998–2014.

Even more interesting are the data showcasing the rate of student enrolment per 100 young people (also by gender) aged 19–​25 in the period between 1971–​2014 that are illustrated in Figure 3.2. If up to the academic year 1973/​74 the Italian system of HE was still considered as ‘elitist’ (1971/​72:  13.4 per cent; 1972/​73:  14.2 per cent; 1973/​ 74: 15.1 per cent), from 1975 it finally took on the characteristics of the ‘mass’ model (16.1 per cent). Yet, and unlike the HE systems of northern European countries, the Italian system has never managed to become a universal system of HE. More specifically, the rate of student enrolments has constantly increased throughout this period, reaching its peak in the academic year 2008/​9 (41.5 per cent), after which, and in the aftermath of the economic crisis, it started to decline overall (2009/​10: 39.6 per cent; 2010/​11: 39 per cent; 2011/​12: 39.2 per cent; 2012/​13: 39.3 per cent; 2013/​14: 38 per cent). By and large, and if compared to the other cases under investigation, Italy has exhibited a relatively low trend of student enrolments, along with a delayed intervention by the legislature on the matter of HE, throughout the entire republican period (from 1948 onwards). These features of Italian HE could also be imputed to the relatively low interest that Italian society has historically exhibited towards HE. Indeed, the main political parties and actors have overall shown little

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attention to the issue of HE (Capano et al., 2017). Such a low level of interest was not limited to the political system, but also shared by other social actors, such as the main Italian businesses and, more broadly, by public opinion. For several Italian policy experts and scholars, the historically low level of attention towards HE policy has been one of the main factors explaining the delay by Italian governments in adopting and implementing systematic reforms of HE in line with the Anglo-​American model of the 1980s (see Moscati, 2012; Capano et al., 2017). According to Moscati (2012), when dealing with the matter of HE, Italian governments have mostly adopted a sort of ‘mosaic strategy’. Italian HE reforms were normally the outcome of non-​linear policy processes, not completely linked to a general framework of modernization of the HE sector as in northern European countries. This may explain why a systematic plan of reforms of Italian HE was designed and implemented only in the early 1990s, with the adoption of a set of measures based upon the principles of NPM. The declared purpose of these reforms, also known as ‘the autonomy reforms’ (reforms for enhancing institutional autonomy in the sector) was to drastically reduce the rate of dropout and the period spent in university by most Italian students. As a professor of public policy at an Italian university put it in his interview: “Italian universities … were inefficient. Autonomy served to limit the efficiency of the system with many dropouts (above 60 per cent until 2000).” (IT 8) The autonomy reforms were designed to restructure the Italian HE sector following principles of efficiency and effectiveness. The reforms introduced contract management, evaluation and assessment, as well as institutional autonomy and accountability. More specifically, the Italian legislature pursued three key principles of the NPM narrative through these reforms: autonomy, evaluation/​ assessment, and financial accountability/​responsibility. As summarized by Regini (2014, p 19), the three pillars of the autonomy reforms were: ‘x) awarding of institutional autonomy to individual universities; y) introduction of competitive mechanisms of funding rewarding or penalizing universities on the basis of the results achieved; z) evaluation of the quality of research and teaching of each autonomous university.’ The substantial and political aim of these reforms was to stimulate the entrance of market and entrepreneurial mechanisms in the university system and, at the same time, to enable the state to devise, administer and implement standards to reward good practice and punish weak performance. In the view of a former consultant of the university funding system for the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities

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and Research (MUIR) (1993–​8), behind autonomy there was “a sleek design, the idea that you could rule the system through a quasi-​ market mechanism, through the allocation of resources based on an incentive mechanism” (IT 9). In the same vein, a former minister of the MIUR (1996–​8) stated that, “the general interest was first to connect the university with the professions market. … Therefore, there were objective social interests supporting those reforms.” (IT 10) Law 168/​1989 introduced important structural changes in terms of the distribution of authority, degree of autonomy of the institutions, and mechanisms of coordination. The rationale of the law was to move towards a supervisory model of governance, in which the state engages in incentive-​based steering from a distance, that is, by ‘setting the legal and financial boundaries and using instruments of quality control’ (Moscati, 2012). For this to happen, first Law 168/​1989 established the MIUR as the principal state authority for governing and funding the national research system. Second, it allowed the universities some facets and degrees of autonomy, which had to go alongside the setting up of an evaluation system that conferred on them the power to approve their own statutes and regulations in the framework of greater financial and organizational independence. For financial accountability to happen, the then Italian government approved an amendment to the state general financial law of 1993, allowing the MIUR to give annually a lump sum to each university, distributed according to certain parameters. This measure established the responsibility of universities for the allocation of resources given by the state; a change from line item budgeting to lump sum budgeting. The universities became responsible for decisions over the composition of their teaching personnel:  the number of professors needed, the qualifications requested, the distribution by professional level, and recruitment policies. For IT 9, “the new system of funding represented a Copernican revolution”. The transformation of the financial leverage was considered as a most important aspect of the reform. According to IT 8: ‘We tend to overlook the epochal passage epitomized by the financial autonomy introduced in 1994. Since 1994 onwards, universities have had a financial budget at their own disposal. Before 1994, it was the Minister who used to tell you even how much toilet paper you were supposed to buy.’ Finally, the principle of evaluation was introduced shortly after the implementation of financial autonomy, when the MIUR created

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the Observatory of the Universities (in 1999 transformed into the National Committee for the Evaluation of Universities, CNVSU) as the national agency responsible for the evaluation of both teaching and research at the system level, and the Units of Internal Evaluation as the local organs of evaluation designed to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching and research expenditure within and for each university. With this third and final set of interventions (along with the introduction of institutional autonomy and financial accountability), the governments of the 1990s aimed at fully enacting the building process of the neoliberal university in Italy. However, the adoption of these reforms failed to bring about the expected effects on the field of HE, which showed, in fact, a great ability to avoid change and maintain its key features: an enduring domination of professorial power in the governing bodies of universities; informal and persisting procedures of ‘collective self-​promotion’ of the baronial class (Palermo, 2011); and lack of clear and binding mechanisms of self-​evaluation and self-​assessment of teaching and research. To sum up, two significant problems for the implementation of the reforms were detected by various policy experts (see Capano et al., 2017). First, these reforms were introduced to the academic world from the outside; from political institutions. As a professor of sociology of education at a university in Milan confirmed, “the main political mistake was to propose a change from above, without discussing with and involving the academic class. A top-​down approach. The academic class has thus formally implemented the reforms, but it has substantially continued to act on its own head.” (IT 11) Similarly, IT 10 argued, “it was our own decision, outside of the academic world.” Second, although a significant number of different and various interests supported them, the institutions had no real and strong political project. For IT 8, the absence of a clear political vision for universities represented a truly “Italian peculiarity”. ‘In England, there is a political vision on the role of university within society. The politician is not the mediator of social interests, but he is the actor leading the policy process. In Italy, we do not have this thing. Our politicians have never had their own vision on the university system. They have always played the role of mediators … we do not have a university policy. At the ministry, there is nobody who has a political vision on our educational policy. The state officials are all legal experts who do not know much about university.’

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Thus, the policy field of HE exhibits the typical structure of Italian policy making; generally, there is no political design or systematic plan to adopt and implement, but only ad-​hoc measures, often contingent outcomes of power struggles between different interest groups behind closed doors (see Capano et al., 2017). This policy pattern constitutes a significant difference vis-​à-​vis the patterns of Chile or England, where a specific and consistent set of interests and ideas usually dominates the field by driving its policies.

Higher-education reforms in Italy in the 2000s With the aim of correcting the ‘bad’ implementation of the autonomy reforms of the 1990s, which was considered to have benefited the class of professors, the plan of HE reforms of the 2000s, carried out by the second and third Berlusconi governments, aimed at reducing the power of academics and accelerating university marketization. In the government’s view, Italian professors had taken advantage of the new institutional conditions of a system capable of ‘producing autonomy without accountability’ (in recruitment policy, career promotion and organization of curricula), namely, autonomy not accompanied by a complementary process of institutional competition and evaluation (Regini, 2014, p 25). This situation of ‘autonomy without accountability’ was particularly problematic after the implementation in 1997 of the principle of didactic autonomy, which, according to several policy experts and consultants close to the Italian government, fostered a proliferation and multiplication of courses, programmes, and curricula, created ad hoc to expand the number and resources of various disciplinary groups. In the years 2004–​10 all the efforts of the Berlusconi governments were thus officially directed towards reversing what they perceived as professorial abuses resulting from the process of autonomy by making the governance structure of the universities more managerial. It was, they claimed, to punish these abuses that in 2008 the Berlusconi government introduced with Law 133 the most impressive cuts in public spending for the Italian field of HE. The cutbacks provided for by Law 133 (€1.5 billion in five years), perceived as the final attack on the conception of HE as a public good, sparked the massive student protests occurring in 2008 (see Chapter 2). A further and significant step in the process of university marketization was taken in 2006, when the government established the ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of Higher Education and Research) replacing the previous evaluation agency

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(CNVSU). De facto a section of the MIUR, the ANVUR was aimed at rationalizing ‘the system of quality assessment activities of university research institutions and public and private receipt of public funds’. The results of its assessment activities were expected ‘to constitute a reference mark for the allocation of state funding to universities and research institutes’ (Law 240/​2010). Thereby the establishment of the ANVUR triggered both a process of national (re)centralization of some key functions of universities (such as content and direction of research, management of funding, and so on), and an acceleration of the internal managerialization of university governance. The thrust towards a managerialized type of university governance had been a goal of all right-​wing Italian governments. The governance of Italian universities maintained four distinguishable characteristics throughout the 2000s, featuring still the presence of a strong academic oligarchy (Dobbins and Knill, 2014). First, Italian universities experienced a ‘bloating’ of both main academic management institutions –​the academic senate and the board of administration –​ to accommodate all actors, more especially all the factions of the departments and disciplinary groups. Second, the incorporation of such a broad spectrum of interests and actors led to tedious processes of consensus-​finding. This brought about a very slow decision-​making process based on the ‘corporatist-​democratic’ negotiation among all the university disciplinary groups (Capano, 2008). Third, due to the strong academic presence, both governing bodies were staffed with people who were strongly affected by the decisions taken, in particular those of a distributive nature. Fourth, the academic dominance of the board of administration brought about a lack of staff with budgeting and entrepreneurial skills. To contrast these aspects, the plan of HE reform, approved at the end of 2010 (Law 240/​2010) represented –​in the intention of the then Minister of Higher Education, Maria Stella Gelmini, as claimed to the media –​the most important attempt to crack down on the power of academics and turn the system of internal authority in the direction of a managerial pattern of governance, as experienced in the English HEIs. Law 240/​2010 established thus several substantial novelties mainly on the matter of the restructuring of governance. Most notably, the reform aimed at changing the Italian university governance in three directions: (a) the centralization of the university leadership, (b) the managerialization of decisional bodies, and (c) the reduction of the power of the collegial organs (Regini, 2014). For this to happen, the law elevated the role of the rector to that of a university top manager by setting a term of six years’ mandate not

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renewable, and essentially making this organ the politically leading figure responsible for the whole university. More importantly, Law 240 aimed to differentiate between the functions of the academic senate and the board of administration by conferring more substantive power to the latter. While the decisional power of the senate was restricted to mere  academic issues such as the organization of curricula and courses, the board of administration acquired all the decisional powers over the main financial and administrative issues of the university, such as the annual (and triennial) budget plans and staff recruitment. The board of administrators, in part appointed by the rector, and which had to include at least three members coming from external stakeholders, became the strategic-​political body of the university. Moreover, allegedly to curb the problem of democratic over-​ representation of academics in all governing bodies, Law 240 prescribed to shut down the faculties, considered as the historical locus of academics, and replace them with departments, to which a certain financial autonomy was now awarded. Finally, Law 240 prescribed that the universities rewrite their statutes by the end of 2011 with the aim of implementing the new managerial principles in their governance structure. It was precisely to halt such a managerialization of HE that Italian students and researchers rose up and mobilized between late 2010 and early 2011 (see Chapter 2). In sum, the HE reforms of the 2000s, aimed at restructuring the sector on the basis of NPM principles to make it more competitive and marketized, begot a significant discontent among various university actors (especially the weakest ones, such as students and junior academics) which in a few years coalesced, giving rise to the mobilizations of 2008 and 2010.

Conclusions The cost of HE must be seen as a crucial aspect in the process of the marketization of HE, considering its direct impact on the life conditions of students and of their families. The transfer of funding responsibilities from the state to the families (or the customers) thus constitutes a potential source of discontent. This process, if it is accompanied by a rapid expansion of enrolment in tertiary education, can become particularly destabilizing. Student struggles over the process of privatization and/​or reduction of public funding represent clear instances of contestation to the marketization of academia. Tuition fees are today a major distributional issue, as it refers to the classic political

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economy questions: who is going to bear the financial burden of tertiary education? Who benefits from higher levels of tertiary education? This is a crucial normative issue that is often sidelined by policy makers and politicians (Cini and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017). In this chapter, we have summarized the processes of marketization in the fields of HE of Chile, England, Italy and Quebec over the last three decades. Although a common trend of convergence towards a neoliberal model of HE can be noticed, differences in the specific policy measures implemented by each government remain pronounced. The presence of specific values concerning the role of the state in the funding of HE, the pace of implementation of neoliberal policies, the degree of institutional autonomy conferred to individual universities, and the employment relations of their staff all played a decisive role in the way the four political-​institutional contexts shaped the norms of behaviour of the university actors. As shown in this chapter, England and Chile proved to be more permeable with regard to the introduction of neoliberal practices in HE than Italy and Quebec. Such a different pace in the marketization process has also heavily impacted in the practices and conceptions of the leading university actors. This also reflected in the different reactions of various HE actors during the episodes of student unrest analyzed in this book. These differences in the adoption of pro-​market norms and practices shaped different structures of opportunity (and constraint) for students, universities and governments, among the four cases studied, as will be explained in the following chapters.

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Student Politics Introduction When activists plan a mobilization campaign, decide the timing of their actions, prepare their public discourses and design the modes in which they will attempt to involve their constituencies, among other crucial aspects of all protest movements, they show how agency is at the centre of resistances and struggles. But protest movements are situated historically. Activists do not decide in a vacuum. History, institutions and cultures leave an imprint on the contemporaneity of social movements, not only as structures that condition and limit but also as sources of creativity and agency. To understand what student activists do and how they do it, we must look at the characteristics of the organizations in which they act, where these organizations come from, their connections with the party system, and the traditions of activism that feed and shape the new generations of students. In this chapter, we focus on two dimensions to explain the ways in which students react to changes in the HE sector. First, the extent to which the student body has access to decision-​making instances, at levels that include university governance and the governance of the HE sector, is examined. The question to be answered here is: how do students relate to state and educational institutions? The recognition of students as counterparts, stakeholders or customers signals different ways in which the state regulates students’ access to key instances of decision making. Similarly, access can be regular (institutionalized and regulated by law) or exceptional (dependent upon the willingness of university or political leaders to include students in their decisional bodies). It is maintained that the degree of institutionalization of student representation within HE fields shapes the ways in which students access HE decisional bodies, organize their claim-​making and other activities, and helps form their interests and demands. The kind of relations

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between student organizations and authorities constitutes an important component of the structure of opportunities available to students. The second dimension, which we call student politics, conceptualizes the forms that student activism takes, irrespective of the degrees of formalization and recognition from the state. The main question here is: how do students do politics? It is contended that cultures of political activism heavily influence the ways in which this happens. The stronger the tradition of political activism, the more militant in terms of tactics and demands the student movement is expected to be. Associated with this, it is to be considered whether student politics is organized centrally and nationally and/​or exhibits a nationwide scope of intervention by claiming, for instance, to represent the entire student body and targeting, or not, central and national authorities. If this is the case, we speak of a coordinated field of student politics. In such a field, student governments become arenas in which groups of students, organized by ideological, political or other common features, attempt to represent and/​or mobilize the student body. Here, student governments (federations and unions) exert attraction over a significant portion of activists, shaping the whole field of student politics. In coordinated fields, an overlapping between formal organizations (federations and unions) and informal organizations (politico-​ideological groups, affinity groups and even branches of political parties) is noticeable. Activists often participate both in formal and informal groups simultaneously, as ideological or affinity groups consider formal organizations as tools and platforms to pursue their agenda. Participation in various organizations sometimes amplifies the effect of activism. Internal elections, congresses, caucuses and assemblies set the clock of internal competitions. The institutions of student government –​student associations, federations or unions –​are important as they offer resources and legitimacy that allow the leading groups to implement their agenda. When these institutions are well established, they can become the vehicles through which students attempt to influence HE or university policies, or even intervene in national politics or transnational campaigns. On the contrary, when no organization can successfully claim the representation of significant parts of the student body, we refer to fragmented fields of student politics. In this variety, there are no established arenas of political competition, no group can voice student demands in a coherent, structured manner, and authorities (university leaders, politicians and governmental actors) can easily disregard students. Normally, this scenario depicts the case of locally-​based networks of organizations connecting different subnational geographical areas and/​

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or university campuses, which can sometimes be accompanied by the presence of a nationwide organization having, however, a low degree of autonomy vis-​à-​vis state authorities and with secondary roles in protest activities. Formal and informal organizations do not overlap, as they tend to work with different agendas and pursue often divergent goals, and activists choose one in which to invest their time and effort. In coordinated fields of student politics, the existence of institutions of student government recognized by the student base, provides incentives for coordinated collective action among affinity or politico-​ ideological groups. They tend to facilitate the building of coalitions within the heterogeneous landscape of campuses. On the contrary, in fragmented fields of student politics, the weakness or lack of student governments makes more difficult the emergence of coalitions among the plurality of groups. If they are recognized by their bases, student governments can become a facilitating factor for the coordination of various groups that populate university campuses. This facilitating effect can occur irrespective of the specific forms these governments might take (associations, unions or federations). Large protest campaigns are more likely when the competition among groups (for leadership, internal resources or support among the student base) is suspended and movements voice a relatively coherent set of demands. Student governments can perform this function more efficiently than other sorts of bodies. It is argued that, while higher degrees of institutionalization of student organizations tend to channel the relationship between students and institutions into a more conventional pattern, the structuration of the field of student politics can offset this effect, leading students towards rather confrontational stances. This outcome is more likely when the perception of threat is high, the sector has endured policy changes that undermine previous arrangements, and/​or traditions of activism predispose students to higher levels of politicization. The four regions studied in this book represent different configurations. While the centrality, resilience and strength of student associations creates a unified field of student politics both in Quebec and Chile, in England and Italy we observe a rather fragmented field, as student unions have lost their former centrality and a plurality of informal organizations constantly compete for the hegemony in student politics. Similarly, a low level of formalization of student representation, which translates as limited access to the policy-​making process, is characteristic of Italy and Chile. In contrast, in England and Quebec, students have some channels to make their voice heard and their organizations enjoy degrees of legal protection and resources. In

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this chapter we offer a detailed account of these features and of the ways they shape different modes of student activism.

Low institutionalization, coordinated field: Chile Chile is a case showing low levels of institutionalization of student governments within a coordinated field of student politics. As we explain in this section, the prevailing political culture gives high relevance to traditional student associations as privileged arenas of activism. These associations act as if they had the monopoly of representation of the student body. This compensates for the lack of recognition of student federations in the governance of HEIs and as legitimate counterparts of the student body before the authorities. This latter characteristic in particular distinguishes the Chilean case from the Quebecoise one. College students in Chile have traditionally been organized through associations. At the level of schools, faculties or departments, these organizations are called student centres (Centros de Alumnos, Centros de Estudiantes), while at the university level they are called federations (Federaciones de Estudiantes). The existence of these organizations dates back to 1906, when FECH was born. These organizations have been significant actors in social justice campaigns through the 20th century, including the struggle against Pinochet’s dictatorship. This historical background shapes them in profound ways even today. Federations are not legally recognized. Their elections are based on customary rules which vary from federation to federation. Some organizations have internal acts that regulate their governance, but these have little or no legal value. Almost all practices of decision making, and the rights and obligations of members of executive committees, student centres and single students, are regulated on a conventional, customary basis. Federations do not collect fees from their members and do not receive direct state subsidies, even though most universities offer some financial assistance, facilitating venues and resources such as the use of computers, telephones, or the refund of travel expenses. Some federations organize parties, events or celebrations to generate some income from the sale of drinks, food or tickets. Others establish partnerships with private companies for sponsorship for merchandising products such as T-​shirts or agendas, but this is an option restricted to the most established federations, or to those in universities with a numerous (or rich) student population. Overall, for economic matters, federations are dependent on the funding provided by their home

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institutions. However, no binding agreements exist between federations and universities, and their relationship is based on mutual recognition and trust. Therefore, there can be a significant disparity in terms of the resources they have at their disposal.1 The path towards acceptance by authorities in private universities has not been without difficulties. Authorities in these institutions are susceptible to being heavily influenced by the ideological agendas of their owners who, in many cases, are not sympathetic to the idea of students organizing, or who simply fear that federations would politicize academic life in an improper manner. Some institutions have also attracted students from the upper echelons of society, not known for being eager to organize themselves in student unions. Nevertheless, federations were eventually created in most of these institutions, especially after 2011, including in those oriented to the social elite. Federations’ executive committees are elected in competitive elections based on the principle of one student, one vote. Some federations have statutes that establish minimum quorums of turnout to validate elections; in FECH, for example, the quorum is 40 per cent of students enrolled in undergraduate programmes, while in FEUC it is 50 per cent. Yet other federations, such as FEUACH (Federación de Estudiantes, Universidad Austral de Chile) and FEC (Universidad de Concepción) have not established quorums of validation. In most federations, the most important decision-​making body is the student board (in FECH it is called pleno de federación, in FEUC consejo de federación, in FEC consejo general de estudiantes). The board is integrated by members elected by study programmes, schools or faculties (consejeros, or vocales), representatives of the student centres (one for each school or faculty). The executive committee –​a body of five to seven students –​presides over the board and proposes the agenda for every meeting. Decisions in this body are made by majority (consensual decision-​making practices are uncommon in student federations), although for some especially sensitive issues qualified majorities or other mechanisms (such as referendums) can be accepted. This has been the case, for example, when it comes to deciding on general strikes. Elections in all these bodies are held on a yearly basis. Overall, the most important decisions are discussed in this instance, thus it plays a key role in managing internal differences and building consensuses and alliances among groups that participate in student governments. In universities with well-​established traditions of unionism, and considering all the different bodies of student representation from the local (student centres) to the university level, there can be between one and two hundred elected positions. The elected student delegates, plus

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those who participate in the politico-​ideological groups (Autonomists, Communists, Trotskyists, Feminists, and so on) and other affinity groups, make up the critical mass of the student movement in each university. The student body has no right to vote in university governance. The centre-​left governments of the 1990s and 2000s did not restore, in fact, the institutions of democratic, collegial governance that, suppressed by the military in 1973, had granted student representation in the senates and the right to vote in the elections of rectors. University leaders have limited themselves to recognizing federations as legitimate representatives of students, thus inviting them to official bodies such as university boards and councils of deans –​but only with speaking rights. While this is customary, it is not an institutional practice regulated by law, the only exception being the University of Chile, whose 2006 statute created a senate with the participation of seven students out of 36 members. At the time of the writing of this book, the parliament was discussing a new law that would regulate this aspect. CONFECH is the organization of students at the national level. It was created in the 1980s as the platform of the so-​called ‘democratic’ federations (as opposed to the federations controlled by the dictatorship as a way to neutralize student activism) that participated in the struggle against the Pinochet regime. Technically, CONFECH is a confederation of federations, and not a supra-​organization of rank and file students. Its speakers are nominated based on a principle of rotation, rather than elected. CONFECH does not possess headquarters or offices, does not collect fees and does not receive any kind of subsidy. The very existence of this organization is based on collective informal rules, which in turn stem from the memory and identity of the student movement. Each federation has one vote irrespective of the number of students of its organization or university. Decisions are made by majority, based on a public agenda which is previously communicated to its members. The meetings are open to the public, and since 2011 CONFECH often invites other organizations that belong to the so-​ called ‘social movement for education’, such as those that represent secondary students (like the Coordinating Assembly of High-​School Students [ACES] and the Centre of Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies [COES]). However, these organizations have only speaking rights, as only federations can vote to make CONFECH’s official decisions. In 2017, as many as 57 student federations were members of CONFECH, of which 21 came from state-​owned universities, 14 from private universities created before 1980 (which, along with the state-​owned institutions, belong to a group of so-​called ‘traditional

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universities’), and 19 from private (created after 1980) universities. In contrast, in 2011, it had 30 federations, all of them from state-​owned, traditional universities. For most of its history, student politics has been dominated by organized groups that respond to specific ideologies along the left-​ right cleavage. During most of the 20th century, there were strong ties between national political parties and student politics. Groups on the left have been significant at various moments in the history of student federations (Moraga Valle, 2007; Muñoz Tamayo, 2012), as happened in the 1960s, or during the struggle against the dictatorship. However, Catholic, reform-​oriented students have also played an important role. In the Catholic University of Santiago, right-​wing gremialistas have been strong since the late 1960s, leading the FEUC in several periods. But overall, right-​wing or conservative groups have been traditionally a minority in student politics. The ties between the student movement and the party system started to weaken immediately after the transition to democracy (Aguilera Ruiz, 2016; Thielemann Hernández, 2016). In the early 1990s, scandals of petty corruption and lack of autonomy from the government led several federations (including FECH) to collapse. The crisis was overcome with a shift in the preferences of students; the youth sections of centre-​left parties were seen with increasing mistrust, while groups located on their left became more relevant in student politics. This shift was the consequence of a more profound cultural change that developed from the 1990s throughout the 2000s. Against a hegemonic narrative that depicted the youth as apolitical and apathetic (Duarte, 2006), new forms of politicization emerged among high school adolescents and college students (Aguilera Ruiz, 2016). They built upon the politicization of a variety of subcultural and countercultural groups, coalescing around a range of musical (metal, punk, cumbia), artistic, social and communitarian inclinations. Common to all these cases was dissatisfaction with political and economic elites and challenges to the status quo. These different forms of associational patterns triggered different routes of potential politicization. Educational institutions (universities and schools) were the social spaces in which these groups coalesced, proud of their distance from the political establishment. The politicization of the young started to become apparent with the protests staged by secondary students in 2001 (the mochilazo), which opposed the high costs of the student transportation pass. The protest campaign was led by ACES, a new association of secondary students that challenged the old logics of participation and played a crucial role during the Penguin Revolution

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of 2006. This was a series of protests staged by secondary students, which included the occupations of several schools, demanding free public transport passes, the abolition of the Organic Constitutional Act of Teaching and the end of the municipalization of education (both approved during the dictatorship). Although some of the leaders of the Penguin Revolution became (or were already) members of political parties, those who occupied their schools and demonstrated in the streets were less inclined to institutional politics. Many were to continue their activism during their post-​secondary education, feeding the various politico-​ideological groups of the field of student politics, and actively participating in the events of the Chilean Winter. Several groups would prosper, such as Izquierda Autónoma (Autonomous Left), Nueva Izquierda (New Left), Movimiento Marginal Guachuneit (Marginal Movement Guachuneit), Frente de Estudiantes Libertarios (Libertarian Students Front) and many ‘colectivos’, which are smaller groups that emerged at school or university level. After 2011 a new wave of organizations was to emerge: Unión Nacional Estudiantil (National Student Union), Somos (we are), and Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolution), among others. All these groups have a strong ideological identification with the left. Most recently, groups of students related to new centre-​r ight and liberal parties (such as Amplitud and Ciudadanos) have been successful in some new federations in private universities (for example, in Adolfo Ibanez University and UDD). The Communist Party –​through its youth section (la jota) –​ remains the only established, old political party with significant presence and influence in student politics. The youth sections of political parties represented in parliament have become residual forces in many federations, being displaced to marginal positions (Von Bülow and Bidegain Ponte, 2015). Even though the communists led FECH and FEUSACH in 2010 and 2011, and one of the main leaders of the 2011 strikes was a party member (Camila Vallejo), la jota paid a price for being in that position, losing both federations in the elections held after the strike. Later, the Communist Party joined the centre-​left alliance New Majority (Nueva Mayoría), supporting Michelle Bachelet as presidential candidate. This decision, to a certain extent, divided the student movement. As shown by Mella Polanco (2016) in a study about the balance of power in CONFECH, the federations controlled by the new forces of the left have increased since 2011, a surge that occurred basically at the expense of the communists and other minor forces affiliated to the New Majority.

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These changes in the balance of power at the level of CONFECH can be partially explained by its enlargement into the private university sector (it has almost doubled in size since 2011). Despite initial hesitations, the politico-​ideological groups in competition eventually saw enlargement as an opportunity to expand their influence and/​or to compensate their weaknesses. This happened not only on the left. Also for the gremialistas, a group based in PUC, with strong ties with the right-​wing party UDI (Unión Demócrata Independiente), doing politics outside CONFECH was not a viable option. According to one of the leading figures of the gremialista movement, which presided FEUC in 2015: ‘a body that represents all university students in Chile is a positive thing, we see a value in being part of the CONFECH. We don’t like how it works today; there are many things we would like to change there and we lack enough votes to do it. But we believe that CONFECH is a good body for students and FEUC must be there. … This year new federations have entered CONFECH, such as those from Andrés Bello University, Finis Terrae University, Universidad del Desarrollo, and we expect that soon other federations will come from the so-​called cota mil [referring to private, elite-​oriented universities], we are very much in favour of the admission of new federations from worlds not previously represented there.’ (CHI 5) The Chilean case shows that, despite their political and ideological differences, very diverse groups recognize both CONFECH and the student federations as legitimate, necessary arenas of political exchange. This normative disposition helps to configure a unitary field of student politics, to the extent that it helps compensate for the negative effects of a closed institutional setting that does not grant federations access, recognition or resources. Competitions for leadership and hegemony are relatively contained within the framework provided by CONFECH and federations, with an overlap between formal and informal organizations favouring coordinated collective action at larger levels.

High institutionalization, fragmented field: England England is a case of high institutionalization of student politics, especially in terms of union organizing and student governments,

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which have regular access to all HE governing bodies and authorities, and in principle are entitled to negotiate with them. Yet, historically, the English field of student activism has been politically weak and organizationally fragmented, lacking a nationally recognized coordination of activists and only able to address demands at the local level, mainly on issues related to individual colleges and universities (Blackstone and Hadley, 1971). These features of student politics have been heavily reflected in the protest and organizational field of the 2010 student mobilizations. The low level of political militancy of student union politics in Britain is a historical legacy of the creation and development of a nationally coordinated student union, NUS, constitutionally lacking a political mission. NUS was founded in 1922 as a national confederation uniting the local student unions (SUs), which had been active in the various British universities since the beginning of the 20th century to provide opportunities for social activity and leisure.2 NUS developed its infrastructure and bought its own headquarters thanks to fundraising from distinguished figures across the political divide. Therefore, its leadership did not initially see the organization as ‘propagandist’; the focus was on practical activities such as organizing travel, student exchanges and debating tours. The ‘apolitical’ status of NUS was then formalized in 1944, when its council delegates agreed on ratifying a constitutional change stating that the union should not discuss any action which does not concern the students of England and Wales as such (NUS, 1944). Put otherwise, since 1944 NUS has been constitutionally obliged to avoid tackling political or religious issues and thus becoming a hotbed of student activism. When, for instance, the Radical Student Alliance and Vietnam Solidarity Campaign came along in 1966 to promote the first real massive student protest campaign (more than 100,000 students attended a rally in the wake of the sit-​in and hunger strike at the London School of Economics [LSE]), the NUS played a very marginal role. In 1967 and 1968, one third of the demonstrations were concerned with student demands to participate in university or college government, and the remainder were divided in roughly equal proportions between issues of student discipline, guest speakers, and curriculum reform (Blackstone and Hadley, 1971). All in all, the British student movement of the sixties was held together by shared ideas and ideals rather than by formal organizational structures. Hierarchy was firmly rejected, and participation by all who wished to express a view was seen as not just desirable but essential: ‘[c]‌ommunication between activists was achieved through informal networks rather than formalized meetings or structures’ (Byrne, 1997, p 32).

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This situation came to an end at the NUS National Conference in 1969, when the motion on the possibility of adopting the tactics used in student protest was won. Pressure from radical left groups operating within NUS-​UK led to a constitutional change that removed the ‘no politics clause’. This allowed delegates at NUS conferences to discuss broader issues, whether related to students or not. The delegates broadened the aims and objectives of the constitution to include ‘political’ discussion.3 From this moment onwards, two apparently opposing tendencies have characterized the history of NUS and of its politics, both contributing, however, to weakening its political potential. On the one hand, a process of professionalization of its leadership and institutionalization of its organizational structures and practices started to take place; on the other, a dynamic of political factionalism within the whole organization was triggered. The process of institutionalization/​p rofessionalization was strengthened by the attempts by national governments and university leaderships to regulate and/​or constrain the funding channels and the decision-​making process of the SUs to neutralize their most political and, therefore, potentially most dangerous activities. Such an ‘anti-​political’ view of the SU was laconically expressed by the director of HEPI who, in describing the role British SUs should have, confided to us: ‘when [NUS] tries to be a commentator on global affairs, namely, more politicized, it is not influential. NUS should be a service provider not a protest movement. At the local level student unions are great (they are service providers). The national leadership is only interested in protesting. If they want to have an impact, they should be less [of a] protest movement and focus on student matters. For instance, all the times NUS leaders speak in favour of Palestine, they alienate many students and potential supporters. They should represent seven million students. Every time leaders take on a contested view, they alienate part of these students.’ (EN 12) Attempts to neutralize the political potential of SUs have been taking place for over 30 years. With respect to funds, in 1980 the Conservative government changed the way in which SUs were funded, incorporating the SU fee into the per capita fee received by universities and colleges for tuition, with the hope that institutions themselves would restrict SU finances. Henceforward, SUs were compelled to negotiate with their

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institutions for a grant to support their activities. More specifically, SUs are today paid by the university management to provide services that universities want and also have large numbers of full-​time staff whose job is precisely to prevent any bad feeling with the people who pay them. As a student officer at LSE in 2010/​11 told us when describing his personal and professional experience in the SU: ‘The university pays me £27,000 per year:  it’s another problem, that is, being paid by the university. Only four people who are elected are paid. I don’t have any decision-​ making power. We just organize events and stuff. We are a kind of democratic union. [The] [u]‌niversity gives a block grant to the student union, only to the extent that the student union produces value for the university, by offering a gamut of student services. So, this stimulates a process of commodification of the student union itself. For instance, we provide academic advice, immigration advice, [and a] series of activities during the term. We have 60 people working full time for our union. Then we provide commercial activities. We rent a bar, a gym. We make money out of the gym, out of the bar, out of the shops. That money goes to the staff (our salaries) and to the activities of the student union.’ (EN 9) To avoid full financial (and decisional) dependence on their institutions, most SUs have started to supplement this grant with income derived from commercial activities such as shops, bars and nightclubs.4 In their research on the current attitudes and practices of British student officers, Brooks et al. (2015a) found out that they consider the profit derived from commercial activities as very important in helping to protect their independence by giving the SUs some autonomy in deciding how to spend their money. As a result, some conceptions and practices of entrepreneurialism are beginning to spread within the British SUs precisely as a form of opposition to the invasive interventionism of the university leadership over their financial activities. As for the institutional transformation of SUs, the wave of governance restructurings of the late 1980s led to the introduction of external trustees  –​ often business and university heads  –​ in their governing bodies. A  quasi-​corporate model seemed thus to emerge in the SUs, generating an organizational culture that was fundamentally antagonistic to the grassroots model. Accordingly, the NUS leadership started to see itself as a national level lobbying group,

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with local unions as service providers, members as consumers, and democracy as expendable (Kumar, 2011). The number and scale of services provided intensified with the establishment of NUS Services Limited (NUSSL) which was a separate corporate entity purchasing products collectively and providing various support and marketing packages. SUs are today large potential markets as they manage over 200 different premises across Britain, including shops, cafés, bars and music venues, with a total turnover of at least £120 million per year (NUS, 2015). The service side of the union involves a structure of unelected managers and paid employees that runs in parallel to the elected student positions. Although technically unions are not profit-​ making enterprises, the logic of running such services tends towards profit maximization. This can encroach on the interests of students, in particular relating to activism. The NUS and the affiliated SUs have undergone a series of significant changes that have limited political activism over the last three decades. Turning points in such changes were the 1994 Education Act and the 2006 Charities Act. These acts formalized the structures of SUs and then forced them to become registered charities, which further shifted the balance away from activism towards service provision. More notably, the 1994 Education Act placed duties on the university governing body to ensure that the SUs were run in a free, fair and proper manner. Additionally, all major office-​bearers were to be elected by a cross-​ campus ballot of members and the financial affairs of the union were to be properly conducted.5 In 2006, the Charities Act definitively transformed NUS into a ‘quasi-​corporate’ organization with the creation of a Board of Trustees (made up of students, elected officers, and some lay advisors who would hold legal and financial liability), whose aim was to exert a bureaucratic control over its organizational and financial activities in order to reduce the likelihood of it developing a militant attitude among its ranks. The move to charitable status was accompanied by widespread changes to the constitutions and internal democracy of SUs. The leadership of NUS did not fight the attacks on internal democracy but rather, it saw them as an opportunity to restructure the union in the consumer services direction. In this respect, the political document, Manifesto for Partnership, launched by the NUS leadership in 2012, with its call for a ‘partnership working’ with senior institutional managers represented the culmination of such a managerialist approach (NUS, 2015). The manifesto was indeed considered an attempt to develop a political agenda with student leaders conceived of as co-​producers within institutional governance (Brooks, 2016).

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The second (and only apparently divergent) tendency accompanying the development of NUS over the last 30 years has been the process of politicization of its internal organizational structures. Also as a result of the dynamics of institutional co-​optation, a process of political factionalism between a moderate and lobbyist leadership and militant networks of activists has begun to take place within the organization, witnessing peaks of high divergence and antagonism during the national conferences, held regularly every year to decide the political orientation and agenda for the next year. In other words, the neoliberal HE reforms of the last three decades, affecting in several respects also the mode of student organization, have brought about a process of political division and factionalism among the English students themselves, disputing the ways such reforms could be fought back and/​or accepted. The political divergence was particularly strong in NUS, as reforms over education funding policy were planned to be discussed and implemented by the British government. In this sense, the 2010 protests were only part of a larger story of dispute over student financial issues between competing student political factions dating back to at least 1997 and the electoral triumph of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, rehearsed repeatedly during the HE funding debates of 1997–​8 and 2002–​4 and continuing to shape both ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ student politics today. In all these debates, the central contentious issue was indeed the political position to adopt towards the introduction (1996–​8) and then increase (2002–​4; 2008–​11) of student fees. Arguments over education funding were formulated to define political affiliations and defeat or marginalize opponents within student politics as much as they were formulated to influence decision makers. Student funding has represented and still represents the main cleavage on which English students politically coalesce and divide themselves in SUs, in NUS and, more broadly, in the student movement (Hensby, 2016). More specifically, the political history of NUS over the last 20 years can be depicted as a history of confrontation and division between a ‘left’ wing faction, supporting free HE and militant tactics of contention, and a ‘right’ wing faction, adopting a pragmatic approach towards graduate tax as a way to also have political influence in the national public debate of those years. Much as Tony Blair sought to modernize the Labour Party, the moderate factions within NUS sought to adopt a funding policy that it was believed would ensure the relevance of NUS in the debates that were to follow. The NUS Conference in 1996 voted to abandon a long-​standing policy of returning student maintenance grants (non-​repayable and intended to help cover living and study costs) to 1979 levels and instead conceded that students could fund their own

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maintenance. This position on grants was informed by an intent on the part of NUS to be perceived as relevant in the political debate. As the Labour Student, Douglas Trainer, elected NUS President in 1996 declared at the time: ‘what we decide will determine what role we have in shaping the future of HE in this country. The further we get from 1979 grant levels, the further we get from the negotiating table’ (Miller, 1997). In this sense, the introduction of student fees and loans was “a compromise [between the NUS leadership and New Labour] not written in the Dearing recommendations. The president of NUS negotiated with the government about that outcome.” (EN 18) For the Blairities of Labour Students, who in those years had the political majority in the NUS national conference, such a new political orientation ‘represented a rejection of the politics of occupation and conflict in favour of building a new centre-​left consensus between politicians, educationist and unions’ (THES, 1996). Overall, the 1996–​8 HE funding campaign established the terms of the funding debate within the student movement. The moderate NUS leadership took an approach to defeat tuition fees based on a pragmatic analysis of the political environment, and in doing so attempted to marginalize the radical left factions. The latter responded by attacking the morality and motivations of the moderate NUS leadership and reiterating their principled commitment to free education as well as to protest and direct action. In their view, the NUS leadership was timid, passive, and more interested in securing a safe Labour seat than in fighting for social change (Kumar, 2011). In 2007–​9, again under the leadership of the Labour Students, NUS developed a long-​term plan to win the funding debate, a plan that was tied closely to the reforms of NUS governance passed in 2009 that were widely perceived to be designed to minimize the influence of radical factions. With respect to the funding issue, the NUS leadership was still in favour of a graduate tax model, while the left was always in favour of free education. In doing so, the moderates adapted policy positions, political rhetoric, and tactics to the context, while radicals stuck to well-​established positions and tactics that were framed as a rejection of all the aspects of the status quo. The left accused the moderates, and their tactics of policy research, direct lobbying of political elites, and limited student mobilization, of selling out to the establishment. The moderates accused the left, with their tactics of direct action, protest, and occupation, of sacrificing real influence for cosy moral attitude. (McVitty, 2016, p 101)

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In the same token, Woodcock (2014) depicts NUS as a politically very contradictory (and controversial) organization based upon three competing interests:  activism, lobbying and service provision.6 For him, the activism and lobbying components must be understood as two conflicting perspectives on how change can be achieved, which can be identified respectively with a ‘from-​above’ and a ‘from-​below’ option. Lobbying is an elitist approach that attempts to persuade those in power to introduce change ‘from-​above’. It stands in contrast to activism, which for this purpose is assumed to require mass participation to force change ‘from-​below’. Table 4.1 illustrates the set of student organizations, identified and grouped by their own distinct political strategic orientation (that is, main political goal and main tactic of action), which were active between 1996 and 2011. As is seen, these organizations constitute the two main political factions within the English field of student politics, competing for the NUS leadership and, more broadly, for the political leadership of the English student movement. The aleatory and changing nature of these organizations shows the absence of a formally organized position within the English field of student politics (this holds especially for the radical groups). ‘Radicals’ are the student groups sharing a free HE agenda and the adoption of radical tactics of action, and ‘moderates’ are those that adopt a more pragmatic agenda of HE (graduate tax) and are united by their shared Table 4.1: The main organizations/​political factions within the English student movement and National Union of Students, classified according to the political and strategic orientation adopted during the three cycles of reforms on student fees (1996–​2011) Radicals Political goal: free education Tactic of action: disruption

Moderates Political goal: graduate tax Tactic of action: lobbyism

1996–​1998

Student Broad Left (SBL), Campaign for Free Education (CFE)

National Organization of Labour (NOLS), Organised Independents (OIs)

2002–​2004

Student Broad Left (SBL), Education Not for Sale (ENS)

National Organization of Labour (NOLS), Organised Independents (OIs)

2008–​2011

National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAF), Education Activist Network (EAN)

National Organization of Labour (NOLS), Organised Independents (OIs)

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concern to minimize the influence of the ‘left’. In the first group, organizations such as CFE, EAN, ENS, NCAF are included, while in the second NOLS and the OIs. The ‘radicals’ tend to prefer disruption as a main political strategy, while the ‘moderates’, lobbyism. Traditionally, the student factions with a radical orientation are the front organizations of various far-​left parties (such as, for instance, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the Socialist Worker Party, see again Chapter 2), whereas the moderate factions are affiliated to the Labour party and their leaders are deemed to be the future politicians of said party. Unlike Chile (2011) or Quebec (2012), processes of aggregation or coordination among these factions have not been successful. In this sense, the division between radicals and moderates constitutes a permanent feature of English student politics.

High institutionalization, coordinated field: Quebec Quebec is a case in which student associations exhibit a significant degree of institutionalization, thanks to a legal framework that sanctions their roles and provides them with resources which guarantee their functioning. However, unlike the English case, the field of student politics is more coordinated. This occurs despite the existence of various nationwide associations that compete for the leadership of the student body, and for the enrolment of local-​based associations. The fact that only one association retains the legal representation of the student body at the local level (schools and universities) contributes to the unity of the field. This has helped to consolidate one arena of political competition common to all groups. The French-​speaking province of Canada exhibits a dense network of student organizations in colleges (CEGEPs), in department and faculties at universities, and at the provincial level. These levels are interconnected, forming a system in which the provincial (or higher) levels of representation depend on the local associations (schools and colleges). Thus, the core of the system is the associations of students in faculties, schools and departments. Provincial SUs, in turn, are formed by associations. Some local associations can have a few dozen members only (in small departments with a low number of students) while others can have thousands of members. Four provincial student associations existed in 2012: FEUQ, FECQ, ASSÉ and TaCEQ. FEUQ was founded in 1989 and is formed by associations from several universities. FECQ was founded in 1990, representing students at the college level only. ASSÉ was founded in 2001 by activists that drew inspiration from the anti-​globalization

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movement of the time, introducing practices of horizontality and direct democracy to the student organization. While ASSÉ works with spokespersons (a man and a woman, one from the CEGEP sector and the other from the university sector), FEUQ and FECQ work through elected delegates. The fourth provincial association was the Quebec Student Roundtable (TaCEQ). This was a federation of associations founded in 2009 that had little influence in the events of 2012 onwards. Following the strike, both TaCEQ and FEUQ underwent severe crises, with various local associations criticizing their leadership and eventually disaffiliating. TaCEQ dissolved in 2014, while FEUQ did so in 2015. Thus, FECQ and ASSE are the only national SUs that survived the 2012 strike, ASSE being the only one at the university level. New national associations have emerged in recent years: Union Étudiante du Quebec (Quebec Student Union [UEQ]), and the Association for the Voice of Education in Quebec (AVEQ), both founded in 2015. The divides within student unionism can be explained by the history of the student movement in the province. In the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution, some SUs embraced a model of militant trade unionism, others adopted an approach of social concertation instead (Theurillat-​Cloutier at al., 2014). The Union générale des étudiants du Quebec (General Union of Students of Quebec [UGEQ]) was founded in 1964 with the purpose of defending the democratization and accessibility of HE. It adopted the principles of the Charte de Grenoble, the declaration of the French student movement at the end of the Second World War. The contents of this charter were heavily influenced by the ideas of the French Communist Party, which saw students as ‘young intellectual workers’ and assumed that in pursuing their goals students had the right to strike. UGEQ acted in a period of accelerated socio-​economic change and nationalistic revival, the Quiet Revolution, with demands concerning language and recognition acquiring great centrality in public debate. The Quiet Revolution also institutionalized social corporatism as a way to accommodate various and often diverging interests under the direction of a developmentalist state that assumed a modernizing programme (Montpetit, 2007). Thus, HE policy started to be guided by corporatist modes of concertation. The student strike of 1968 triggered the creation of the first five seats of the Université du Québec to meet the demands for tertiary education from a growing population of francophone students. However, UGEQ dissolved amid its incapacity to deal with its various internal trends. After a few years without a provincial organization, the Association Nationale des Étudiants du Québec (National Association of Students of Quebec [ANNEQ]) was founded in 1975.

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ANNEQ attempted to follow the historical and foundational precepts of student syndicalism, but soon had to accept the appearance of the Rassemblement des Associations Étudiantes Universitaires (RAEU) in 1976 and its separation as an independent association in 1979. In 1982, the Fédération des Associations Étudiantes collégiales du Québec (Federation of Quebec College Student Associations [FAECQ]) emerged. This consolidated the process of institutionalization of an area that pursued an approach of social concertation with the state. The entire field of student associations at all levels is regulated by Law 32 (adopted in 1983) about the accreditation and funding of the student associations (Loi sur l’accréditation et le finacement d’élèves ou d’etudiants). This law was inspired by the Rand formula (or automatic check-​ off) that regulated labour unions in Canada and Quebec. However, similar provisions have never been applied to the university sector in any other Canadian province. According to this law, students become automatically affiliated to unions and fees are collected on their behalf with their enrolment. Law 32 aims at providing student associations with financial resources to ensure their autonomy from the CEGEPs and university administrations. Before that, student associations had to ask for financial aid, which was understood as compromising their independence. Following the Rand formula, universities charge and collect SU fees at the beginning of the academic year, and transfer these resources to the student associations. Moreover, this law obliged colleges and universities to provide the associations with office space and other facilities. However, to benefit from these provisions, student associations must apply and be accredited. To do so, associations must hold a referendum among their members according to strict predefined rules and be approved by the Accreditation Officer of the Ministère de l’Éducation of Quebec (Ministry of Education of Quebec [MEQ]). One of the consequences of Law 32 is that student associations have secured a constant stream of revenues, which in some cases can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013). Law 32 was controversial. Some federations were in favour of receiving accreditation, but others feared that this would compromise their autonomy from the government. The amount of the union fee, and whether or not students can opt-​out from paying the fee, depends on each association.7 A number of student associations have permanent staff paid by the union and have resources to hire personnel on a temporary basis for specific positions. Provincial associations have the capacity to fund specific projects from students or local associations. In 2006, ASSÉ established a funding scheme for social projects from members and

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non-​members (in this case the group should have the support from a member association). These are subsidies of up to C$600 for projects that promote or are aligned with ASSÉ’s main goals. The Student Faculty Association of Human Sciences at the University of Quebec in Montreal (AFESH) also offers small subsidies to projects run by their members (up to C$1,000 per project). AVEQ has set up a Community Action Fund which distributed C$39,000 to 44 projects across Quebec in 2017. In addition to SUs, a number of other associations connected to them have been established, thus contributing to the activist scene in Quebec. The Public Interest Research Groups are examples of this. These groups act as advocacy groups engaged in campaigns on issues that go beyond the student experience, taking inspiration from the North American model of student activism of the 1960s. For example, the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at Concordia (QPIRG Concordia) works in campaigns for migrant rights, in favour of first nations and sexual minorities rights, as well as against extractivism, war and consumerism. The Public Interest Research Group of the University of Quebec in Montreal (GRIP UQAM) promotes popular archives, popular education, alternative media and environmental activist projects, among other issues. Thus, these groups are key nodes of social and political activism in the province. These groups receive funding from the associations or from students directly (who pay a small fee). Associations differ with regard to their organizing models and practices. ASSÉ embraces the principles of horizontality and direct democracy. The prime decision-​making body is the congress, which is held every year (Poirier St-​Pierre and Éthier, 2013). Associations of faculties and campuses send three representatives with the right of voice and vote, while associations at the department level send one delegate. The annual congress decides the goals of the organization for the coming year, while the Conseil Central oversees the execution of these decisions. To join ASSÉ, local associations must adopt the general assembly as its central decision-​making body. Through its principles, organization and agenda, ASSÉ attempts to differentiate itself from the student federations existing at the national level by promoting the concept of student syndicalism. FEUQ and FECQ instead adopt a more classical model of organizing. The head of the organization is the executive committee, elected by their members, which concentrates several functions. Central to this model is the role of the president of the federation, who usually makes decisions on behalf of the student base without

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consultation. These organizations were not only more moderate in ideological terms, but also assumed that their role was to act as interest groups, lobbying politicians in parliament and the government. The verticality of these practices and the lack of responsiveness of their leaders in relation to the student base have been strongly criticized not only by ASSÉ but also by their own members. These organizations have often been accused of being too close to the PQ. In particular, these criticisms were very significant in the aftermath of the 2012 strike, and indeed they led FEUQ to a terminal crisis which triggered the appearance of new organizations at the provincial level (UEQ and AVEQ). In their declaration of principles, both UEQ and AVEQ took these criticisms into account and thus placed strong emphasis on transparency and accountability. UEQ appears as the natural successor of FEUQ, as the eight associations that concurred to found it were previously members of the FEUQ. Although UEQ and AVEQ differ in their political identity, they are similar in their organizational aspects. UEQ places the caucus at the centre of the organization, which is the meeting of the association members of the union. In AVEQ, this body is called the Members’ Assembly. UEQ’s caucus meets every three months, with decisions being taken by a double majority system: that of the associations and that of the number of students represented by the associations. These provisions aim at preventing the takeover of the organization by small groups that are unrepresentative of the student base. In ideological terms, AVEQ is closer to ASSÉ. Its programme of action recognizes a crisis of accessibility in HE in Quebec as caused by tuition fee hikes but assumes that students must make their voices heard on other issues too. It takes the demands of feminism on board, fights against discrimination, and promotes the protection of the environment. For example, Concordia Student Union (CSU), one of the main associations of AVEQ, campaigned for years for the divestment of the university endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry. Despite ideological convergence at the level of general orientations, the requirement of adopting the general assembly as the main decision-​making body makes it difficult for AVEQ to converge with ASSÉ. Similarly, ASSÉ and their associations have spokespersons, instead of presidents, with specific mandates taken collectively in the assembly. This, for example, impedes spokespersons from commenting on issues that fall outside the mandate given to them by the assembly. These provisions are at odds with the organizational cultures of some associations. Others might fear that this is too difficult a step to take

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for constituencies that are not politicized in the same way as students in UQAM or the most radical CEGEPs. The student body also has the right to participate in university governance. Since the 1960s and 1970s most universities in Canada have adopted a bicameral governance structure involving a board in charge of administrative affairs and a senate in charge of academic policy (Bégin-​Caouette and Jones, 2014). In Quebec, all universities include students in both the board and the senate to varying degrees, but the structure and composition of boards differ greatly. For example, in the Université Laval, there are 3 students in a board of 25 members, and 8 students (4 from the first cycle, 4 from the second and third cycle) in a senate of 67 members (12 per cent of the total). In UQAM, 2 students participate in a board of 16 members, and 7 students designated by the certified associations integrate a senate of 23 members (30 per cent of the senate’s seats). In most cases, students hold elections to select these representatives, but in some cases, associations can directly appoint them, for example in boards (IGOPP, 2007b). A similar structure of governance with participation of students in collegiate bodies is replicated at the faculty and departmental levels. Similarly, in the English-​speaking universities, students participate in the process of selecting the university president, as they integrate the search committees (Bégin-​ Caouette and Jones, 2014). University governance has recently become a controversial issue, partly because of reform plans from the provincial government. There have been proposals to update these structures to bring them closer to those of Anglo-​Saxon universities in North America, including further autonomy to establish tuition fee levels, and more powers for boards (IGOPP, 2007a). The provincial government presented Bill 38 in 2009. This bill introduced the requirement that 60 per cent of board members must come from outside of the university (only Concordia and the Université de Montréal exhibited that ratio). In addition, the government would appoint three members to the boards of the University of Quebec system and one member to the other institutions of the province. For most French-​speaking universities, this would mean less government representation, but in McGill and Concordia this would have implied for the first time that the government would hold a seat on their board. The bill also reduced the influence of students and non-​academic staff on the boards. CREPUQ, the conference of university rectors, accused the bill of unnecessarily increasing procedural control, and compromising the autonomy of universities with higher government interference. The bill would be eventually

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abandoned in 2011 amidst criticisms from students, professors, unions and university authorities alike. An important feature of student politics in Quebec is that activism has been intense and well developed among francophone students, and weak among anglophone students. This is the outcome of the rise of the Quebec sovereignty movement since the 1960s. A number of francophone CEGEPs have been hotbeds of political activism. Thus, francophone universities recruit students who in many cases have significant experience of activism or who have been sensitized towards social and political action during their college experience. This makes the field of student politics in Quebec more politicized than in any other area of Anglo-​Saxon North America. Yet politico-​ideological groups or the youth sections of political parties do not act openly in student campaigns, despite some connections with parties such as the PQ and the left-​wing Quebec Solidaire. One of the members of the executive committee of CSU explains the differences between French and Anglo-​Saxon youth culture thus: ‘there’s one association at McGill that went on strike during 2012, and it was the French Students Association, because it was all Quebecers. There’s this historical, cultural identity in Quebec that is rooted in historical oppression that I think paved the way to a certain degree to more activism … to more belief in the power of social movements. I  think that exists in the Quebecois/​francophone identity more than it does in the anglophone. I think the anglophone is actually reactionary to that, and you can see that also with students coming in. A lot of the students coming in [to anglophone universities] didn’t go to CEGEP, didn’t go to high school [in Quebec], didn’t see, never participated in a general assembly, never participated in a student association. So, they’re coming into university and this is the first time they’re hearing about this. Whereas, by the time you’ve got to UQAM, they’ve already had two years in a francophone CEGEP, where they probably went on strike already, you know? So, it’s a different level of education, with regards to organizing, that doesn’t exist in the Anglo schools.’ (QUE 2) The existence of four national student associations, representing different strategies and cultures of participation with a long-​standing tradition in Quebec society, has created a situation of competition for the representation of the student body. Unlike England and Italy, this

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situation has not led however to the fragmentation of the student body. One factor preventing fragmentation is that affiliation to the national associations depends on decisions made by local associations at the school and university level. The existence of strong, representative student governments can facilitate agreements and large coalitions, provided there is willingness to act in coordination –​as it happened during the 2012 strike. In turn, politico-​ideological or affinity groups respect their local associations of reference, attempting to lead them and acting within them to –​among other purposes –​make use of the resources they have at their disposal. Furthermore, the leadership of these organizations gives students access to the authorities at different levels, thus reinforcing the legitimacy of these organizations and the unity of the field.

Low institutionalization, fragmented field: Italy In Italy, student politics have traditionally exhibited a low level of institutionalization and a high level of political fragmentation. This was the case of the student mobilizations of the ‘long 1968’ (the 1960s and 1970s) and of those of the 1990s. SUs and formalized groups have never played any political role during such protests. Rather, informal networks and groups of students (‘collettivi’), affiliated either to extra-​ parliamentary leftist political parties or to broader social movements, adopting more militant tactics of action, have been the central actors of this field. These networks of activists have been key in setting in motion and organizing mobilizations in all three cycles of student protests (in 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s), which brought about institutional and organizational change within Italian HE and universities. If the 1968 movement was part of a long protest cycle where the labour movement was by far the central actor, the generation of activists of the student movement of 1990 (the so-​called ‘Pantera’ [panther]) flowed into the movement against the Gulf war and into that of the social centres. Likewise, the student activists of the movement of 2008/​10 (the so-​called Onda Anomala [anomalous wave]) inherited, to a certain extent, the protest forms and claims from the activists of the global justice movement (Andretta et al., 2006) and, more especially, their demands for a more radical process of social redistribution. In short, all the past generations of student activists were immersed in and influenced by larger cycles of struggle, strongly shaping their cultural repertoire of actions and discourses. Yet, the level of political and ideological factionalism that these groups usually showed prevented the student movement from being organizationally

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unified and thus developing a widely accepted institutional structure of student representation. Unlike England or Quebec, but similarly to France, Italy has in fact shown a radical tradition of student activism both in terms of ideology (that is, revolutionary Marxism) and repertoire of actions (disruptive tactics). More specifically, Italian students started to play an important role in the ‘political affairs’ of Italian universities from the second half of the 1960s onwards, when the global wave of student protest arose. As in many other parts of the world, they contested the authoritarian and hierarchical way in which universities were organized and governed. The figure of the professor and their arbitrary authority, represented as the quintessential features of baronial power, were radically challenged in the assemblies, sit-​ins and university occupations at which students began to overtly adopt the buzzword of ‘student power’: that is, ‘the power of students to determine structure and content of their education’ (Cockburn and Blackburn, 1969, p 14). In this sense, the Italian students involved in those mobilizations constituted the first university actor, after the end of the Second World War and the establishment of the Italian democratic republic, able to rise up and overtly question the authority of the class of tenured professors. For a while, they succeeded in reversing or at least counterbalancing the power relations constitutive of the university field at that time. The rise of ‘student power’ in the Italian universities was, therefore, strictly related to the capacity of protesters to carry out large mobilizations through acts of ‘contentious politics’ (McAdam et al., 2001). Despite the variety of movement organizations and political orientations, the key demands underpinning student contestation in Italy were three: (a) the cessation of academic authoritarianism and the democratization of university governance, (b) the reorganization of curricula towards the needs and desires of students, and (c) the democratization of university access (Ortoleva, 1988). The impact of these protests was relatively significant, at least in the years immediately after the contestation. The then Italian government was forced to adopt some legislative measures reflecting specific points of student demands, especially the ones concerning the liberalization of access, the reorganization of curricula, and the inclusion of student representatives in governing bodies (see Cini, 2019b). Yet, in the long run, all these attempts were doomed to fail. The Italian student movement lacked a structured national organization and a clear political strategy corresponding to its ‘firepower’.

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Table 4.2: Student organizations involved in the protest campaigns of 2008 and 2010 Protest campaign against Law 133 (2008)

Protest campaign against Law 240 (2010)

UDU

UDU

Uniriot

Uniriot

Atenei in Rivolta

Atenei in Rivolta

-​

Link

-​

Red-​Net

This tradition has heavily impacted on the Italian field of student politics of recent years. The field of student politics of 2008 and 2010 was indeed characterized by a low organizational formalization and a relatively high level of political fragmentation. It consisted of several locally based groups with the ambition to be representative of the entire student body, even though they usually had different names in every city.8 During the protest campaign of 2008, three student organizations (or networks of organizations) competed for the leadership of this field, while in the campaign of 2010 there were five (see Table 4.2). Founded in 1994, UDU (Unione degli Studenti, Union of Students) is one of the few student groups that publicly claims to be a union that defends and promotes student rights, ‘because the student is a social person and should be independent from their family’ (Genicot, 2012, p 69). About 10,000 students each year enrol in UDU, which is politically linked to CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, General Italian Confederation of Labour). UDU is formed by a central executive committee and 26 local branches, that is, units rooted in the university campuses of 26 cities (Pavia, Brescia, Verona, Padua, Trento, Venice, Parma, Modena, Forlì, Ferrara, Florence, Pisa, Ancona, Macerata, Perugia, Rome, Teramo, L’Aquila, Naples, Caserta, Salerno, Catanzaro, Cagliari, Messina, Palermo and Catania). UDU is the largest student group in terms of membership, and it is organized by an internal statute and formalized decision-​making procedures. Yet, it was marginal in the organization of the protests, as other student groups, both in 2008 and 2010, accused UDU of professing an excessively moderate political orientation. In 2008, two other ‘quasi-​national’ organizations were involved in the protest:  Uniriot and Atenei in Rivolta. While Uniriot was politically close to the social centres of the Italian ‘Autonomia’, a network of political activists adopting a workerist ideology which

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emerged in the movements of the 1970s (Raparelli, 2009), Atenei in Rivolta was politically linked to the national Trotskyist party Sinistra Critica (Critical Left). Both Uniriot and Atenei in Rivolta were central to the organization of protests in many universities, competing with each other with the ambition of becoming the politically hegemonic organization of the Italian student movement. More notably, Uniriot was present at the universities of Rome, Padua, Bologna, Milan, Naples, Turin, and Venice, whereas Atenei in Rivolta was present at the universities of Bari, Bologna, Florence, Milan, Reggio Calabria, Rome and Trento. Although both student networks aimed at radically transforming HE by opposing the neoliberal agenda of the government, they used different tactics of action and political strategy (see also Chapter 2 for a more detailed account of the different political strategies of the various student movement organizations). This difference constituted one of the main causes of the split and the consequent failure of the national assembly of the Italian student movement held at the University of La Sapienza in Rome in November 2008. While Atenei in Rivolta intended to construct a national political organization of the movement with a formalized decision-​making structure, Uniriot preferred to maintain a movement-​like type of organization, with a loose network of relations and informal decision-​ making procedures. In the words of one of the leaders of Uniriot: ‘[Atenei in Rivolta’s] way of conceiving the organization of the protest did not reflect the political potential of the movement. We believe that organization should not be an obstacle but a way to multiply the power of the movement. In our view, this cannot occur if we build a formalized coordination of student representatives according to the French model [of the 2007 student protests that Atenei in Rivolta aimed to adopt in the Italian situation].’ (IT 2) A further consequence of the failure of the national student assembly in November 2008 was the establishment of two other sub-​national networks of groups, Link and Red-​Net, founded in early 2009. Both groups were in fact critical towards the organizations that had led the protest in 2008. More specifically, they accused Uniriot and Atenei in Rivolta of being responsible for the failure of the movement to make an impact at the national level. In their views, both Uniriot and Atenei in Rivolta missed an opportunity to create a nationwide unitary organization voicing the concerns of students. As one of the future leaders of Link mentioned:

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‘In 2008, the movement did not have any organizational structure, neither locally nor at the national level. We did not manage to organize a politically credible actor capable of negotiating with the ministry and the government. At the national assembly in Rome, we argued with other student groups precisely over this issue; some of us wanted to create a national political structure of the protests. We failed. Because of this failure, the movement was unable to entertain any kind of political or institutional relation[ship] with official authorities for the remainder of the 2008 campaign.’ (IT 3) Although sharing this view on the causes of the decline of the 2008 protests, Link and Red-​Net had a very different take on how to lead the student movement and on how to reform Italian HE. Link emerged as a split from UDU (which had been accused of being too moderate) and put forward a trade unionist line whose goal was to make Italian universities more democratic and participatory. This stance emerges very clearly in the narration of a student activist at La Sapienza of Rome and a member of Link’s national executive: ‘We as LINK believe that there are three tools which, jointly, successfully affect higher education policy. They are: adaptive claims [‘vertenza’], representation, and conflict. They cannot stand separately. Representation only works if we have concrete demands to put forward, which means that we have to seriously study university policies and regulations and come up with alternative proposals. Representation and counter-​proposals, in turn, do not work without conflict, because if outside there are no students creating pressure, this thing does not work. These three things [adaptive claims, representation, and conflict] are the pillars on which we have built Link. What we don’t like about UDU is that they think that one can raise demands only through representation. What we don’t like about the [antagonist] student collectives is that they think it’s possible to win things only through conflict and without representation; and actually very often even without a specific demand: conflict for conflict’s sake. For us, these three things must be linked together for student politics to be effective.’ (IT 4)

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Link was present in the university campuses of Bari, Bologna, Foggia, Lecce, Milan, Naples, Padua, Rome, Pisa, Salerno, Siena, Taranto, Turin, Trieste and Urbino. In contrast, Red-​Net was active in the universities of Milan, Padua, Naples, Rome, Florence, and Palermo. It gathered together all the student groups with a Marxist-​Leninist orientation, whose main political goal was to transform HE into a field of (class) struggle. For them, student politics should not be understood as institutional mediation but as conflict and antagonism. In this sense, a student movement should ‘develop antagonistic and incompatible attitudes towards the system’. Student movements are political only to the extent that they are able to express incompatibility vis-​à-​vis the status quo. They have to pursue “an intrinsic politicization, exhibiting dissatisfaction for what exists. This politicization is the expression of dissatisfaction and incompatibility with the extant. The contestation of the system in which we live.” (IT 13) The main aim of a revolutionary student organization is to politicize and socialize as many students as possible to the new language of social conflict. In sum, the organizational field of Italian student protest appeared highly fragmented in political terms in both 2008 and 2010. This thwarted the emergence or the construction of a national actor capable of fully representing students and negotiating their demands with the government. Most of the protagonists of the 2008 and 2010 events we interviewed confirmed this picture. As argued by a former MIUR consultant in the late 1990s and one of the central figures of the university reforms of the 2000s, who considered the politically and organizationally fragmented character of the student mobilizations of 2008 and 2010 as one of the main causes of their failure: ‘The cause of the current weakness of the movement is that the organizational field of the student left is too fragmented. UDU, Link and too many other organizations populate this universe. Small groups competing against each other without a national political centre, and even capable of losing student elections to CL [a conservative organization of Catholic students]. A terrible fragmentation. Without a nationwide scope of action, which is a deleterious lack. A  strong presence of organized students would improve the system.’ (EN 12) A similar interpretation seems to be endorsed also by the leaders of the various student organizations. As one of them put it:

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‘The lack of a nationwide movement organization has jeopardized the emergence of a national agenda and political alternative. We were not politically mature [enough] to pose concrete demands. Uniriot rejected completely this approach. For them, the movement had to convey only a rebellious generational identity to avoid having a reformist approach. This was wrong. We had to pose a list of demands to challenge the government.’ (IT 3) Yet, this fragmentation was not only conditioned by the students’ inability to organize themselves at the national level, but also by the specificity of the Italian system of student representation, which was, in their views, institutionally designed so as to fragment and disempower the students’ voice. Again, in his words: ‘The CNSU [National Council of University Students] is not representative of the actual student forces. It was built to fragment the movement. There is an election on a national basis in which entire sections of the student movement do not take part. Those who participate are generally local clientelist networks, which then take part in the CNSU election. Students do not care about the CNSU, which is a useless ministerial advisory body.’ (IT 3) The presence of an organizationally fragmented field prevented the students from elaborating and agreeing upon a shared political agenda to reform HE. In both 2008 and 2010, the Italian student movement failed to formulate and put forward an alternative vision for Italian HE (on this, see also Caruso et al., 2010). What is more, the absence of a concrete political proposal on HE was related to the highly ideological protest culture of Italian students, historically embedded in larger cycles of struggle and therefore more focused on broader societal rather than educational issues (Tarrow, 1989). In short, each generation of student activists is influenced by larger protest cycles, strongly shaping their cultural repertoire of actions and discourses. If the ‘1968’ movement was part of a long protest cycle, where the labour movement was by far the central actor, the generation of activists of the student movement of 1990 flowed into the movement against the Gulf war and into that of the social centres (Mudu, 2004). Likewise, the student activists of the movement of 2008/​10 inherited, to a certain extent, the protest forms and claims from the activists of

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the ‘global justice movement’ and, more especially, their demands for a more radical process of social redistribution. In sum, this section illustrated the extent to which the organizational field of Italian student protest appeared highly politically fragmented in both 2008 and 2010: it consisted of several quasi-​national networks of student organizations able to neither individually hegemonize the protests nor to cooperate with each other. These features jeopardized the emergence of a national actor representing the full student body and capable of creating both a national system of alliance and negotiating student demands with the government.

Conclusions The ways in which student organizations interact with state institutions and the party system have a significant influence in shaping the patterns of student activism. As suggested by the political process approach to contentious politics, the institutional setting is crucial for the making of social movements, as it ‘enhance(s) or inhibit(s) prospects for mobilization’ (Meyer and Minkoff, 2004, p 1457). In particular, we have focused here on formal aspects of the HE sector, such as access and recognition, that have significant long-​term effects on the patterns of student activism. However, we have also claimed that political cultures are extremely influential in student politics, especially when students take inspiration from them to mobilize identities and establish their demands and goals. These cultures can survive the demise of some organizations and reappear in new ones, as well as endure through various generations of activists. Indeed, they can be so influential as to offset the limitations of adverse institutional settings, as we have learnt from the study of the Chilean case. In this chapter, we have observed that regular channels of access to decision-​making bodies at the national or university level offer opportunities for influence that do not necessarily depend on the protest capacity of these organizations. However, some associations might accommodate themselves to this institutional environment in manners that, over the long term, exclude them from the disruptive, militant commitments that were their foundational resources. In Chile and Italy, students have limited access to policy making at the national level, and restricted channels of influence at the university level. This characteristic makes student associations more confrontational and militant and, especially in Italy, it makes these associations weaker in terms of organizational resources. By contrast, in England and Quebec

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student associations have legal status and protection, which confer on them ample financial and organizational resources. A significant segment of the student associations in these regions displays moderate patterns of activism. A second dimension that affects the patterns of student activism refers to the ways in which student organizations engage in politics and organize the student body. Two modalities are identified: fragmented versus unified modes of student politics. The main difference between them is the existence (or not) of a more or less formalized arena of political exchange, where different groups of students regularly meet, debate and strategize with each other. As seen in the Chilean and Quebecoise cases, student governments act as such arenas, facilitating processes of coordination and large-​scale collective action. When these arenas are in place, competition for the leadership of the student body can be temporarily suspended or tamed, thus favouring coalition building among the various groups that inhabit the campuses (Van Dyke and McCammon, 2010; Heaney and Rojas, 2014). Therefore, and given certain conditions, these arenas of exchange can play a role in transforming competition into cooperation, fostering alliances among groups that otherwise would ignore, or compete against, each other. An important precondition of the large protests of 2011 and 2012 in Chile and Quebec, respectively, was the presence of this common arena of political exchange. This allowed students to act in coordination and deliver a coherent message to the public, politicians and the state. By contrast, such an arena was weak in England and practically inexistent in Italy, jeopardizing the capacity of students to act in coordination. As is explained in other chapters of this book, fragmentation of student politics makes it easier for governments and politicians to ignore student associations and their demands. Furthermore, historical patterns of student activism have been more resilient in Chile and Quebec, shaping successive generations of activists and the student associations themselves. One crucial aspect in which the legacy of previous struggles is especially relevant for current generations of activists, is their trust in nationwide associations and their role vis-​à-​vis the state and the party system. This aspect has helped to mould unified fields of student politics in these regions. Particularly in Chile, this factor offsets a significant lack of resources in several federations and the lack of a legal framework regulating their existence and representative role.

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5

The Outcomes of Student Protest Introduction The idea that we must look at political contexts to understand the emergence, dynamics and outcomes of contention dates back to the first developments of what is now known as political opportunity structure theory (Eisinger, 1973; Tilly, 1978). Since then, much scholarship has adopted the assumption that environments –​those factors in the ‘world outside’ social movements –​can explain mobilizing activities, demands, strategies, alliances and the influence of social protest (Meyer, 2004). Taking distance from the rather deterministic character of such an approach, more recent developments call into focus the interactions between institutions and protestors, focusing on the ways in which these interactions shape and influence each other (Goldstone, 2003; Jasper, 2015; Tilly and Tarrow, 2015). Most agree however that contexts matter for social movements. Yet the specific questions that scholars must specify are: how and to what extent do they do this, which aspects of the political environment are more relevant, and for what kind of outcomes? (Uba, 2009; Bosi et al., 2016a). When studying the policy impacts of protest movements, we should distinguish the policy field from the broader political system. Policy fields configure the immediate structure of opportunity and constraints of social movements attempting to advance alternative policy proposals. These fields usually define the legitimate actors of the relevant policy discussions and the mechanisms through which these discussions take place. Policy fields are embedded in the broader political system, which in turn shapes the constraints and opportunities that protesters face (Kriesi et al., 1995).

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Yet, this does not mean that the same opportunities and constraints at the level of the political system can be replicated in the specific policy field. Within the HE field, there might be variation in the opportunity structure at the level of campuses, as recent research has pointed out (cf Reger, 2018; Cini, 2019b). For instance, Reyes (2015) adopts the concept of academic opportunity structure to explain differences in activism across colleges. Specifying a structure of academic opportunity, Cini (2019b) argues that the type of university leadership affects the strategies and tactics that student activists adopt in their mobilizations on campuses. Although cross-​campus variation in student activism is important, we focus here on cross-​national differences in the capacity to produce policy outcomes. HE scholars recently argued that student protests are likely to generate a greater impact in countries in which neoliberal norms are weaker, as governments are reluctant to push through radical reform if they believe such policies will not win widespread social acceptance (Klemenčič, 2014; Brooks, 2016; Luders, 2016; Cini, 2019b). According to Burstein, social movements frequently ‘fail to get what they want because a majority of the public wants something else’ (Burstein, 1999, p 9). This is explained by the fact that, to be re-​elected or not to lose electoral consensus, politicians are most interested in satisfying those preferences on policy issues that public opinion itself considers to be a political priority. Therefore, social movements ‘are highly likely to succeed if public opinion is both supportive and attentive or fail if the reverse is true’ (Luders, 2016, p 189). In England for example, student protests against tuition fees had little impact on policy making because the government deemed that there was sufficient support in society for its specific fees policy and broader consumerist agenda. In regions such as Chile and Quebec, however, the challenges to neoliberal policies by student mobilizations were more successful because such mobilizations put pressure on some political actors to distance themselves from more radical versions of neoliberalism. In this respect, the political-​cultural environment in which policies and political measures are implemented is a crucial factor in favouring and/​ or inhibiting the impact of social movements (Uba, 2009). In a similar vein, the political mediation model maintains that social movements and protests are necessary, but insufficient conditions for policy change, and their ‘impact … is mediated strongly by political conditions’ (Amenta et  al., 1992, p 335). The vulnerability of the institutions targeted by movements appears as particularly relevant to enhance their options (Moore, 1999). King suggests that ‘the more open the target institution is to change, the more effective the mobilization of the movement will be’ (2008, p 396).

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Yet, focusing only on contextual factors may lead to overlooking the agency of actors, proposing static explanation of the processes under investigation. To avoid the structuralist bias that is implicit in the political mediation model –​and more generally to the political process approach –​it is therefore important to give actors, their characteristics, and their mutual relations at least as much analytical weight as their context of action (Meyer et al., 2005; Cini, 2017b). In this study it was found that the capacity of protestors to find allies within institutions (including governments and parliaments), or to change the political scenario in such manner as to create incentives for political actors to offer concessions, were important determinants of policy outcomes (Amenta et  al., 2005; Banaszak, 2005; Amenta, 2006). Movement activists occasionally build coalitions and make alliances with insiders, members of the decisional bodies, to amplify their influence in policy making instances. These have been referred to as ‘mediators’ (Moore, 1999), ‘institutional activists’ (Santoro and McGuire, 1997), or ‘tempered radicals’ (Meyerson and Tompkins, 2007). Those who occupy the middle ground between institutions and movements can be in a good position to translate the claims of protesting groups into changes in practices, norms, and members (Moore, 1999). But, as we see in this chapter, protestors or movements can also initiate a transition towards institutions, evolving over time. This joint pressure exerted over the decisional organs seems to be crucial in producing some positive impacts. However, such a move does not come without costs for activists and movements themselves (Katzenstein, 1998). In this chapter, the impact of student protests in the four regions, focusing on their impacts (or lack thereof) in HE policies, is analyzed. The four cases studied here differ in the degree to which students were able to achieve concessions close to their demands. As the main actors in the policy making process are lawmakers, we look at the interactions between political parties and protest movements and the extent to which the latter were able to influence the decisions of the former. What did students do to obtain concessions from policy makers? How difficult was it for them to persuade (some) members of the polity of the need to attend to their demands? What are the levels of responsiveness of the political system to student demands? To explain why student campaigns obtained more concessions in Chile and Quebec (in that order) than in Italy and England, the focus is on mechanisms such as the availability of allies; the attitudes of actors such as vice-​chancellors, intellectuals, personalities and public figures; the dynamics of competition in the party system; and public opinion.

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In particular, it was noted that, in both Chile and Quebec, as student demands were supported by significant social constituencies and the government proved unable to appease the protests, the opposition parties presented themselves as allies. These parties committed themselves to delivering reforms that would (partially) meet student demands, while students attempted to gain influence in decision-​making bodies by joining political parties and/​or participating in elections. By contrast, in England and Italy, students did not obtain concessions from the government, while their campaigns had a minor effect on public opinion, which remained relatively indifferent to their demands. More notably, student protesters failed to build solid alliances with other social and political actors opposing similar neoliberal measures in other fields of policy, such as trade unions, radical left parties, and social movements. The opposition parties of both countries (the Democratic Party in Italy and the Labour Party in England) were supportive, or at least not opposed, to such measures. No alliance was even feasible with the two official associations of university leaders (CRUI in Italy and UUK in England), which publicly endorsed the two governments’ actions. Given this configuration of factors, both governments successfully retaliated against or neutralized student actions without feeling the need to offer significant concessions. As the general political climate was not affected in the immediate period, the issues raised by students did not condition the following elections. In this chapter we begin by addressing the outcomes of the student protests in Chile and England, two countries where market-​based mechanisms are paramount in HE systems. This is then followed by sections devoted to Quebec and Italy, where the state retains considerable power in shaping university systems.

The outcomes of the 2011 protests in Chile During Ms Bachelet’s administration (2014–​18), the national parliament passed the following bills regarding the HE system1 (Guzmán-C ​ oncha, 2017b): the provisional administrator bill (2014), which consents to state intervention in tertiary education institutions in cases of financial collapse; the ‘short law’ on free education (2015), according to which students from the five poorest income deciles are exempted from tuition fees (extended to the sixth income decile in 2018); the law establishing two new state-​owned universities and 15 centres of technical formation (CFTs) (2015); the laws repealing the prohibition against students and administrative staff participating in governance bodies (established by

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the dictatorship in its last day in government in March 1990), including in private institutions and non-​university tertiary education institutions (2015). Furthermore, the government submitted a bill to cease the AFI, a voucher for institutions chosen by students that obtained the 27,500 best scores in the admission test (PSU), and to replace it with a competitive subsidy (2017). In addition, it submitted a project for regulating and creating a new ‘system of higher education’ (2017). This latter bill includes the mechanism provision according to which, depending on the state structural revenues related to the growth of the economy,2 the exemption from tuition fees could expand to cover the entirety of the student body, as well as defining the regulatory agencies that would oversee the system, the requirements that all institutions had to meet, and the inclusion of private universities founded after 1980 in the Council of Vice-​Chancellors (CRUCH), which up until then had been formed by pre-​1980 institutions. Finally, in her final week in office, Ms Bachelet submitted a bill to end the state-​guaranteed loan, CAE (which is issued by private banks) from 2019, replacing it with a state-​funded loan whose repayment would be contingent on income. These last two bills are to be discussed by the new parliament (emerging out of the November 2017 elections) under the new government of Mr Piñera (2018–​22). During the first months of this administration, there are indications that it will pursue its own agenda on the matter, presenting new projects that reflect the ideology of the government. However, as there is no clear majority in parliament, any legislative initiative will have to be negotiated with other groups. The main leaders and politico-​ideological groups that command the student federations have been critical of Ms Bachelet’s education reforms. The extent to which these reforms meet student demands, and whether or not these changes represent a true departure from a highly marketized HE system, or its consolidation, are two crucial and contested issues. Yet, there is no disputing that HE has seen frenetic legislative activity in the period 2014–​18. Furthermore, the number of bills passed and discussed in parliament in the same period is the highest since the reforms of the dictatorship in the 1980s. How can we explain this? What is the relationship between the student protests of 2011 and these legislative initiatives? To answer these questions, we must look at the political and electoral processes, the configuration of Ms Bachelet’s second government, and the impact of the student movement (as an entity that exists beyond the protest actions students may or may not stage) and student preferences on society and on the intellectual community that informs the public debate on education policies.

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The impacts of 2011 on the political process In the study conducted for this book, Chile has been identified as a case in which students made a significant impact on policy making and the political system as a whole. The protest wave of the Chilean Winter in 2011 was a remarkable historical episode, resembling events such as the 1968 protests, or the 1986 struggles against the dictatorship). Despite the protest’s size and historical significance, the protest campaign did not have an immediate significant effect on education policy. During 2011 the Piñera administration announced some reforms, which they expected would appease the students’ mood, but only the reduction of the CAE interest rate (from 6 per cent to 2 per cent) was implemented in 2012. This measure gave relief to many students and their families but did not touch on the problem of indebtedness that already affected large numbers of graduates and was far from the free tuition demand that CONFECH had successfully put at the centre of the debate since the previous year. During 2013 the presidential and parliamentary elections dominated the political debate, as former president and socialist Michelle Bachelet returned to Chilean politics from New York, where she had led (between 2010 and 2013) UN Women, a recently created United Nations division. Despite her absence from the country and self-​imposed silence on all issues relating to Chilean political affairs, Bachelet enjoyed a solid position in most surveys, her popularity having survived the accusations of negligence and emergency mismanagement in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami of 27 February 2010, only a few days before leaving office. The Piñera administration would instead not recover from its collision with the student protests, leaving Bachelet in pole position to lead the centre-​left back to La Moneda (the presidential palace), as in the Concertación no other leader had the capacity, strength or determination to challenge her popularity. In March 2013, Bachelet returned to compete in the primary elections of the newly formed New Majority (NM) (against three other candidates, one from the Christian Democrat Party, one from the Radical Party, and one independent backed by liberal forces), the coalition that succeeded the now defunct Concertación, including together with other leftist minor parties the Communist Party, a force previously excluded from the centre-​left alliance. In fact, the NM electoral manifesto was also characterized by a more leftist approach than that of the Concertación. In the acceptance speech for her candidacy, Bachelet declared that Chile was now a society more empowered but also more disgruntled, and that the cause had to be

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sought in inequality: ‘Chile is one of the most unequal countries in the world. And this fracture is ethically and politically unacceptable’ (Bachelet, 2013). After naming a number of inequalities that had to be tackled, including those in education, gender and wages, discrimination against indigenous people and abuses committed by private companies, she concluded that socio-​economic policies had to be drastically modified if the country was to become a developed nation: as she noted, ‘we must rethink the basis of our development strategy’. Thus, the new centre-​left coalition embraced the ideas put forward by students in the Penguin Revolution (2006) and the Chilean Winter (2011). The NM electoral manifesto endorsed Bachelet’s promises by promoting a stronger role of the state in education, a comprehensive reform of the three levels of the educational system (plus the strengthening of early childhood education and day care centres); the end of for-​profit schools, co-​payment and pupil selection in public and state-​subsidized schools; and free university education. To finance these programmes, the NM proposed a tax reform with an increase in taxation for corporations and high-​income earners, and the abolition of a mechanism of tax avoidance (known as FUT) which had been widely used by companies since the 1980s. In addition to these changes in education policy, the new centre-​left alliance promised to initiate a process of revision of the 1980 constitution, written during the dictatorship. On this issue, the NM manifesto had been rather ambiguous: it did not promise that this would be accomplished by means of a constitutional assembly, as students and other civil society organizations demanded, but it did not dismiss completely such a mechanism either. The acceptance of the constitution had been one of the concessions of the Concertación when it agreed to participate in the 1988 referendum –​in which the electorate rejected the prolongation of Pinochet’s rule for another eight years, which led to free elections in 1989. While in the 1990s only the extra-​parliamentary left demanded to revoke the Pinochet constitution, 30 years later support for that claim had broadened across the political spectrum. The NM obtained a landslide victory: Michelle Bachelet won in the runoff election with 62 per cent of the vote, far ahead of the 37 per cent of the right-​wing candidate Evelyn Matthei. Furthermore, the centre-​left coalition won 67 seats (out of 120) in the lower chamber), the largest share since 1989. Although this fell short of the 70 seats required to approve some of the changes promised during the electoral campaign, as these required qualified majorities, three independent MPs were deemed to be in favour of these reforms (among them, the

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former student leaders Giorgio Jackson and Gabriel Boric, plus one member of the liberal party). But why would the centre-​left alliance take these issues on board? Left-​wing parties, such as the Socialist and Communist parties, had strong incentives to support student demands. First of all, they were in the opposition, after having been defeated by the right-​wing alliance in the presidential elections of 2009. The identification of the opposition with a very popular cause was to help them increase electoral support. Therefore, the first success of the student protests, as shown by many surveys during 2011 and afterwards, was in transforming education into an issue of national priority and generating consensus around demands of free education and greater state involvement in education. The protests so undermined the position of President Piñera and his administration that it compromised the capacity of the right-​ wing alliance to succeed in the forthcoming elections in 2013. The support of the parties of the former Concertación (which included the centrists Christian Democratic Party and Radical Party, plus the left-​ leaning Socialists and the Party for Democracy) indeed contributed to enhance the resonance (and press coverage) of the students’ demands, as well as encourage the constituencies of these parties to endorse the students’ claims. Furthermore, there was some ideological affinity (or overlapping) between the movement’s goals and the historical policy goals of left-​wing parties. This affinity was particularly evident among certain intellectual groups related to these parties (for example, think tanks and foundations), and their rank-​and-​file members. This occurred against the backdrop of significant linkages between private sector universities, schools and technical agencies (which sell educational services to schools and municipalities) and the political parties of the opposition. Former state officials during the Concertación administrations had in fact become the owners of some of these institutions and agencies, while many others were appointed as directors to the boards of private universities. These antecedents were of public knowledge, contributing to the mistrust of many students towards the support and intentions of opposition parties. The second element to consider is the rapprochement of the Communist Party (CP) to the parties of the Concertación. This repositioning had actually started in 2005, when Guillermo Teillier took office as party chairman. Over the 1990s, the CP had achieved a significant presence in student federations (such as FECH and FEUSACH) and trade unions (especially the strong teachers’ unions Colegio de Profesores and the combative union of externalized workers in private and public copper mines, CTC). Yet, the party had been

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unable to reverse its position as a marginal force in the post-​1990 party system. Thanks to pacts with the Concertación (with the omission of strong candidates of the Concertación in districts with a historic communist presence, to favour the concentration of the centre-​left vote for CP candidates), in 2009 the CP instead returned three MPs –​the first communist MPs since 1973. The communists’ assessment of the opportunities and constraints of the party system is presented by one of their candidates in 2013 thus: ‘When Michelle Bachelet emerged as a candidate that could make several political forces converge and more parties sum up behind a programme that accepted [our] demands, then we say we have an option here. We came from a recent experience of attempting to generate an alternative force of the left, a third alternative, the Together We Can alliance [Juntos Podemos], an alliance of the extra-​parliamentary left that competed in the 2004 and 2009 elections, which had not achieved good results. And nothing indicated that we [the left alone] could do better this time. … There is a sort of permanent contradiction within the student movement even today, which is to raise sympathies among the people from the left, confront the state, but not to contest the state itself. In a way, it is like a permanent self-​defeating attitude, to make demands to those you criticize, instead of you going yourself and struggling against them so you can become the makers of the solutions through state power, parliament, the government. And that was a pretty harsh criticism we received.’ (CHI 3) In 2014, the CP increased its representation in the lower chamber to six MPs, among them the former FECH and FEC presidents Camila Vallejo and Carol Cariola respectively. The CP then became a party of government for the first time since Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity. Members of the party were appointed as advisors in various positions in secretariats and the public service. In 2013, the position of secretary of Women’s Affairs was given to a party member (Claudia Pascual), and later the party would obtain its second secretary in Social Development (Marcos Barraza). The presence of new, leftist advisors and policy officers was noticeable in the Ministry of Education. Some of them were CP members or sympathizers (or from the youth section); others were supportive of the demands of the student movement.

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A distinctive group of new policy advisors that entered the Ministry of Education came from the Democratic Revolution (DR), a left party recently formed by former activists in the student federations (especially from the Catholic University of Santiago). In the 2013 elections one of the 2011 student leaders, Giorgio Jackson, was returned as this party’s first MP. Although DR was not a member of the NM, the party considered that the Bachelet administration offered a significant opportunity to advance new demands, and thus adopted a strategy of ‘critical collaboration’, which included participating in the Ministry of Education through a number of policy advisors. A DR policy advisor of the Secretary of Education between 2014 and 2016 explained the logic behind their incorporation in the government as follows: “social movements have the chance to expand the margins of public discussion … when power holders are relaxed they don’t have incentives to take risks … Social movements, in a second phase, must transform demands into [policy] proposals.” (CHI 6) The appointment of advisors with a clear leftist background and former experience of membership in the youth section of the CP led to the emergence of working dynamics that recreated their days of student activism. The CP had considered the Bachelet government as characterized by tensions between the conservative forces within her administration and those more progressive and aligned with the students’ demands. These tensions developed also within the Ministry of Education. Another policy advisor in this ministry told us: ‘people in our team adopted a working logic which resembles the logic we applied when we were communists [party members]. We work as a team; we have internal meetings to decide what to do. And we are all excited, we all believe we are doing something important, we work overtime and weekends and we are all available to that, that’s normal.’ (CHI 7) Although the configuration of the team of policy advisors was a novelty within the Ministry of Education, mistrust between the government and student leaders did not however disappear. An independent policy advisor in the Higher Education Division, with a background of activism in the student movement in the 1990s, told us that “the student movement don’t see that what we have now is because of 2011 … but I don’t know if their role is to say, ‘we won’ … the logic of opposition to us gives them advantages in their own federations.” (CHI 8)

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Value change and a changing policy paradigm in education The intellectual, technical discussion on education policy thus became an arena of confrontation as experts, academics and practitioners contributed to shape the policy narratives in this field. For a university professor and renowned education expert: ‘most people in academia align with the new idea that, it is not about regulating the market but rather about taking education out of the logic of markets. I am talking about scholars in universities, independent researchers, etc.; those who still defend free market ideas are a clear minority now. One can notice this also among economists, who were perhaps closer to this idea of education as a market, but now they also share the [student movement] criticism … There are renowned economists that say today that the market is the problem.’ (CHI 9) The student federations as well as the political organizations that emerged out of the 2011 protests were well aware of the relevance of this field. A process of professionalization and knowledge production from below started, as the need to intervene in a more and more sophisticated public discussion became apparent. FECH, for example, had a centre of studies (Centro de Estudios de la Fech, CEFECH, founded in 2007), but its purpose was more related to the investigation of the history of the federation and the student movement. Since 2011 though, the FECH leaders have shared the idea that this centre should play a more active role in the policy debate, participating in public discussions of HE policy through reports and studies. For the first time in 2013, CEFECH was invited to hearings in the education committee of the lower chamber. Similar processes of professionalization have taken place among other groups. In 2013, the Autonomous Left established the Nodo XXI foundation, while activists related to New Democracy –​the national organization that integrated the National Student Union as its student front –​created the Crea Foundation in 2015. These foundations aim at providing reflection and analysis for the members of their respective political organizations and their student fronts. Their contribution goes beyond studies and informed opinion on educational issues, as they attempt to tackle a variety of policy areas as well as the daily political debates. Nodo XXI has attempted to

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take a leading role in the education debate. In 2015, they launched an open manifesto ‘For a New Education’ which was supported by a broad variety of politicians, vice-​chancellors, academics and student leaders. In an attempt to create a wide coalition to push on certain issues, the manifesto was submitted to the members of the educational commissions of the lower chamber and the senate. Members of Nodo XXI (sociologists, historians, economists, among other specialists) often participate in academic and public debates, with op-​eds in newspapers, and they have been invited to public hearings in parliament to provide opinion and inputs on the parliamentary discussion of bills on numerous occasions. Reports and studies published by the independent Fundación Sol, the National Center for Alternative Development (CENDA), and Educación 2020 (created in the aftermath of the Penguin Revolution) have also been widely read by student leaders and activists over the period. These research centres have been invited to public hearings for the education committees in the lower and upper chambers, and mainstream media (newspapers, TV news services) have often mentioned their reports and interviewed their members. In a similar vein, a new generation of young academics and education experts is becoming more influential within Chilean academia –​for instance, through the Network of Researchers of Chilean Education (RIECH). For many researchers, the Penguin Revolution and the Chilean Winter were defining moments that led them to specialize in the study of the problems of the national education system. This generation has taken distance from the mainstream scholarly narrative that prevailed in the first two decades after the dictatorship. In a process that started after the events of 2006 and 2011,3 universities, in turn, have created academic units (institutes, centres and faculties of education) dedicated to the study of the education system. A number of members of RIECH and/​or former student leaders have become members of these units. Thus, as a consequence of the last two large episodes of student unrest, a constellation of think tanks, research centres and scholars have emerged. This network engages in public debates and provides input to activists and student organizations, thus shaping an alternative policy narrative.

Public opinion Public opinion provides another perspective from which to observe the extent to which the message of the student movement has been

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influential in society. The surveys of the Centre of Public Studies (CEP) provide a picture of the changes in attitudes towards education. For example, while during the presidency of Ricardo Lagos (2000–​6) only 20 per cent regarded education a top priority for the government, during the first Bachelet administration (2006–​10), the figure increased to over 30 per cent. In the Piñera administration (2010–​14) it stayed over 40 per cent, including a peak of more than 50 per cent during the 2011 protests. Furthermore, in two periods (August 2012 and November 2014), education was considered the top priority for the government, while criminality was in second place. Overall, between 2011 and 2014, education was considered as important as crime and healthcare issues. During Bachelet’s first year in office, education remained highly relevant with a peak of 50 per cent in November. This is coherent with the relevance that the ‘education reform’ had at the beginning of her administration, as well as with the resistance that it encountered within and outside her coalition. Only in the following year did interest in education as a relevant issue fall again to levels similar to those observed prior to the Chilean Winter, below 40 per cent (CEP, 2015). Moreover, the protests have strengthened the preference of society for greater state involvement in education. Public opinion surveys of the Universidad Diego Portales (2015) provide evidence that confirms this impression. Those who agree with the statement ‘subsidized private schools should become public schools’ climbed from 45 per cent to 57 per cent between 2012 and 2014; and those who agree with the statement ‘all private universities should become public owned universities’ jumped from 47 per cent to 69 per cent. Moreover, in 2014, 48 per cent supported the idea that ‘private schools should not exist, only public schools’. These changing preferences cannot be exclusively attributed to the action of student federations or to a lag effect of the events of 2011. Rather, they resulted from the combined effect of the endorsement of expected and unexpected allies (including the New Majority and relevant stakeholders such as vice-​chancellors and education experts), the effect of electoral campaigns in which education had been a major issue, the media presence of student leaders and young MPs with a background of student activism, and a community of experts that has changed, becoming more heterogeneous. These factors have contributed to popularize ideas of radical change in education that a decade ago were endorsed only by minorities.

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The 2010 student campaign in England: politicization without a politically successful impact Why did English students fail to achieve any significant policy gain in their confrontation with the British government, despite their large mobilization in 2010? The relatively unexpected massive and disruptive student mobilization of Autumn 2010 opposing the tripling of tuition fees did gain a high political relevance in British public debate. Yet, the absence of a national protest actor legitimately recognized as a political challenger to the British government reduced the opportunity to affect the outcome. Lacking a credible political interlocutor, the coalition government could focus the attention of the media and of public opinion on the disruptive and ‘violent’ side of the protests and thus ignore the political challenge of the students. The fact that British public opinion showed no significant support towards the student protesters and their opposition to the tripling of tuition fees greatly facilitated such an orientation by the government (Bailey and Freedman, 2011). Indeed, the latter could easily take advantage of this situation to adopt and implement its pro-​marketization agenda. As effectively summarized by EN 18 in her interview: “Nothing [was] able to change this course of action.” It is claimed that this peculiar configuration of contextual and movement characteristics explained the policy failure of the 2010 national campaign. Unlike what is, at times, believed within the international community of HE scholars (see, for instance, Capano et al., 2017), the policy of HE has been only episodically a relevant political issue for British governments over the course of the last 60 years. Other policy fields, such as the healthcare system or the military (to list just a few), have traditionally gained more public attention and, therefore, have been politically prioritized as objects of intervention. It is not a coincidence –​ according again to EN 18 –​that “between the 1963 [Robbins report] and the early 1980s, there was relatively little legislation around HE.” Such low attention has thus heavily affected the allocation of public spending, generating competition and trade-​offs among the various items of the public budget in which expenditure on HE was permanently sacrificed. For EN 17: ‘If you look at the public expenditure survey mechanisms, you find that HE funding is competing with healthcare system funding, etc. In short, for most citizens, HE is not important. The way the government allocates money suggests that government does not care much about HE. … 142

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Most [of this] has to do with the mechanics of government. Higher education was never in the front line.’

Politicizing higher education (and student fees) Even though there are some elements of validity in this analysis, the authors’ research fieldwork on the English sector offers a slightly different picture. It is not contended that HE has been as important as other policy fields (such as healthcare, national security or military defence). However, interviews with various stakeholders and policy experts from the English sector pointed to a recent trend of greater political attention towards HE, especially concerning the issue of student funding. For a former president of UUK, such an increase in public interest towards HE has moved in parallel with the expansion in student enrolment, as the number of young people attending university rose “from 8 per cent to 45 per cent” (EN 14). As a result, HE “has become more and more politically fancy”: ‘So, more families are involved in this system. It has become more important for the UK. And in England we had a strong debate whether it should be a public or a private good and we took on fully the American model, this made HE a very highly political issue. Even though, compared to other fields of policy (such as immigration, military and so on), it is less important. However, when HE comes to the press, it becomes an important issue.’ (EN 14) As an increasing number of English people (that is, students and their families) accessed HEIs, these people started also to have a stake in the sector by feeling personally involved in its dynamics and outcomes. Put differently, once HE becomes prioritized in the life of a growing number of people, its most problematic aspects become a socially relevant issue, making it a potentially contentious political issue for society itself. If students and their families invest a growing portion of their financial resources and of their life on HE, then they have rising expectations on the social but also economic returns that HE should provide to them. In this sense, the rise of a gap between expectations and reality may therefore trigger feelings of discontent. This was what a professor and expert on university budgets explained to us when pointing out the reasons why HE has become so politically relevant for a consistent segment of English people. She stated:

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‘[HE] is today a politically contentious issue around two main things; one of which is for the university to provide value for money, to be socially relevant … Then, the other big issue is around student fees. It has been a political issue for the last 20 years. Now it is very crucial. We have the most expensive public system of higher education in the world. It is politically contentious because the burden of this new system founded on tuition fees, is only on students and not on the universities, which still have to prove if they can provide value for money.’ (EN 20) Rather than seeing HE as a unitary policy field, impermeable to the transformations of the economic and political conditions of which it is necessarily the result, these actors urged us to look at English HE as a historically context-​specific field, consisting of different actors and issues, whose relevance varies depending also on politically contingent factors. In this sense, a policy field becomes relevant when some of its aspects become politicized, that is, when interested actors actively mobilize for them. A former Dean of the Doctoral School at the Royal Holloway (London), who is acknowledged by the scholarly community as one of the most knowledgeable people on the recent reforms on English HE, was very clear in putting forward this reading when arguing why HE has recently become so important in public debate. She stated that a greater interest towards HE was fuelled by the active involvement of various stakeholders (especially students and university leaders) in the issue of student fees, regarded as the ‘big political issue’ within this field. In line with this interpretation, EN 18 contended that today English HE “has become a politically relevant issue. What politicized it was student funding (fees) [which] brought HE much higher on the political agenda.” This more nuanced and articulated picture of the English sector of HE tells us a specific story about the dynamics of politicization of policy fields. Although contextual and long-​term factors play an important role, it is the intervention of specific actors, shedding light with various resources on previously invisible problems, who are able to politicize a policy field. In this regard, the 2010 mobilization of English students against the hike in tuition fees represented an exemplary case. Before October 2010 there was little activity documented in traditional media and little interest from the public on the topic of ‘student protests’. By late October 2010, when protests began, there was some indication of public interest. By November and December

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there was a tremendous spike with more search engine activity and news coverage about ‘student protest’ (with peaks beyond 40 per cent in terms of search engine activity during the last weeks of November) on any single day between November and January than at any time in the UK since 2004 (Kumar, 2011). In other words, the national student campaign of 2010 produced a significant impact on the British public media and, more broadly, on British public opinion. In this sense, the ‘power of the streets’, with the high numbers of students gathering in the various local and national demonstrations, was very effective in making this issue publicly visible and worthy of the attention of various national political authorities. All the student activists we interviewed made this point very clearly. The then President of ULU, the organization representing the 19 SUs of the London universities, summarized in three key points the broader cultural relevance of the student mobilization of 2010: “one, raising the debate about the tuition fees in the mainstream media; two, it was politicizing massively the students themselves; three, to give confidence to the broader movement to organize demonstrations and events into other spheres. Especially the trade union movement. The student movement was the first anti-​austerity movement of the UK.” (EN 6) Other student leaders we interviewed especially stressed points one and two. In their view, the most positive aspect of the mobilization of 2010 was precisely to have focused public attention on a hitherto not much discussed issue in England, HE, both among the students themselves and English public opinion. Speaking of how mass mobilizations were effective in creating public attention, one of the organizers of the Campaign for Fractional Staff remarked that the student mobilization of 2010 was crucial to generate a “widespread awareness against the neoliberal university and the neoliberal policies on higher education among students and people more generally” (EN 5). She continued by adding that: ‘The campaign was in this sense successful because it was a combination of local occupations, where students were raising their awareness of the problems concerning the university, and the national level of demonstrations which addressed the political system and the policies on higher education as a whole. This had a national impact.’ (EN 5) According to another 2010 student activist, it was precisely the emergence of this awareness that produced among the students a “sense of collective power. The students kicked off the movement against

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austerity. Without us, the trade union movement would not have even started the campaign the following months.” (EN 10) Despite adopting a politically more moderate tone, a member of the board of NUS at the time admitted that the most important thing that the student movement of 2010 achieved was to “see young people angry against these policy choices of the politicians in the matter of education. In NUS, for instance, we now believe that we can mobilize people and we can do it together if we work on it.” (EN 7) In her view, the high level of mobilization capacity expressed by that movement was, in fact, fundamental in slowing down the implementation of reform and, more broadly, the neoliberal policies on HE. In this respect, she claimed that through the mobilizations “we stopped the most radical vice-​chancellors’ feeling [they could do] what they wanted. We slowed down a little bit the process of marketization and the most radical vice-​chancellors’ positions. They know now that there is a high-​profile resistance to their plans.” (EN 7) These observations on the strength of mass mobilization were even more clearly shared by the professors sympathetic with the student movement we interviewed. For a London-​based professor and University and College Union (UCU) activist, the massive student mobilizations of 2010 produced ‘two legacies’: ‘First, it was a generation of excellent campaigners who were radicalized during that period and helped to maintain the pressure to defend the public universities. Second, the mobilizations of students and staff unmasked the ideologically driven project of the government of higher education and, above all, showed that there was an opposition to these reforms that was not easy to defeat. So, further plans for privatization must be seriously reconsidered. Higher education is still an important battleground for all these forces. Nothing is lost yet. The process of marketization is going on, but not how they wanted. They have not been able to present and implement another piece of legislation related to it after the 2010 mobilization. They are going much slower than they expected.’ (EN 22) What this professor is referring to in this interview extract is a ‘reactive’ impact (‘they have not been able to present and implement another piece of legislation related to it’) that the massive mobilizations of the English students in 2010 effectively contributed to achieving. In other words, the political attention raised by the student movement of 2010

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on the policy of HE prevented the coalition government from enacting and implementing other university reforms that were in its neoliberal agenda. For several political observers and scholars, the government was in fact worried that the adoption of further measures approved through primary legislation would have caused other massive waves of student protest, which would have thus been detrimental to its political popularity (McGettigan, 2013). As a result, no primary legislative act was adopted by the coalition government in the following five years after the 2010 mobilization. As clarified by a student officer and member of the UCL Council in the academic year 2012/​13: ‘Without the mobilization, the government most probably would have proposed a full education act based upon a white paper much more regressive and based upon neoliberal principles. They enacted most of the things they wanted to put through in the bill without primary legislation. In a sense, it means that their agenda [has not] fully succeed[ed] yet.’ (EN 11) To sum up, one can claim that an important outcome of the student campaign of 2010 was precisely its capacity to politicize the issue of HE in English public debate in an irreversible way. From 2010 onwards, thinking about and discussing the matter of HE in England has become a ‘political matter’: one can be in favour or against the reforms of the government, but one must take a stand on them.

No political impact Yet, the 2010 campaign did not manage to significantly change the neoliberal views of the mainstream media and of public opinion towards HE and the reform of tuition fees. For one of the interviewees, it was a cold fact that “in 2010, nobody apart from the students was against that reform” (EN 18). As explored and confirmed by other studies (Williams, 2013; Brooks et al., 2015b; Tomlinson, 2016), the idea of HE as a positional and/​or private good and that of students and their families as consumers was widely shared among the English people at the time of the protests. The construction of student-​as-​consumer was and remained dominant in the mainstream media, among the wider public, and among the senior university managers, as well as in government agencies (Brooks et al., 2015b). Students were not represented in the media ‘as agents of change,’ but rather as consumers of HE (Williams, 2013, p 180). This representation

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aimed at reducing the ‘learners’ roles to purchasers and delimit[ing] their role and agency’ (Tomlinson, 2016, p 5). The increasing market order of English HE had impacted in an irreversible way students’ identity positions within HE and their wider sense of what it meant to be a student. As Williams noted (2013, p 177), ‘middle-​class parent-​consumers expect to see results in exchange for their money’. Overall, newspaper reports represented British university students as a generation of consumers demanding value for money on their educational investment in return for a graduate-​premium in their future employment (Bailey and Freedman, 2011). In light of this, it is not by chance  –​Tomlinson stressed (2016, p 12)  –​that ‘consumerist discourses have certainly become more widespread and are increasingly framing students’ relationship to higher education’. Accepting the neoliberal conception adopted by the British governments of the last 30 years, mainstream media and broader public opinion mostly agreed on and reproduced the idea of HE as a positional good. Despite the student campaign for free and public HE in 2010, the norms and conceptions of HE remained strongly neoliberal among the broader English public, exhibiting a relatively sympathetic view of the marketized process. In this sense, the student protests of 2010 failed in modifying the preferences of most of the English people, who remained politically closer to the neoliberal conception of HE and therefore were not supportive of the protests themselves. In short, there was no evidence of a change in the general public opinion towards the UK government and its HE proposal as an immediate result of the 2010 student protest campaign (on this missed shift see again statistics on English public opinion in 2010 in Kumar, 2011). In the same vein, interviewee EN 13 concluded her interview by telling us: ‘There is now a strong debate in the English media on the fact that HE is considered a private good. So, it is reasonable to pay for it, because you gain a benefit from it. Earning more than people without a degree. I guess the politicians took the view that public opinion as such is not willing to have a public funding system for HE … Public opinion was quite in favour or at least not against the increase of the tuition fees. The student protests of 2010 did not manage to change this view [the neoliberal conception of HE]. … There was not any other option that was politically acceptable for the government. There was a significant political consensus among the main parties, so it is difficult to challenge this view and change, radically, policy.’

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However, such an adversarial context towards a free and public HE was not the only factor inhibiting student influence. The incapacity of protesters to affect English institutional politics was also related to some specific features of the student protest field. For several student activists but also policy makers and experts we interviewed, the politically and organizationally fragmented nature of the 2010 campaign was indeed central to explaining the movement’s inability to significantly alter the political orientation of the English people and, therefore, of the coalition government itself. Given this character of the protest, it seems understandable that the English people and the media focused only on the disruptive and violent actions of the students and depicted the protesters as childish and immature. As remarked also by EN 21 in her interview, the adoption of disruption as the chief political means made students appear to be “not clear on what they wanted to achieve”. It seemed that “they wanted to stop what was happening without having a real alternative”. This was why –​for EN 17 –​it was then easy to turn these protests “in[to] the idea that students can only cause trouble and undermine their political credibility”. In other words, the government was able to weaken the political meaning of the protests by hijacking the student demands as an issue of public order. As EN 12 put it in his interview: “street demos in [the] UK do not make a difference”, especially when their leadership refuses “to meet the government and only adopts direct action, as it was in 2010”. Despite having different political orientations, most of the student activists we interviewed seemed to reach the same conclusions. When referring to the main reason for the political failure of that mobilization, a student activist very clearly singled out “the lack [of] a national organization capable to organizationally and logistically support the protest and keep the energy of the protest on. An organizational infrastructure sustaining [continual] student activism. A  bottom-​up organization capable [of organizing continuous] protests (like in Quebec) with some national spokespersons” (EN 1). In the same vein, a former ULU spokesperson blamed the political fragmentation and divisions of the movement. “In January 2011, NCAF (and the other radical organizations) split the movement with two demonstrations on the same day. The radicals were in London, while NUS was in Manchester for another demonstration. This was the beginning of the downfall of the movement.” (EN 6) Likewise, EN 20 pointed to the absence of “a significant student organization” as the origin of the political defeat for the students in 2010:

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‘There was not an organized protest, but only angry and very young people on the streets. Young people in this country are not politicized. They reacted in the only way they do, that is demonstrations. Without a political and organizational infrastructure able to help them. In the universities, student protesters were just seen as communists.’ Several activists connected the absence of a strong national organization to the ineffective and, to a certain extent, counterproductive tactics that the students predominantly adopted in the 2010 campaign. In other words, these activists stressed the insufficiency of disruptive actions as a means of influence. For them, the ‘power of the streets’ had to be accompanied by the capacity to organize the movement within the institutions. Mass and disruptive mobilizations needed to be strongly connected with the tools of institutional politics to be truly effective and to have an impact in the direction desired by the movement. The vice-​president of NUS in 2010 was very clear in this respect, when she argued, “if everybody is on the barricades, then universities stop engaging with us. So, you do need some people in the room, and some other people making pressure from the outside … You need different things for different people. Not only occupations and direct actions. You need a variety of tactics and people.” (EN 7) In the same vein, a professor at Sussex University and UCU activist remarked, “negotiation without mobilization and disruptive action is powerless. And this was what the students were doing by occupying the conference centre. The Union must keep lobbying, but alone is so ineffective. All these aspects are complementary. Disruptive action can create a bit of power behind the lobbying.” (EN 23) When explaining to us the strategy that the English student movement needed to adopt in the future to pursue and achieve its political goals, EN 22 seemed to allude to the adoption of a coalition-​building strategy (Cini, 2017c, 2019). He told us: ‘The street demonstrations of 2010 were important to capture the media and public opinion attention, showing an organized response from the students. But they cannot be forever. We also need a more political and institutionalized response complementary to protest. Protest can be a trigger for action, but then you need formal and political response to really make the difference.’ To a certain extent, the disruptive strategy adopted by the English movement was both the presupposition and the result of the absence

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of national political allies, either internal or external to the HE field, such as UUK and the Labour Party respectively. Put differently, the closure of the English context towards the student demands was both the cause and the effect of the movement’s radicalization and fragmentation, leading to its political inefficacy. As also seen in the previous chapters (especially Chapter 3), the association of university vice-​chancellors (UUK) was traditionally in favour of the establishment and successively of the increase in tuition fees. Its president at the time of the protests in 2010 was indeed very supportive of the government’s measures. If an alliance with the vice-​chancellors’ association was not on the agenda for the student movement (that is, full closure of the alliance opportunity within the HE field), then UUK’s active support of the tuition fees’ policy contributed to the radicalization of student strategies by fuelling the process of movement fragmentation. Even more evident was the unfolding of this process in the wider political arena. As seen in Chapter  3, the Labour Party was the initiator of the process of privatization of university funding in the late 1990s. Similarly to the case of UUK, no enduring or even tactical alliance was possible with a student movement demanding the return to free education. Put differently, the then executive of the Labour Party, strongly dominated by Blairites, was not hostile at all to the pro-​marketization reform proposals of the coalition government. Seen from the movement’s side, this was a clear situation of closed political opportunities. What is more, the historically documented political relations between the Labour Party and some leaders of NUS (McVitty, 2016) contributed to exacerbate and crystallize the traditional political divisions between the moderate and radical flanks of the movement even in 2010, by closing down any hope for the creation of a national political actor representative of all the English students. In conclusion, even though English student activists were successful in 2010 in politicizing the matter of HE, and especially the issue of student funding, they were not able to modify significantly the English public’s orientation (especially the media coverage), which substantially remained favourable to the marketization process. In such a context, the politically and organizationally fragmented mobilizations of 2010, associated with the movement’s incapacity to build alliances with national actors (or the impossibility thereof) were not viewed as a credible threat by the British government. The latter was thus able to take advantage of the low support that the English people showed towards the protestors’ claims and proceeded with the implementation of the increase of tuition fees.

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The Quebec 2012 strike: limited successful impacts Quebec was a case of significant student protests that resulted in impacts circumscribed to the repeal of a governmental plan to increase tuition fees. Yet, students were able to momentarily cleave the party system on the issue of public education. Faced with growing student protests, the government of Jean Charest was reluctant to negotiate; it waited too long to initiate conversations with the student associations, attempted to divide the student movement by isolating CLASSE, used repression to alienate the student base from society, and showed little disposition to withdraw the tuition fee hikes from the agenda. The liberals thought that the political crisis created by the strike could be resolved in their favour with the call to new elections. They therefore promised to restore order, condemned the radicalism of the students, and offered no concessions to the demands of the student organizations. The nationalists of the PQ, led by Pauline Marois, instead stated that the hikes would be repealed in the event of a PQ victory. On 4 September 2012, the PQ won the elections, even if by a difference of only 32,000 votes and with a hung parliament that limited its capacity to implement a clear agenda. The new PM did not wait to abolish the hikes enacted by her predecessor and cancelled most of the articles of the controversial Law 12 in September. Moreover, Marois announced that her government would maintain the C$39 million boost to financial aid announced by the liberals to offset the increase (Fidler, 2012). However, in November 2012, the government announced a budget of austerity, restating its commitment to achieving a zero deficit by 2014, which suggested that further cuts were to be expected. In the same direction, the PQ abandoned the idea –​presented during the electoral campaign –​of a tax reform, which would have balanced the public budget by increasing revenues. The government also announced that it would propose indexing tuition fees to living costs. Meanwhile, in the face of a commitment to reduce Quebec’s deficit, the government imposed a C$250 million budget cut to be achieved over the following two years. These cuts would be later partially softened by a concession made by the government after the summit, allowing institutions to spread the load of the retrenchment over seven years rather than two. McGill was the only institution not to take up the offer (Gibney, 2013). The government also announced a summit on HE to be held in 2013, with the participation of various stakeholders (experts, think tanks, vice-​chancellors) including the student associations. While FEUQ

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and the College Students Federation of Quebec (FECQ) agreed to participate, ASSÉ decided not to. The summit was a one and a half day event held in Quebec city, with the participation of the student federations, the government, rectors and the business sector. With not much time to debate at length, the main conclusion of the summit was the announcement of the indexing of tuition fees to the cost of living. It was also agreed that the threshold, in terms of family income, for eligibility to bursaries and loans would be raised from $28,000 to $45,000 a year, by 2015/​16. Furthermore, a panel examining student grants and loans issued its conclusions on 14 May, including plans for the government to redirect C$25 million to the most disadvantaged students to help with food and housing costs. Finally, five working groups were created with the task of (a) updating laws on university governance and finance, (b)  creating a National Council of Quebec Universities, (c) improving college education with the aim of strengthening their integration with their communities and localities, (d) revising the system of university funding, and (e) revising the system of student aid, bursaries and loans. These committees were chaired by prominent professors or former university leaders, except for the committee on student aid, which was chaired by former FEUQ president Pier-​André Bouchard St-​Amand. The National Council of Universities was originally conceived of as a consultative body of the Ministry of Education. Former rector of UQAM Claude Corbo was mandated to produce a report with recommendations for the creation of this council. The work of this committee would survive the defeat of the PQ in the 2014 elections. The incoming liberal government of Philippe Couillard would renew the mandate of Corbo to produce a report in consultation with stakeholders, with the scope of creating the aforementioned council. According to the last report published in March 2017 (Corbo, 2017), the council would advise the Secretary of Education on matters pertaining to the university system, including financial aspects, creation of new universities and campuses, and the evaluation of the quality of study programmes. The council was to be formed by 19 members designated by the government, with a slight majority of academic members. According to a student member of AFESH, the results of the university summit were insignificant: ‘Not that we didn’t care [about the summit], but it was a big joke, it was a big set-​up. The decisions were made long before that big TV show. So, some people I think tried to

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make some demonstrations against it. What month was that? February 2013. Everybody was tired, because we had two semesters in one [to recover the time lost during the strike] … Nothing came out of this, for me, maybe I’m wrong, but nothing came out of this.’ (QUE 4) Except for the indexing of tuition fees and the National Council of Universities (which at the time of writing has not been officially created, but seems close), none of the proposals emerging from the summit of education has yet been implemented. University rectors agreed on the view that the cuts of the PQ administration have severely affected their budgets (they calculated that the shortfall was C$850 million a year) and attributed the chronic deficit to the historic policy of low fees in Quebec. Beyond this point, opinions within CREPUQ diverged on all the major topics. It seems clear that without the consensus of (at least) a majority of this body it is difficult to further advance any significant reform in the area. In addition, the PQ government (2012–​14) did not enjoy a majority in the National Assembly, which was an obstacle to passing controversial issues. The demise of CREPUQ was apparent both for academics and HE experts. According to an expert based in Ontario: ‘Clearly, the group self-​destructed, because of the very different opinions of how interests were being structured within those debates. And there really was a sense that they didn’t think that the university interests were well-​ represented in the politics of the Maple Spring, and, especially, immediately after, when the government was interested in reform.’ (QUE 5) For an academic administrator of an Anglophone university in Quebec: ‘There is very little concerted action, there aren’t even any common statement[s]‌or positions, that I’m aware of. There are fractures between the universities, the so-​called charter universities and the University of Quebec System [UQS]. Within the UQS, there are fractures: UQAM wants to be treated differently from the other UQ campuses, and want[s] to be separate from everybody else, I  mean, it’s a mess. There’s no cohesion, there’s no university system, really, right now in Quebec. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.’ (QUE 6)

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The abolition of the hikes in September 2012 and the policy of indexation of tuition fees agreed upon at the 2013 summit were however effective in deactivating a conflict. Indeed, after the C$250 million cuts announced by the PQ, students protested but were unable to reorganize as a large-​scale movement. The liberals came to terms with the indexing, as the party’s spokesman for HE Pierre Arcand declared in March 2014: ‘I think we need to digest the events of 2012 … We don’t want to revisit right now those tuition hikes that you have seen under the Charest government. We are going to take a softer approach on this.’ However, the party stated that university students should pay their fair share for their education: ‘We’ve said that the tuition fees should be anywhere between 15 and 17 per cent of the total cost of education per student’ (Wrobel, 2014). After taking office in April 2014, the liberal government of Mr Couillard maintained the indexing. The Couillard administration did not however seem willing to repeat the mistakes of the liberal government in 2012. This has come at the expense of increasing universities’ financial stress, as the government seems determined not to invest further in HE and has handed over the responsibility for finding new income to the universities themselves. For Guy Greton, rector of the Université de Montréal, ‘The Maple Spring paralyzed everyone who criticized the underfunding of universities. No one wants to take up our cause, especially not politicians. Nobody wants to discuss funding, let alone tuition fees. These have become toxic topics’ (in Venne, 2017). As UQAM’s rector Robert Proulx remarked, ‘In 2012, politicians realized that attempting to impose higher tuition fees came with a political cost, but there seems to be none attached to neglecting universities’ (in Venne, 2017). Students created such a political turmoil that the possibility of repeating the situation prevents the party in government from considering reinstating tuition fee hikes even after the ceasing of hostilities. A member of parliament of the PQ confirms that the risk of paying a price too high for attempting a reform paralyzes the government: ‘If I had to advise the Prime Minister on that, I would say, ‘Open your book and read the history.’ I don’t think any government will touch that, to be honest. The strike that has been going on in Quebec, I don’t think any government would like to do that again. I really doubt that it will ever happen again, anytime soon, I doubt it, unless a political party would like to use it as an edge issue, a conservative government, maybe the CAQ [Coalition Avenir Québec], which is more conservative, maybe they would use it as a

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way to distinguish themselves from the others and make sure that they don’t want to have them, and use it as a leverage to get elected, that could be it, but definitely, it’s never going to come from us.’ (QUE 7) The indexing to some extent contradicts the (temporary) tuition fee freeze that the PQ implemented in September 2012. Still, students celebrated the abolition of the hikes as a victory of the protest campaign. Studies made by the independent think tank IRIS (Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques) demonstrate that the increase in tuition fees as a result of indexing results in a much lower tuition over time than those set by the hikes of the Charest administration (Daoud et al., 2012; Hurteau, 2017). With indexing, fees have grown from C$72.26 per credit in 2011–​12 to C$77.60 in 2016–​17, an increase of 7.4 per cent, whereas with the hikes proposed by the liberal administration, the cost of credit would have jumped to C$126.41 in 2016–​17, a 75 per cent increase. This represents savings of C$1,465 a year, or C$4,374 over the duration of a BA degree.4 Quebec remains one of the provinces with the lowest tuition levels in Canada. Only Newfoundland has lower tuition fees than Quebec (the Canadian average is C$6,201 in 2016), while Ontario has tuition almost three times higher than Quebec. The Quebec model of free college and low university tuition is arguably one of the reasons for significant lower levels of indebtedness in this province. While the average indebtedness level among the student population amounts to C$28,000 in Canada, in Quebec it is only C$15,000 (Hurteau, 2017). While indexing avoided a drastic increase in tuition fees that would have placed Quebec more in alignment with the Anglo-​Saxon HE systems, to what extent the 2012 student protests triggered a change of trend remains less clear. As explained by an Ontario based HE expert: ‘In terms of the impact on HE, in my opinion, what it did was immediately to destabilize the HE system … on the fee issue, I guess you could say there was a short-​term win, but there was no huge change in direction, I would argue. There was an avoidance at what had been a large fee increase, a neoliberal attempt to change the direction, but it was modified, but it wasn’t a clear change in direction … I’m not sure there was a broad range of HE reforms attached to the Maple Spring movement. There was a diverse range of ideologies associated with the movement. So, you clearly had a tuition fee issue as the cornerstone, and the students did have an influence on

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tuition fees. But it’s hard to argue that there was the Maple Spring and then there was this major change or reform on HE policy in Quebec. I don’t think there was a major change in HE policy, and even the change in tuition was modest, so that the big impact I think of the Maple Spring was a major destabilization of the HE system. There was the potential for change, but that change never really took place.’ (QUE 5) Given the austerity budget that was imposed on universities by the PQ government in 2012, one way in fact to offset the cuts was to increase tuition fees for international and Canadian (non-​residents in Quebec) students. Depending on the citizenship and residence status, non-​ residents in Quebec can pay several times more than Quebec students, as fees are modulated by each university and there are few restrictions from the government. Overall, Canadian students pay tuition fees that are between two and three times higher (about C$6,650 a year in 2015), while foreign students can pay tuition fees that are five or several more times higher, depending on the programme.5 Overall, from the 32,778 foreign students enrolled in Quebec universities in 2013, 19,820 were undergraduate students Ministère de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement supérieur, 2013).6 Following similar developments in other regions (for example the UK), the internationalization of the university system can be a lucrative source of further income for universities that have been placed under financial stress.7 Student associations have strongly opposed tuition fee hikes for international students.

Public opinion The student protest seemed also to have some effects on public opinion –​but to a lower extent than in Chile. Premier Charest was a controversial political figure, as his administration had faced several corruption scandals in the previous years. In May 2012, 59 per cent of Quebecers had a negative opinion of Charest, while 76 per cent considered that the government should re-​establish negotiations with the students (Léger Marketing, 2012a). The popularity of the government was already very damaged before the strike: only 21 per cent were satisfied with the government in April 2012, a percentage that had not moved very much since 2010 (Léger Marketing, 2012b). Discontent with the government did not translate automatically into support for the student strike. According to various surveys, society was divided over the issue of the tuition fee hikes. A slight majority backed the hikes (Léger Marketing,

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2012b). Support for the position of the students hovered around 40 per cent over the period February–​May 2012, with its highest level on 24 March (45 per cent); while support for the government’s position scored its highest level on 10 May (60 per cent). The divide between those for and against the hikes had different expressions depending on age, place of residence and community. A Léger poll showed that opposition to the hikes among those aged between 18–​24 was 74 per cent (March), 58 per cent (April) and 69 per cent (May) whereas support for the hikes in the age cohort 55+ was at 74 per cent, 62 per cent and 66 per cent respectively (Léger Marketing, 2012a). Although these figures show a high fluctuation, they confirm that opposition to the hikes was substantially higher among the young. In a similar vein, support for the government plans was higher outside Montreal, where only one out of five respondents in a CROP poll backed the students; support for students was also higher among francophones than anglophones (38 per cent versus 23 per cent respectively) (Katz, 2015). The attitudes toward increases in tuition fees was largely negative only a few years before the strike. But the perceptions of the public changed in a few years: between 2007 and 2009, those in favour of hikes jumped from 28 per cent to 50 per cent. This change has been attributed to a campaign by the liberals –​in office since 2003 –​which emphasized the concept of the ‘just contribution’ of citizens to the maintenance of public services (Tremblay-​Pepin, 2013).

The marginal effects of the Italian student protests Why did Italian students not achieve any significant policy gains in their confrontation with the Italian government, in spite of their large mobilizations in 2008 and 2010? Like the English case, although expressing a high and massive level of disruption towards the two reforms of HE under contestation, the mobilizations of the Italian students were not successful in opposing them and thus were not able to fight back the government’s neoliberal plan. Even though Italian students were able for a certain period to increase public attention towards the cuts in HE funding and the managerialization of university governance, they did not persuade the government that such an increase in attention also implied a shift in terms of public support towards the student protests. As seen in Chapter  4, the Italian student movement appeared highly fragmented in political terms in both 2008 and 2010. This jeopardized the emergence or the construction of a national actor

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capable of fully representing students and negotiating their demands with the government. The difficulty of the emergence of a politically credible student actor at the national level constituted one of the reasons explaining the incapacity of the Italian students to increase beyond a certain point the level of attention that the political system devoted to the issues of the contested reforms. This, at least, was the perception of several student leaders, who claimed that Italian students had historically been victims of a lack of consideration by Italian governments and by the media system. A former founder of UDU Forli and UDU International confirmed this in an interview (quoted in Genicot, 2012, p 64), in which he compared Italy and England: If the English students’ union says, ‘I organize a demonstration,’ the minister tears his hair out. If UDU says ‘I organize a demonstration,’ maybe the minister will never know … when journalists do not write about universities, the government does not want to see you, nor do the rectors, you have to find a way to make yourself heard. All the policy makers, state officials, and experts of the Italian field of HE we interviewed confirmed this perception. In this sense, HE is still perceived as something detached from the main dynamics of Italian society. Italians, especially from lower social classes, do not see HE as a public good able to generate high social and economic benefits. For a policy expert interviewed, the social perception of the low importance and value of HE in Italy is to be imputed to the fact Italian HE is not seen as an engine of social mobility as in Germany or the UK: “That is why there is no strong social bloc supporting HE in Italy. It is no coincidence that it has never been a relevant political issue.” (IT 8) Similarly, IT 9 noted, “the institutional political debate on HE has never been strategic in our country. The debate mostly occurs in a hysterical manner on single and contingent episodes, such as on the scandal of academic recruitment.” In other words, the Italian university system is still seen as a sort of ivory tower, and this perception relegates the issue to political marginality.

Marginal effects on the public debate Considering such a background context, in our investigation we tried to understand whether the 2008 and 2010 student protests succeeded in changing this perception in Italian society. Did the recent protests modify this long-​term perception? Both the statistical data of a

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European survey and our research fieldwork in Italy seem to provide a substantially negative answer to this question. To begin with, this reading was confirmed by the data of a recent study, commissioned and funded by the European Commission, illustrating the most politically salient issues among European citizens in the years 2005–​ 16.8 The survey asked respondents what the two most important issues in their country were. In Italy, ‘education’ was one of the most marginal political issues perceived by citizens, as the average percentage value for the years 2005–​16 was 2.7 per cent. This value seemed impressively low if compared to the average values of the two most important policy issues, ‘unemployment’ and the ‘economic situation’, whose relevance was perceived by Italians with values above 40 per cent in the same time frame. In this sense, these results confirm that HE has not been a political priority for Italians over the last ten years. What is more, they also show that the 2008–​10 student protests have not been influential in significantly changing the relevance of HE in Italian public opinion, both during the protests and in the period immediately afterwards. Yet, these data do not say much about the changes of political orientation that the student protests may have provoked in the Italian public debate. With respect to this, a relatively good proxy can be represented by the content of the media coverage that the Italian mainstream newspapers gave of the protests and of the contested issues. In analyzing the news coverage that la Repubblica provided of the student protests in 2008 and 2010, Cini (2017b) claims that these protests contributed to positively influencing the news frames of such contentious issues. In the course of the protest campaign of 2008, la Repubblica in fact gradually modified its media coverage by reporting more and more positively about the student protests and their demands. This view is to some extent confirmed by several student leaders we interviewed. As a student activist put it: ‘Thanks to our protests, we succeeded in undermining the perceptions of unanimity and of popularity that revolved around the third Berlusconi government. We represented the first successful experience of social opposition to that government. The honeymoon between Berlusconi and the Italian people ended there. It was our main achievement.’ (IT 3) In line with this reading, another student activist pointed out even more clearly the various and relatively positive effects that the 2008 student mobilizations produced in the public debate. For him:

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‘[the mobilization] slowed down the implementation of the reform. Even though we did not manage to stop the reform. Nevertheless, our mobilization was successful in reopening a phase of social conflict in the country outside the university system. The student movement succeeded in politicizing a significant segment of Italian society after years of Berlusconi’s cultural and political hegemony over the public debate. Most importantly, it brought on the public agenda the issue of the redistribution of wealth and that of the economic crisis.’ (IT 5) In other words, for several of these activists, the 2008 student movement constituted the “first movement against the economic crisis” (IT 6). Considering this, one cannot help but notice the similarities of the political experiences lived by the Italian students of 2008 with those of the English students in 2010. Similarly to the 2010 mobilization in England, the Italian ‘2008’ indeed represented the beginning of a new cycle of struggles, which brought to the forefront the rise of ‘new subjects’, able to raise political awareness among the younger Italian generation of the fact that things can be positively changed if collective mobilizations are organized. In the words of one of the leaders of Atenei in Rivolta: “in 2008, the youthful generation of the unemployed and of the precariat came into the political scene. A generation without future rose up to fight back.” (IT 7) Yet, even if Italian students succeeded in slightly modifying in a positive fashion the public debate on the issue of HE, this shift did not significantly affect the policy decisions of the government. This fact would thus confirm Burstein’s expectation (1999) that posits that when the public relevance of a policy issue is low, the public’s political orientation is not considered by politicians. In short, politicians do not feel responsive to social movement demands when public interest in the contentious issue is low. Since the student protests failed to increase significantly the interest of the Italian public towards HE, one can derive that, also for this reason, they failed to influence the policy decision of the government over it. Despite the high level of mobilization, the Italian student movement did not gain any significant result in 2008 and 2010 at the policy level, apart from a generic (and not always positive) attention from the national media. In the words of a Neapolitan activist: “we realized that the game was already lost. The implementation of [Law 133] was in place. We failed in determining almost anything apart from a high media attention.” (IT 5)

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In times of economic recession, governments normally carry out cuts first to policy sectors which are not perceived as relevant either by political actors or public opinion in their country. Cuts are even more likely to be implemented in policy sectors whose positive perception is constantly in decline among the public, as was the case for Italian HE in the years 2008 and 2011. For several policy experts in Italian HE, this fact explained why one of the first measures adopted by the then Minister of Economy and Finance Mr Tremonti when he took office in 2008 was precisely a plan of significant reduction of public funding towards HE. With respect to this, a policy expert of Italian HE and professor at the University of Milan highlighted to us, “the cuts in the sector of higher education carried out by Mr Tremonti represented a clear and precise political design. To lower taxes, especially during an economic crisis, we needed to find money. You draw it from the sector about which your electorate doesn’t care: higher education!” (IT 13) Illustrating the set of political priorities that the Berlusconi government had in the years of the crisis, IT 12 confirmed such an interpretation of the hostile political orientation of Tremonti towards the HE sector by claiming that he aimed at financially dismantling HE, because Tremonti was “strongly against the idea of mass public universities. In his view, it is too costly for Italy. That is why he invented the cut of the turnover for the academic personnel.” Facing such a hostile context, it does not seem so difficult to understand why the student protests of 2008 and 2010 failed to persuade the government to change this orientation.

A strategic failure of the movement Although these contextual factors were central to heavily condition the low political impact of the student campaigns, their presence was not sufficient to fully explain the student failure. In our fieldwork, we observed also the presence of specific organizational features of the movement as key in contributing to explaining the marginal political effects of the student campaigns. Put otherwise, these campaigns were unsuccessful also because of the lack of political ability of their promoters. One of the elements of such inability was the lack of capacity to come to a political agreement among the various student factions on the opportunity to build a national unitary organization (on this see again Chapter 2 but also Cini, 2017b). If student leaders unanimously perceived the lack of this capacity as being conducive to their failure, the fact that their political interlocutors (that is, former ministers and undersecretaries) also

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expressed similar views might turn out to be a good confirmation test of this interpretation. Among them, a former Minister of Education, University, and Research was very clear in stressing the “magmatic and loose nature” (IT 10)  of the organizational networks of the student movement, which prevented the creation of a stable form of organization able to negotiate with the various authorities. For him, the 2008 and 2010 movements lacked the strategic capacity to build such organization. Specifying and complementing this explanation, IT 8 considered such incapacity as the result of a student leadership that was not truly interested in producing “an effective impact” on the public arena. In our analysis, the absence of this capacity played a crucial role in limiting the formation of a national system of stable alliances with other actors by means of which to be more effective in challenging the government. Also in virtue of this, the threatening capacity of the students was never perceived as high by the government and by the other political opponents. This is, in our view, one of the strategic reasons explaining the marginal political effects of the two student campaigns of 2008 and 2010. Although both the student protests of 2008 and those of 2010 had the government as their main political target, some differences between them rested on the combination and type of allies which students could rely upon in the HE sector. Unlike other contexts of HE (Chile), Italian students never planned or attempted to build alliances with the association of the university leaders (in Italy the Conference of Italian University Rectors [CRUI], see again Chapter 3), as the latter was always more interested in safeguarding its privileged institutional relation with the Berlusconi government rather than negotiating with it for the sake of the whole HE sector. If in 2008 the Italian university leaders (rectors and heads of departments) expressed a generic feeling of opposition towards the cuts in HE, in 2010 they had a more nuanced position towards the managerialization of governance. Yet, and besides the ambiguous political orientation of the CRUI, the impossibility to reach an alliance with the students was also determined by the latter’s inability to deal with the issue of institutional power and/​or to seek institutional channels of political influence. Similarly to the English case, a political strategy tackling the issue of power was completely missing in the Italian student movement. Some student leaders with whom we spoke stressed precisely this aspect as one of the crucial factors preventing the movement from bringing about significant change at the national level in 2008. Speaking of the incapacity of the movement to exploit its high consensus and

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mobilization to exert power nationally and locally, one of the leaders of Uniriot pointed out that the major limit of the students was precisely ‘political’, namely their incapacity and unwillingness to “frontally deal with the issue of institutional power”. He claimed that: ‘The movement had a limit, which was the limit of the political form. We had launched the slogan ‘no one can represent us!’ that is, a slogan which denounced the lack of representativeness of institutions and of political bodies. Yet, we did not pose the question on how to build alternative forms of power, how to give a continuity to the movement. We were not able to find a mechanism maintaining our mobilization capacity and, at the same time, giving an organizational continuity to take over the institutional power of the university. This was our main problem. Our incapacity to build an organizational and political form able to reproduce and use the high mobilization capacity of the Onda.’ (IT 2) One of the activists we interviewed offered an even more detailed account of the institutional failure of the Italian student protests of 2008 and 2010 by comparing them with the student protests of Chile in 2011, where students managed to oppose successfully the hike of tuition fees by adopting, besides disruption, a strategy of institutional influence. In his words: ‘The Chilean movement had a greater capacity to exploit the institutional apparatus at their disposal. This is the mechanism of the FECH, CONFECH [the SU]. The fact the movement managed to exploit the institutional channel as a source of political legitimacy by acquiring and providing public credibility through it, was fundamental. The government was forced to meet the student union to discuss the reform. In Italy, with whom was the government supposed to meet? There is also a very strong organizational difference [with the Italian student movement]. The CONFECH is a forum in which several organizations take part and run for the leadership. A forum in which all the fractions and organizations of the movement take part and exploit this institutional channel. What is more, you have also to take into account that in Chile the people

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who took the lead of the demonstrations were precisely the same people who went to meet and negotiate with the government. There was a dialectic between movement and institutions. In Chile, there was the same leadership, which in Italy was missing given the absence of an institutional channel of influence.’ (IT 3) What these activists are referring to here is the absence of a ‘lobbyist’ strategy of influence. Like their English comrades in 2010, the Italian student activists mostly adopted a disruptive strategy of action in challenging the government, associated also with their difficulty to embrace a strategy of coalition building (on this, see also Cini, 2019b). More notably, the difficulty of finding solid and stable allies in the wider political context was also the result of the high level of political and organizational fragmentation of the student movement. Although all the main Italian trade unions (on the one hand, the confederations, especially CGIL, and within CGIL, the Italian Federation of Metalworkers [FIOM]; on the other, the grassroots unions, especially Comitati di Base [CUB] and COBAS-​Scuola) supported student action by also contributing to the organization of several protests (see Chapter 2 for the description of these attempts of coalition), the high ideological factionalism of the Italian movement prevented the establishment of an enduring relationship with them (some student groups were closer to the union confederations, some others to the grassroots unions) and, therefore, the creation of a stable coalition. What is more, a similar dynamic of political factionalism was also present in the trade union movement taking on the issue of the HE reforms, between the most moderate and most radical positions (on the one hand, between the CGIL Executive Council and FIOM within the CGIL; on the other, between CGIL and COBAS-​Scuola within the broader labour movement). If the CGIL supported the students in their opposition to the government’s reforms, it was more cautious to make the student protest a general issue of political contestation with the Berlusconi government. By contrast, FIOM and the grassroots unions aimed precisely at using the student protests to trigger a general strike of all the Italian workers discontented with the government. Added to the internal competition among the student organizations, this political tension within the labour movement was one of the reasons for the difficulty the students faced in making a stable alliance with the workers. This interpretation was provided to us by one of the student leaders of Atenei in Rivolta. He explained:

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‘we aimed at broadening the political scope of our struggle by seeking … an alliance with the workers. Especially with the FIOM and the grassroots unions. We took part in all of their strikes. We worked a lot on our political relation with the unions. Our goal was to unite the students with other social sectors. Unfortunately, we did not succeed in this because of the CGIL. Throughout the protest campaign, we used to demand CGIL to call for a general strike and to call it along with the grassroots unions, because at that point we still did not realize why they could not organize the strike together.’ (IT 7) Considering these tensions, there was no realistic possibility of a long-​term and politically strategic alliance between the unions and the student movement. Even more problematic was the relationship between the students and the various opposition parties, especially those on the left. If the possibility of a political alliance with the Democratic Party (PD) was not taken into consideration by any of the various groups of the movement, the presence of competing small far-​left parties, to the extent that each of them was perceived as a specific sponsor of a specific student group (see again Chapters 2 and 4), contributed to the process of organizational and political fragmentation of the movement, inhibiting the adoption of a shared political strategy to oppose the government’s policies. The PD was not fully hostile to the university governance modifications as provided for by the Gelmini Law, as in 2007 the then centre-​left government led by Mr Prodi had proposed a similar reform. What is more, all the centre-​left governments of the so-​ called ‘Second Republic’ (1994–​2013) had continued the policy of financial disinvestment of HE, carrying out cuts to public spending for HE, in common with the conservative governments led by Mr Berlusconi. Put differently, the political orientation of the PD towards HE did not differ significantly from that of the right-​wing parties in government. It is not by chance that the PD backing the cause of the students was thus limited to generic statements of support towards the importance of a public funding system for HE (see Piazza, 2014). Given such orientation, a strategic political alliance with the students was considered as impossible by both sides. By and large, the high ideological and organizational fragmentation of the Italian movement, associated with a parallel political fragmentation of the labour movement and of the parties of the left, prevented the

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students from building politically enduring alliances with such actors. Yet, and unlike the English context, although the Italian political environment was not so fully closed to the demands of the students, the fact that these openings were represented by the support of small political parties or actors with low institutional resources made de facto the influence of the students over HE mostly marginal. This may explain why the negative reaction that the Italian government adopted towards the student demands was not considered as very costly in political and electoral terms. Forced to face the most negative effects of the crisis, the government did not have any interest in engaging in negotiations over an issue, that of HE, which not only did not represent a priority for Italian public opinion, but was also a policy field closely related to the Italian left and its traditional voters. Considering this context, the politically and organizationally fragmented student mobilizations did not gain sufficient credibility to be perceived as a threat in terms of loss of consensus by the Italian government. The latter was thus able to take advantage of the low interest that Italian society showed towards the issue, and of the protesters’ low political credibility, to hijack the protests and implement its full policy agenda.

Conclusions Confirming some hypotheses of the political process approach (Burstein, 1999; Giugni 2004b; Kolb, 2007; Luders, 2016) and the political mediation theory (Amenta et al., 2005; Amenta, 2006), we have observed that, faced with closed political administrations and limited options to make student voices heard through institutional channels, a change in government was a necessary condition for policy change in the two cases in which concessions were accomplished. As the political parties in the opposition took students demands on board, these issues (tuition fees, accessibility, a stronger role for the state) cleaved and mobilized the electorate. As the parties in the opposition saw an opportunity to harm the party in government and maximize their options, both in Chile and Quebec they presented themselves as allies of students. Student campaigns were successful in terms of sensitizing a significant portion of society to the justness of their demands, even if during the electoral campaign these organizations were no longer able to sustain or repeat massive protests. But as national politics was ‘contaminated’ by the narratives and demands put forward by protestors, there was a continuity that favoured a policy process to some extent aligned with their expectations. The movement strength,

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determination and massiveness convinced politicians not to take student organizations lightly in their calculations, even if they knew that it would not have been easy for them to repeat a similar campaign in the short term. Furthermore, as a means to condition and participate more directly in the bodies that decide upon education policy, student leaders, and the politico-​ideological groups to which they belonged, entered national politics. The transition to institutional politics, if successful, allows these new actors to intervene in the policy field with institutional activists. Both in Chile and Quebec some student leaders became members of political parties and competed in elections, while others joined forces with young and old activists to create new political parties –​this later development is evident in the Chilean case. The impacts of student protests on public opinion were deeper in Chile. As different segments of society enthusiastically endorsed the student demands, the political parties in the opposition identified an opportunity to make a comeback to government. This placed these issues at the centre of public debate, politicizing (higher) education. The following elections saw these issues being hotly debated by both right and left-​wing parties. Education policies cleaved the electoral debate. The need to undertake reforms was recognized by all parties, although they clearly differed in their orientations, as their electoral manifestos made clear. The politicization of the policy field translated into openings for actors previously excluded from the debate, and, as we have seen especially in Chile, can lead to a restructuration of the previous balance of power within the field through the concatenation of electoral outcomes, and public opinion and social preferences changes. Conversely, favourable concessions from power holders were unlikely where student protests did not affect the political and electoral process, did not open opportunities to get (more) political power for the parties in the opposition, and/​or were unable to transform their demands into issues of broad, national concern. The English and Italian mobilizations exemplified these trends. Although both student campaigns were able to positively modify, to a certain extent, the public’s orientation on the contentious issues (especially the media coverage), they failed to persuade the British and Italian governments that such a shift was so significant as to induce a policy change. Both governments were thus able to take advantage of the protesters’ low political leverage to hijack the protests and implement their declared HE reforms. Overall, we observe that openings in the political opportunity structure are not ‘over there’, waiting to be discovered, but can be

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induced by protest movements. These occur when these movements are sufficiently strong as to carry out a protest campaign of significant duration and massiveness, which either persuades some insiders of the polity to endorse their demands or threatens governments and opponents with effective or potential losses (popularity, reputational or electoral), or both simultaneously. Where student protesters are able to act and express a unitary voice, it is more likely that they will be perceived as a credible political threat. By contrast, when students are not interested or are not fully able to overcome their political and ideological differences, they are less likely to affect political decisions, as their fragmentation is seen by authorities and institutions as an element of political weakness. We also notice that the policy field and the broader political system can offer different opportunities and constraints to protest movements, yet both are closely intertwined. Movements can exploit or create openings at different levels of the polity, which can result in different outcomes. The distinction between policy fields and political systems helps us to understand differences of degree of influence across social movements engaged in similar policy areas. The cases studied here show that influence in the policy field is more likely when students have institutional access to certain decision-​making bodies, although this does not ensure that their voice will be heard, and their demands incorporated. Alliances with other actors or stakeholders are needed for such an outcome to happen. On occasion, students can obtain partial access to the policy field (and effectively influence it) by engaging in political struggles that disrupt the normal course of politics. As we have seen in this chapter, when student organizations develop the capacity to mobilize their constituencies in large numbers over significant periods of time, they can challenge the authority of governments. Without this capacity, politicians are less inclined to offer significant concessions to students.

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Conclusions Introduction This book has analyzed student protests in four regions in South America, North America and Europe. In doing so it has aimed at contributing to social movement studies in several directions. First, in considering contextual constraints and opportunities, the text has contributed in two ways to traditional approaches that have explained contention in terms of structural opportunities. With the aim of introducing political economy in the study of HE and of student protests, we looked at how the dominant form of capitalism, neoliberalism, has affected the current field of HE, its policies, and its actors. In doing so, and bearing in mind the processual approach taken, political opportunities were considered not as a given but rather as one of the dimensions affected by social movements ­themselves. In this endeavour, regions with distinct models of HE were examined, selected on a continuum going from ‘state-​oriented’ (Italy and Quebec) to ‘market-​oriented’ (England and Chile) HE sectors. Second, looking at mobilizing resources, the authors considered student politics as a combination of both protest and associational politics in collective action to promote student claims, looking at long-​term cultural dispositions as well as adaptations to the interactions with various players in the field of HE. It was noted that the capacities to adopt various types of strategies, ranging from conventional to disruptive, in coordinated fields of movement politics, increased the chances of policy impacts. Rather than singling out a specific strategy as the most successful, the book examined the evolution of a series of (more or less) strategic moves during

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movement campaigns as interactions with other actors favoured some choices, but blocked others. Third, in order to deal with complex policy fields, a processual approach was adopted, looking at protest campaigns as eventful experiences with the potential to impact on social structures. In this sense, resources and constraints were not taken for granted but rather created in action as students interacted within complex webs of relations in policy fields. Mobilization processes included different steps, even if these steps were not in a neat sequence. In all cases studied, proposals for neoliberal adjustments (mostly in the form of fee hikes) operated as suddenly imposed grievances, triggering a protest event that acted as a positive shock, starting a wave of further mobilizations. The capacity of the initial shock to reproduce itself in space and time (by reaching out to the various actors within student politics) varied however, given different cultural predispositions but also conjunctural dynamics. What varied was also the capacity of student claims to find support among the media and public opinion, the political parties and, then, within legislative arenas. In these conclusions, the results will be summarized and further research on the topic will be presented.

Protest campaigns against neoliberal higher education: agency in process In order to understand the process of mobilization and its outcomes, the authors focused on protest campaigns through a systematic comparative analysis. In investigating them, della Porta and Rucht’s definition of protest campaign as ‘a series of thematic, social and temporal interactions that become inter-​connected, the actors involved believing them to be oriented to a specific objective’ was followed (della Porta and Rucht, 1995, p 3). A main assumption is that, between conditions and outcomes, there are a set of intense relations among main players that constantly transform the field, using but also producing resources and opportunities. Dynamic elements have in fact been considered as well, as movement campaigns often start with rather limited demands and moderate forms of action, and later politicize their discourses and become more confrontational. In this sense, mobilizations that were originally focused on student-​related concerns may, during a campaign, broaden their scope and address societal concerns instead, transforming themselves from reformist and single-​issue to radical and ideological movements. As also noted by Altbach (1964) for the 1960s mobilizations:

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What starts as a limited protest against some isolated issue may easily turn into a sustained movement, with concerns extending to the broader society. The leadership of the student movement is notably fluid, and it is very possible for a norm-​oriented leadership to be supplanted by students interested in capitalizing on a particular movement for their broader political purposes. Thus, while the norm and value orientations offer some convenient models to work from, student movements often defy a tight definition of either category. (cited in Luescher et al., 2017, p 2) The mobilization campaigns studied have shown some consistent similarities in their dynamics. First, in terms of tactics of contention, these students have used forms of protest rooted within the traditional repertoire of collective action. Strikes and marches followed a ‘logic of numbers’ (della Porta and Diani, 2006, ch. 7), showing the strength of the student movement organizations within campuses, but also demonstrating it to the wider public. Occupations had at the same time external and internal functions, blocking academic activities as a form of pressure, but also prefiguring a different academia. As observed in other waves of student protests, ‘[l]‌etting things idle through occupation stops or interrupts the incessant need for “results” and is itself a kind of impotent result, or a result that withdraws from calculation and measures’ (Lewis, 2013, p 154). In this sense, occupations of university spaces challenge existing educational practices, experimenting with alternative ones (Ross and Vinson, 2014, p 108). Additionally, creative forms of activities were developed with the aim of expanding sympathy for the protests; teaching in squares or trains reflected this goal. Students also adopted radical forms. In fact, in the four cases studied, a high confrontational orientation emerged in the adoption of disruptive protest tactics such as street and railways blockades, as well as in the occasional escalation of interactions with the police. However, insiders’ activities by student associations were also part of the broader repertoire of collective action. Also similar were some aspects of the protest organizational structures, combining local presence with some coordinative efforts. In all four cases analyzed, the sedimentation of different waves of protests and their outcomes brought about a complex structure of student politics, including ideological groups of various leanings, as well as informal student collectives and more formal student associations, with unions’ characteristics and different types and degrees of recognition. All

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these groups were reactivated, collaborating and competing during the protest campaigns. Finally, similar was a convergence on the main demands and goals pursued by the students, who in the four cases were concerned with the negative consequences of the process of marketization affecting their universities, and called instead for a stronger public system with a more democratic outlook. In fact, in all regions, the protest campaigns studied had counterhegemonic characteristics, stressing the conception of knowledge as a public, rather than a positional, good. An alternative knowledge as well as freedom of protest were advocated as part and parcel of a just and democratic academia. Some key differences across the four cases were however identified in the varying capacity of students to build protest fronts and alliances with other social and political actors, such as leftist parties and trade unions, a capacity which was higher in Quebec and Chile, and lower in Italy and England. In Quebec and Chile, students were able to forge alliances in their struggle against the government plans and managed to agree on common platforms of demands. In both cases, the prolongation of the conflict, which overstepped the expectations of the most optimistic activists, gave the protests some momentum, even if contributing also to the radicalization and exhaustion of various fringes of the movement. Although differences among factions were always present, they remained contained in the first phases of the mobilization campaigns, acquiring later on more relevance, jeopardizing organizational coordination and mass mobilization in subsequent years. The government’s attempts to address some of the student demands also contributed to demobilizing a significant part of the student body. In both cases, this occurred after elections defeated conservative parties in office, which led to changes in government. Compared to Chile, government concessions were more limited in Quebec, yet they were enough to deactivate some student associations, signalling also the subsequent disagreements among them regarding the HE summit of February 2013. In Chile, CONFECH managed to retain its role as unique voice of the students, but the displacement of the conflict to the electoral arena in subsequent years undermined the capacity of students to play a more significant role in terms akin to those of 2011. Furthermore, the centre-​left opposition promised to deliver a radical, comprehensive reform of the HE sector that seemed to be aligned with the broader aspirations of the 2011 movement, and which contributed to quell the agitation in several campuses.

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The student protests in England and Italy also targeted neoliberal reforms of the university, without however being able to achieve the intensity and duration of the Quebecois Maple Spring and the Chilean Winter. Albeit showing some differences in terms of goals and strategies even among themselves (especially between distinct student groups), the Italian students mobilizing between 2008 and 2011 expressed a similar firm opposition to the neoliberal plan of the Berlusconi government by putting forward, at the same time, alternative conceptions of HE, based on the values of democracy and self-​government. They failed however in stopping the process of the dismantling of public HE and the managerialization of university governance due to their incapacity to build political alliances with other social actors and due also to their ideological frictions. In England in 2010, after decades of acquiescence, large numbers of students, mostly without prior activist experience, revolted against the coalition government’s announcement to triple tuition fees and, more broadly, its plan to implement a fully marketized model of HE. Like their Italian colleagues, the English students were successful in bringing to light and practising an alternative model of university, founded on the idea of a free, democratic and public HE. Imbued with such a conception, protest campaigns arose in many university campuses across England to oppose locally the process of marketization in the following years. Even though they were not able to stop the hike in student fees –​as they failed to convince the English broader public that the implementation of a neoliberal agenda for HE was a negative process –​not all was lost. Since the end of 2011, students and groups of activists in several cities all over the UK ran campaigns against the process of managerialization of university governing bodies and, to a certain extent, were successful in slowing down such a process (see Cini, 2019b).

Neoliberal higher-education fields as triggers and targets Social movement scholars assign a crucial role to politics and institutional settings in explaining both the making of social movements as well as their consequences (Meyer and Minkoff, 2004). They have, however, rarely addressed the relations between the state and the market (della Porta, 2015). As Fleet and Guzmán-​Concha have shown with reference to Chile, the grievances expressed by the student movement reflected the process of reproduction of intellectual labour and the related forms of class exploitation. During processes of privatization, marketization and commodification, the role of intellectual labour in society broadens,

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as the service economy demands polyvalent professionals with academic credentials, therefore increasing the importance of institutions of HE. In this context, students have denounced forms of domination and exploitation, which –​ingrained in the inequality of mass HE –​undermined the reproduction of intellectual labour and constrained its future worth. Furthermore, students called for the restitution of public education and the intervention of the state to de-​ commodify intellectual labour and ensure its meaningful socialization. Therefore, students not only reacted to the material contradictions of massification but also to its ideological aspects, related to the public uses of knowledge and labour. (Fleet and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017, p 160) In their struggles, they relied upon those very values of knowledge and professionalism that ‘provide intellectual labour with the subjective disposition of contributing to society by delivering value beyond pure economic transactions’ (Fleet and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017, p 161–​2). Building upon these reflections, the unfolding of these processes in the HE fields of Chile, England, Italy and Quebec were analyzed. As observed in the authors’ research, the economic crisis in 2008 represented a decisive watershed in the process of marketization, with many governments pursuing pro-​austerity agendas. Austerity measures, following the crisis, have accelerated the implementation of neoliberal reforms. Although a common trend of convergence towards a neoliberal model of HE could be noticed in the four polities studied, national differences remained however pronounced. The presence of specific ideas concerning the role of state in the funding of HE, the pace of implementation of neoliberal policies, and the degree of institutional autonomy conferred to individual universities vis-​à-​vis governments, all played a decisive role in the way the four political-​institutional contexts shaped the norms of behaviour of the university actors. As shown in Chapter 3, the transformation of HE towards a market-​friendly system has been more evident and deeper in Chile and England than in Italy and Quebec. Paying attention to the political economies of contemporary societies, the political-​economic changes in the field of HE were considered key to understanding the rise, variety and trajectory of student mobilizations. The neoliberal reforms of HE had distributional consequences, as they altered the old state/​family balance in the funding of HE by increasing the weight of families’ expenditure (via tuition fees)

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to compensate for the retrenchment in state funding. Given the impact of these processes in the life conditions of lower income students, the process of the privatization of HE costs triggered discontent. The extent to which families and the state must contribute to HE is a crucial normative issue that is often sidelined by policy makers and politicians (Cini and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017). In all four cases, even if to different degrees, universities have undergone a process of neoliberal transformation, which has addressed most of the dimensions singled out in the introductory chapter. The four regions have experienced processes of (a)  commodification of services, with the increasing of tuition fees; (b)  privatization, with increasing numbers of private universities and the spreading of a market logic even within public ones; (c) managerialization, with mechanisms of competition among universities; (d) marketization of curricula; and (e) precarization of labour relations. Although with some differences across the four regions, it was the implementation of a low public investment agenda in education that was targeted, together with a conception of universities as firms selling positional goods. As mentioned, the extent of these interventions differed broadly in the cases under examination. For instance, the level of tuition fees varied, being very high in Chile and the UK and lower in Quebec and Italy, with also different degrees of related student indebtedness. Private universities were most widespread in Chile and England, less so in Quebec and Italy, whereas managerialization processes were more widespread in England than in any other of the regions investigated. What was noted however was that, while the source of discomfort among students were pro-​market reforms enacted by conservative administrations, the nature and magnitude of the student reactions were shaped by political factors. Threats and perceived grievances triggered collective reactions, but their resonance was also dependent upon the creation of resources and appropriation of opportunities. In sum, the rise, development, and decline of student protests should be interpreted in the broader context of capitalist transformations, including the process of massification of HE, whose social and economic consequences have not yet been fully understood. It was observed that institutional and political arrangements were as important as the organization of the economy in shaping universities and their actors. The protest campaigns analyzed occurred in contrasting institutional settings, which, despite their differences, did not prevent the emergence of protest movements. However, it was found that the configuration of such settings, and in particular the role and centrality of the state vis-​à-​vis the market, was crucial to understanding the

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different ways in which students reacted to detrimental conditions or sudden policy changes. While a single pattern of marketization of HE across the four cases was not observed, the resilient presence of different conceptions of universities forged during the 20th century was noticed –​in particular after the Second World War. In general, public universities play a significant role in supporting visions of public education, even if these universities have willingly engaged in competition to attract international students (and their fees) in a global market (which is the case in Quebec and England). Student protests can create a temporary shock, that can even develop into a critical juncture, but the protest achievements remain contested in the long term as the interests and powers challenged tend to re-​organize themselves. In this respect, the capacity of students to create and develop enduring and effective organizations able to challenge and fight back against such interests and powers on their own terrain, and in the long-​term, is important.

Students as players: resources and strategies In social movement studies, social protests have been considered as more likely to occur when certain conditions converge in facilitating the pooling of mobilizable resources and the emergence of protest entrepreneurs (della Porta and Diani, 2006). As for student movements, within-​country comparisons have shown that universities –​especially larger ones  –​ provide a ‘critical mass’, with dense networks which facilitate communication as well as coordination. As Nick Crossley summarized: First, studies suggest that dense networks, especially where actors are tied to one another in multiple ways (multiplexity), generate the solidarity, trust, support, incentives, identities and situational definitions conducive to collective action, supporting ‘deviant’ cultural practices … the politically inclined are being drawn together (homophily/​selection), creating a network, but simultaneously political inclination is spreading by means of inter-​personal contact in pre-​ existing networks (influence). (Crossley, 2003, p 599) In general, student movements have been considered as particularly influenced by some aspects of campus life, such as an age-​g raded population, a fairly close community, common social class backgrounds and other elements. In fact, academic life in general, and student life

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in particular, both permit and hinder student activism. The role of universities as arenas for the cultivation of new ideas and the ‘structural realities of academic life’ have a powerful effect on student political thinking and organizing, and create a tendency for students to be idealistic, oppositional, and impatient to see change. However, the transient nature of the student population and the rapid turnover in student leadership have an especially powerful impact on student movements; they are quick to emerge and difficult to sustain, short-​ lived, and sporadic (Luescher et al., 2017; della Porta, 2018a and 2018c). Cross-​campus research has also shown the positive impact of the memory of previous experience of politicization on the Left, as well as of the specific mission being the promotion of national development and social cohesion that some universities endorse (Wood, 1974; Lipset, 1976). In public or elite universities, these symbolic dispositions are taught by their teachers and embraced by their students. By contrast, commercially oriented universities tend to hire a faculty and to attract students with different orientations (Fleet and Guzmán-​Concha, 2017). Grievances are indeed fuelled in neoliberal universities, but do not automatically trigger protests. As eventful protests act as a shock, the capacity to develop dense and coordinated networks of action varies together with the capacity to trigger contentious forms and challenge conformist habitus inside the universities. As mentioned in the introduction, neoliberal transformations in HE have challenged both material and symbolic resources for student contentious politics, aiming at depoliticizing and taming the student body. The authors’ research indicates however that these trends were resisted, at times successfully. To a certain extent, it was observed that student fees bring about a commodified vision of knowledge as a positional good that can indeed discourage protest. It was also noted, however, that cultures of contestation within the university system are resilient, bringing about the re-​emergence of contention, as embedded in memories of previous waves of protests but also in the infrastructure of student organizations. While weakening material resources to devote to contentious politics, precarity itself can become an element of collective identification, transforming a cohort of students into a political generation (Cini, 2017a; della Porta, 2019a and 2019b). Besides contentious forms of collective action, there is also another aspect of student politics which has been affected in complex ways by neoliberal transformations:  associational student politics. According to Klemenčič (2014), student access to various levels of decision-​ making bodies follows three main models. One is the authoritarian-​ paternalistic model, in which students participate in some decisional

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bodies but with limited discretion, and only on issues that concern them directly (such as the provision of student services). The second is the democratic collegiate institutional governance model, by which students are granted participation in all bodies, with co-​decision rights on all issues and without restrictions. The third model is inspired by the new public management doctrine, which conceives of students (and academics) as stakeholders who inform an institutional leadership with autonomy to make decisions. In this model, the student governmental structure tend to adapt to specific opportunities and expectations in terms of structures, practices, priorities and orientations, becoming professionalized and entrepreneurial while the more political student groups within student government tend to be marginalized. As noted in the authors’ research, student politics varies in terms of degrees and forms of associational life, even though regular channels of access to decision-​making bodies at the national or university level offer opportunities of influence that do not entirely depend on the protest capacity of these organizations. Some associations accommodate themselves to institutional settings that grant them some decisional power at the expense of taming their more disruptive and militant features over the long term. In England and Quebec, for instance, student associations have legal status and protection, which confer them with ample financial and organizational resources. During the recent protest campaigns, these associations displayed rather moderate patterns of activism and, as explained in Chapter 2, they had secondary roles in the organization of protests (with some differences, however, as student politics remained more politicized in Quebec than in England). By contrast, in Chile and Italy students have limited access to policy making at the national level, and restricted channels of influence at the university level. This characteristic made student associations more confrontational and militant, especially in Italy, where they exhibited a lack of (formal) organizational resources. Nevertheless, as the Chilean example indicates, a lack of institutional recognition can be more than compensated for by the networking capacity of political student groups. In addition to access to decision-​making bodies, which is substantially regulated by the institutional framework, a second dimension that contributes to shape student politics revolves around ways of student organizing. Making sense of the variety of such ways in the four regions, a typology was built based upon the distinction between fragmented versus coordinated modes of student politics. Irrespective of the level of state recognition, in Chile and Quebec nationwide

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student organizations played significant roles in student politics. National organizations provide legitimate political arenas which, given certain conditions, make the emergence of alliances among groups more likely. As many of these groups also embrace causes related to national politics, politicization processes can become very important. Therefore, in addition to their institutional or representative roles, these national organizations played important roles as agents of protest. In sharp contrast, nationwide organizations were weak in Italy and England. As a consequence, student politics was fragmented into several smaller, unofficial organizations that represented like-​minded students at the campus level. These groups were formed on a voluntary basis by students sharing similar ideologies, lifestyles or interests, and they tended to assign little value to bodies of institutional representation. In these cases, fragmentation appeared as the result of a process wherein different student groups strived to hegemonize the protest arena. Yet they ended up fighting each other, thus making coordination and the emergence of a nationwide, politically credible actor impossible. The four cases investigated in this book combine different levels of student access to institutional decision-​making bodies, as well as differing modes of student organizing, as summarized in Table 6.1. Chapter 4 explained how the structuration of the field of student politics had significant effects over the modes of activism and the orientations that students tended to develop. In particular, and relating these characteristics to the impact of social movements, it was observed that coordinated, relatively cohesive fields of student politics that draw on strong, politicized traditions of activism can –​on occasion –​offset the lack of formal channels of access to decisional bodies. Chile offers an example of this pattern. Furthermore, it was observed that cultures of activism and experiences of politicization can be preserved and become a resource for mobilization, despite an institutional environment that tends to reproduce moderate approaches among student associations. Quebec offers an illustration of this pattern.

Table 6.1: Student politics in action Institutional access

Student organizing

low

high

coordinated

Chile

Quebec

fragmented

Italy

England

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While the relevance of politics and institutions for social movement impacts has been long recognized in the literature, this book has provided a more nuanced approach that builds on the political mediation model (King, 2008; Amenta, 2013). The book agrees with the main assumptions of this approach, namely that the impacts of social movements are the result of mediated interactions that involve other actors, institutions, and more broadly, the political system. However, further specifications have been introduced. It has been shown that some contextual factors that are usually seen as external to movements can be affected by large protest movements and thus provide openings or resources that are used at later stages by these movements. In addition, the authors’ findings contradict the core assumptions of the political opportunity structure theory (Kriesi et al., 1995; Meyer, 2004): namely, that higher degrees of institutional access to challengers favours conventional modes of contention at the expense of lower disruption, and that more formal access makes challengers’ influence in decision-​making instances more likely. The authors’ findings suggest that more access to these instances does not necessarily prevent the radicalization of these constituencies nor increase the inputs of movements in the policy process. Traditions of activism can last long periods of time, shaping the orientations and resources available to social movements. Finally, the authors’ analysis takes distance from previous approaches in HE studies, which regard institutional settings as a rigid and static precondition for actors’ agency (see, for instance, Capano et al., 2017). By contrast, the research for this book has shown that it was the eventful and transformative process of contestation, rather than institutional resources, which enabled students to bring about impacts both in the HE field and national politics.

The political impacts of social movements: beyond legislative effects As we have seen in the previous chapters, the student mobilizations in Chile, England, Quebec and Italy at the turn of the last decade have had different political impacts, ranging from low or absent, to significant. Key here is the role played by the opening of political opportunities, especially embodied by the presence of powerful allies (Kriesi, 2004). When a conflict scales up to the government, political allies have been said to become more relevant. Social movement literature has shown how the presence of allies in political institutions, in key decision-​ making bodies, in the media, and, more generally, in the public arena, is one of the main factors facilitating the impacts of movements

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(Kitschelt, 1986; Amenta et al., 1992; della Porta and Rucht, 1995; Kriesi et al., 1995; Cress and Snow, 2000; Kriesi, 2004). Historically, ‘natural allies’ of movements have been left parties or unions (della Porta and Rucht, 1995; Kriesi et al., 1995). Specific political opportunities emerged as important from our analysis of the dynamics of student protest campaigns, and not only as conditions, but also as effects of such protests, which in their unfolding have been able to forge innovative political alliances and, in turn, to obtain concessions, as was in the case of Chile or Quebec. As the advent of neoliberalism has brought about the unfolding of post-​democratic processes (Crouch, 2004), student movements have had to, in varying degrees, distance themselves from political parties. A strong criticism of institutional politics has characterized, in particular, recent student protests (for example, Piazza, 2014; Caruso and Giorgi, 2015). The development of horizontal organizations with the use of direct action among students has been noted, among others, in Brazil (Alonso and Mische, 2017), and the presence of networked social movements has also characterized the #RhodesMustFall movement at the University of Cape Town in March 2015 and afterwards in the nationwide #FeesMustFall movement in South Africa (Luescher et  al., 2017). Interestingly, however, the critique of existing parties did not bring about a neat or definite detachment from representative institutions –​in Chile, this is testified for by the continuous presence of left-​wing parties as well as by student representatives contesting national elections and a few of them entering in parliament in 2013 (Von Bülow and Bidegain Ponte, 2015). As observed in the authors’ research, student protests had in fact different types of effects on legislation, promoting and, especially, resisting changes. In particular, legislative impacts were more straightforward in Chile and Quebec, where protestors were also able to sensitize public opinion and had an impact on electoral politics, than in England and Italy, where neoliberal reforms passed with little impact from student protests. In all cases, though, intense protests impacted some segments of public opinion, even if with different capacities to sensitize it to the relevance of free and public education. All in all, even protest campaigns which failed in achieving their goals, did however contribute to the long-​term opposition to neoliberal conceptions of HE. In the authors’ research, the aim was to account for these different outcomes. While long-​term exogenous and endogenous conditions certainly set constraints and opportunities that the student struggles had to adapt to, these could not explain the specific results of specific campaigns.

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In this sense, it is not suggested that protests are more likely to succeed given a specific HE policy model or a specific configuration of student politics. Rather, the focus was on the contingent and conjunctural development of eventful campaigns within complex fields of action. Nevertheless, the characteristics of the HE fields previously described had effects on the course of the protest campaigns in the four regions, especially on the interplay between movements and state institutions. However, it is also during eventful protests that opportunities and resources of influence are created. As Lewis (2013) suggests, blockades and occupations of buildings open spaces for converging in a state of suspension, by assuring the availability of ‘free time’ and ‘free space’ to think and fight. Events such as the occupations of university buildings aim at achieving ‘the social time necessary to articulate the protest and, at the same time, to break with the faculty daily routine and visualize the conflict inside the institution’ (Fernandez, 2014, p 207). This is what happened in the four protest campaigns, as they accelerated with the intensity of mobilization (della Porta, 2018b), and assemblies, meetings and demonstrations became resources, providing space to meet, coalesce and strategize. Not only resources but also opportunities are created along the campaign. The combined reactions of institutional actors define an ‘institutional sensitivity’, which political struggles can indeed modify by addressing the disposition of authorities, policy makers and bureaucracies. In the short run, institutional sensitivity might vary in reaction to challenges, from civil society to drastic changes in public opinion, or to exogenous crises (such as disasters or international conflict). In the long run, institutional sensitivity might change due to broader alterations of the balance of power and/​or due to institutional changes in the rules of participation and representation of interests in society. We observed in fact that in the two episodes of contention with the largest impacts (Chile and Quebec), students were able to mobilize in large numbers over a long period of time. Protests of significant magnitude put pressure on the political system, which obliged politicians and governments to take sides and respond to student demands. In both regions, government attempts to weaken and repress the movement were not successful (at least not at first). The lack of a proper government response combined with repression transformed student strikes into movements for civil rights and against the authoritarian turn of these governments. This provided students with new, significant allies, and enhanced the interest of international media in the protests. Furthermore, in both cases elections were a test for the governments’ approach to social demands. The opposition parties in both regions

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embraced student demands and promised to fulfil them once in government. This stance divided students  –​between those more sceptical of the promises of the parties of the centre-​left and those who saw in the arrival of those parties an opportunity –​compromising the unity that the movement had exhibited during the most contentious period. After elections, the new governments, however, partially fulfilled some of these demands, although the assessment as to how far remained an issue of controversy within the ranks of students themselves. By contrast, in the cases with little or no impact in the policy process, student organizations were not able to mobilize in large numbers (Italy) or to sustain their campaign over time (England). Furthermore, public opinion remained relatively indifferent about the issues at stake and did not endorse their demands. As repression isolated the students rather than raising sympathy for them, governments managed to retaliate or neutralize student actions and therefore never seriously considered giving concessions. Students could not influence the climate of the next election or the general political debate, and no significant actor (such as university authorities, trade unions, or newspapers) supported them. The main party of the centre-​left did not subscribe to the students’ narrative, having been instead among either the promoters of the neoliberal reforms (England) or indifferent (Italy). This meant that no significant ally emerged in the political system, as centre-​left parties remained aligned with the policy paradigms behind the reforms that the students opposed and dismissed their criticisms. Notwithstanding the aforementioned differences, which were reflected in the different claims and organizational structures of these movements, the campaigns analyzed in this book were characterized by a shared mix of conventional and disruptive repertoires of action and an attempt at bridging organizational differences. At times, an evolution from specific issues to broader topics was noted. Repression brought about solidarity, with also the potential for politicization and reaching out to public opinion. In some cases, there was a capacity to sensitize political actors. Effects were also visible in terms of sensitization of public opinion, political alliances, organizational building, innovations in the repertoire of action, and empowerment of groups previously demobilized.

Further research Four protest campaigns have been analyzed with the aim of singling out some dynamics of contentious politics within the policy field

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of HE. Rather than identifying and assessing the best strategies, the authors were interested in the relationship between players within a specific area of politics. Neoliberal transformations of universities were at the same time conditions and targets for the protests that did, to a certain extent at least, transform them. Students mobilized in different university models, with different capacities for influence. No model per se thwarted or facilitated protests, but student strategies certainly needed to adapt to conditions that affected their resources and opportunities and also challenged them. While governmental reforms triggered protests, their size and dynamics had different capacities to resonate in broader circles, within and outside universities. Opportunities were created in action as the strength of the student mobilization and their resonance in broader sections of the population contributed to trigger a debate in the party system, with an appropriation of opportunities on the Left that was more visible in the Chilean case. Given also the limited attention that social movement studies have given to contentious politics in universities (for valuable exceptions, see Reyes, 2015; Roger, 2018; Cini, 2019b), it is believed that the authors’ efforts might help stimulate further research on student protests. If there are admittedly several limitations to this work, we hope that other international comparative projects may be able to address them. First, focusing on campaigns, specific time periods have been isolated. This has given an opportunity to analyze the relations between various players as well as the immediate effects in greater depth, but it does not allow for tracing the long-​term effects of a campaign. The capacity of students to maintain and defend their previous gains has already appeared variable in these four cases (see, in particular, the case of Quebec). In addition, some apparent cases of failure of protest campaigns, like England, seem however to have been able to produce long terms impacts, at least in the position of the main centre-​left party, as under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn the abolition of student fees has become one of the symbols of the renewed centrality of issues of social justice and redistribution. Second, the main focus has been on relations within the field of HE, looking at student politics and at their opponents and allies in the structures of power. The authors did not, however, consider, in depth, the interactions of university students with their peers outside universities, which would have allowed, among other things, an investigation into some of the generational characteristics of these actors. In a similar vein, limited attention was paid to other actors within universities who could have increased the protest potential of the students, such as unions of academic and non-​academic personnel,

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student societies and clubs, and the professional associations to which faculty belong. Third, the need to focus on one field in order to single out relations and dynamics should be combined, in further research, with attention to relations across fields. In particular, students are often embedded in broader movements, especially in the so-​called left-​libertarian social movement family. They support and are supported by other movements in society. Protestors located the issues of student fees or university governance within broader ideologies calling for social justice and participation, thus adopting a left-​wing stance. They were embedded in waves of anti-​austerity protest that developed in different forms and with different strengths in the four cases, given different structural and contingent opportunities. The research has also singled out some relevant contradictions within the HE field, which are worth investigating further. First, the protest campaigns studied in this book have occurred after significant expansions in HE enrolment, which have led to an ongoing process of differentiation (and hierarchization) of university systems. Further research should investigate the impacts of these dynamics in terms of socio-​economic stratification and social reproduction, but should also look at the consequences of massification for the process of knowledge creation and the (varying) roles of knowledge in the economy and society. Second, the specific values and aspirations promoted within the university system might offer some space for specific definitions of rights, among which is participation in the HEIs. The need for taming student protests through repression enters then in tension with visions of freedom, in some cases –​but not in all –​promoting waves of solidarity. Finally, it is worth exploring the role of students across historical periods, especially in the wake of the recent anniversary of the events of 1968 (for example, della Porta, 2018a), as well as including other regions and geopolitical contexts using comparative frameworks. As student protests in Mexico and South Africa have suggested, waves of unrest have been intertwined with claims for human rights and against persistent inequalities based on gender, race and ethnicity. Further cross-​regional and historical research, looking at old redistributive issues and new cleavages of mobilization –​such as gender and minority rights –​is therefore necessary to fill the gaps in our understanding of the local and global dynamics of student activism.

187

Appendix Status of the interviewees and codes, per country ITALY Student organizer

IT 1

Student organizer

IT 2

Student organizer

IT 3

Student organizer

IT 4

Student organizer

IT 5

Student organizer

IT 6

Student organizer

IT 7

Expert

IT 8

Expert

IT 11

Expert

IT 13

Politician

IT 9

Politician

IT 10

Politician

IT 12

QUEBEC Student organizer

QUE 1

Student organizer

QUE 2

Student organizer

QUE 3

Student organizer

QUE 4

Expert

QUE 5

University leader

QUE 6

Politician

QUE 7

189

CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION CHILE Student organizer

CHI 1

Student organizer

CHI 2

Student organizer

CHI 3

Student organizer

CHI 4

Student organizer

CHI 5

Policy officer

CHI 6

Policy officer

CHI 7

Policy officer

CHI 8

Expert

CHI 9

Policy officer

CHI 10

ENGLAND Student organizer

EN 1

Student organizer

EN 2

Student organizer

EN 3

Student organizer

EN 4

Student organizer

EN 5

Student organizer

EN 6

Student organizer

EN 7

Student organizer

EN 8

Student organizer

EN 9

Student organizer

EN 10

Student organizer

EN 11

Expert

EN 12

Expert

EN 13

Expert

EN 17

Expert

EN 18

Expert

EN 19

Expert

EN 20

Expert

EN 21

University leader

EN 14

University leader

EN 15

University leader

EN 16

Member of UCU

EN 22

Member of UCU

EN 23

190

Notes Chapter 2 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

UCEN was a ‘strange animal’ in the market of private universities. It reinvested its profits, it owned all its buildings, and after a reform of its statutes in 2000, a general assembly of academics was the major decision making body (the general assembly appointed the board of directors, for example). See: http://​ciperchile. cl/​2011/​04/​28/​el-​negocio-​que-​esconde-​la-​venta-​de-​la-​universidad-​central/​. As Aaron Porter, the then President of the NUS, defined them in an interview released to The Guardian the day after the demonstration (Vasagar at al., 2010). (Vasagar and Taylor, 2010) ‘Students to follow protest with national day of action: Group stages occupation in Manchester over cuts, NUS plans campaign in Lib Dem constituencies’, The Guardian, [online] 12 November. (Asthana et  al, 2010) ‘Student protests:  Young, disillusioned and angry’, The Guardian, [online] 11 December. According to most of the students with whom the authors spoke, NCAFC and EAN ‘had been formed to fill the void left by an inactive NUS, due to its intimate relationship with New Labour, which had hindered the student movement and allowed fees to be established in the past’. Due to space constraints, the authors could not present all the extracts from the 15 student activists we interviewed here; they unanimously claimed that they and/​or the student groups to which they belonged supported both the ideal of free education and the democratization of the university governing bodies. The authors therefore decided to present in the text only a few testimonies that were considered representative of the student activist orientations. ‘This was another play of words invoking carrément’s dual meaning of “squarely” (literally) and “completely” (in colloquial usage) to signify a population that is “in red”, or in debt’ (Katz, 2015, p 75). The Comité maintien et élargissement de la grève took the task of collecting data on the strike, and the dataset was called Système d’information sur la grève générale illimitée (SIGGI) (Ancelovici and Dupuis-​Déri, 2014). Uniriot and Atenei in Rivolta were not in fact the only semi-​national student organizations active in 2008. Unione degli Studenti (UDU) (Union of Students) was also present. Adopting a lobbyist strategy, UDU was marginal in the organization of protests, both in 2008 and 2010. This is the reason the authors did not consider such an organization as relevant in the dynamics of student protests and in their impact.

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Chapter 3 1

2

3

4

5

The former secretary of education during the first Bachelet government, Sergio Bitar (2003–​5) explained on CNN Chile the motivations of its secretary at the time, in a debate with the former vice-​president of the Student Federation of the University of Chile, Francisco Figueroa:  https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=7YbQkFSO49M. Such as the Bicentenary Scholarship, New Millenium Scholarships, Juan Gomez Millas Scholarship, Academic Excellence Scholarships, Scholarship for High PSU scores, Scholarship for Future Teachers, Scholarships for Children of Education Professionals, Indigenous Scholarship, Scholarship from the President of the Republic, Scholarship for Victims of Human Rights Violations, Maintenance Grants, and Scholarships for Territorial Integration. These figures only concern England. In fact, the Robbins report covered the whole of HE in the UK (that is, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). In this sense, the figures of 560,000 and 216,000 included also students in non-​English institutions, who were likely to have made up around 15 per cent of the total. This fact does not invalidate the claim: the Robbins report was meant to expand student participation in the English HE. In the authors’ investigation, only the HE sector of England was dealt with. Although the term ‘the UK’ is used, we refer only to ‘England’. This usage is allowed by the current process of political devolution occurring in the UK. Indeed, following the devolution of powers to national assemblies in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 2000, the UK national Parliament has jurisdiction only over education policies in England (there being no separate assembly for England independent of the UK parliament, as is the case for the other constituent countries in the UK). Universities UK is the national body gathering all the vice-​chancellors and principals of the universities of the United Kingdom. Reading about the history and structure of Universities UK from its website at: http://​www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/​ aboutus/​OurOrganisation/​Pages/​Structure.aspx (accessed 31 December 2014): Founded in 1918, Universities UK members are the executive heads (vice-​ chancellors/​principals) of each UK institution that has the legal power to award its own first and higher degrees and which, by virtue of Act of Parliament, Charter, Statute, or Order of the Privy Council, has the right to claim university status. Universities UK currently has 133 members including virtually all the universities in the UK and some colleges of higher education. The University of London has 15 members, including its vice-​chancellor. In Wales, the vice-​chancellors of the constituent institutions of the University of Wales, and the principals and chief executives of the university colleges in Cardiff and Newport are members of Universities UK. Universities UK is a company limited by guarantee with charitable status and is financed mainly through subscription from its member institutions. Today Universities UK remains the essential voice of our universities -​supporting their autonomy, celebrating their diversity.

6

In 1992, polytechnics, colleges of higher education and other institutions became universities. Thus, the increase in student enrolment is not entirely due to the introduction of student loans and fees.

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Notes 7

8

9

10 11

12

13

14

15

16 17

Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). Retrieved at: https://​www. hesa.ac.uk/​data-​and-​analysis/​publications (accessed 9 August 2017). HESA holds data on higher education in the UK from the 1994/​95 academic year when it started to collect data about students from 182 HEIs. Figures for the HEIPR are rounded to the nearest whole number to reflect the degree of accuracy inherent in the data. As this can conceal changes or trends, figures rounded to the nearest decimal place are also provided to inform comparisons over time. Figures rounded to the nearest decimal place are shown in parentheses. Figures for the counts of initial entrants are rounded to the nearest thousand. Rounding may result in apparent inconsistencies between totals and sums of constituent parts. Source: HESA. Retrieved at: https://​www.hesa.ac.uk/​data-​and-​analysis (accessed 9 August 2017). Domiciled students are those normally resident in the UK. For more info, see https://​www.hesa.ac.uk/​news/​07-​08-​2017/​undergraduate-​ student-​numbers (accessed 10 August 2017). More notably, Callender and Mason (2017, p 5)  found out that ‘by 2013/​ 14, 92 percent of students had taken out a loan for tuition and 89 percent for maintenance, suggesting that most cannot afford to study unless they willing to borrow. Between 2002 and 2015, tuition fees rose by 553 percent’. It is not in the purpose of this section to provide a complete and coherent overview of all the higher education reforms that British governments have enacted over the last ten years. More simply, in this section we illustrate the main passages of reform concerning the English system of HE on which the bills and the protests of 2010 were based. In the government’s forecast, most of the universities would have charged £6,000 a year, and up to £9,000 only in what the government described as ‘exceptional cases.’ But this optimistic forecast seems to be contradicted by most of the vice-​ chancellors who have declared their willingness to increase the tuition fees in their universities up to the £9,000 cap per year. It is hard indeed to see £9,000 as the exception. There will be a strong financial incentive for universities to charge as much as they can after the government outlined plans to cut state funding for HE. Almost 647,000 of England’s 16 to 18-​year-​olds received the up-​to-​£30 a week allowance, which was introduced in 2004 to encourage teenagers from deprived backgrounds to remain in education, especially in what is called further education. FE in the UK is a term used to refer to post-​compulsory education (in addition to that received at secondary school), that is distinct from the HE offered in universities. FE is usually a means to attain an intermediate or follow-​up qualification necessary to attend university or begin a specific career path. http://​www.uquebec.ca/​reseau/​fr. Although it should not be identified with the type of university admission based on performance in standardized tests, in a similar way, the presence of numerus clausus limits the number of student enrolments on the basis of meritocratic criteria. Such a mechanism of selection is, in Italy, still active in the faculty of medicine.

Chapter 4 1

FECH, for example, has an annual budget of over CLP$100  million (some €120,000), plus the free use of a three-​story university building (more than 200 square meters). With these resources, FECH hires a permanent administrative staff of four to five persons. By contrast, federations in public regional universities are

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2

3

4

5

6

7

assigned more limited budgets, small offices and no permanent staff. Federations in the traditional universities enjoy a better position in term of resources, whereas those in small, public universities in northern and southern Chile often face economic and material difficulties to operate. SUs in Britain are closed shops: all students are members of the unions automatically. In brief, all British students are also SU members. NUS-​UK has expanded, growing from 27 constituent members (CMs) in 1922 representing approximately 30,000 students to 600 CMs in 2011 representing approximately 7 million students. Today NUS is a confederation of 600 SUs; this covers 95 per cent of all higher and further education unions in the UK, representing more than seven million students. For more details on the history of NUS, see https://​www.nus.org.uk/​en/​who-​ we-​are/​our-​history/​a-​brief-​history/​ (accessed 16 August 2017). Currently, SUs in the UK receive £77.4  million in grants from their parent institutions (NUS/​AMSU 2011). Adding in commercial activities such as alcohol sales at SU bars, their annual turnover is £248.3 million. This level of resource allows SUs to employ 3,312 permanent staff and 17,034 student staff who, among other activities, support 4,500 student clubs and over 20,000 course representatives (NUS/​AMSU 2011). This provision from universities, despite significant pressures on them to cut expenditure, demonstrates the value institutions place on the contribution SUs make to university life. While students are automatically members of their SU, they decide, through their democratic structures, whether to affiliate their union to NUS-​UK. The NUS-​UK membership fees are based on a calculation that takes SUs’ income and student numbers into account. The minimum fee paid to NUS-​UK is £250 and the maximum £52,000. NUS-​UK income is also derived from management fees for externally funded projects (12 per cent), sponsorship (7 per cent), shares in Endsleigh Insurance (which focuses on students and was originally established by NUS-​UK in 1965), sales from the NUS Extra retail discount card (31 per cent), and income transferred from NUS Services Ltd, NUS-​UK’s commercial arm. Affiliation fees to NUS-​UK still represent 44 per cent of NUS-​UK’s income and in 2011 NUS-​UK recorded a turnover of £13.8 million. While NUS-​UK has to demonstrate value for money to its SU members or face disaffiliation, SUs are in turn financially accountable to their institution through audited accounts. The process of professionalization of the SU representatives and leadership had already commenced in 1985, when Sheffield Polytechnic SU became the first to employ staff whose task was to provide training and support for students who had taken on the role of class or course representative. Today, all SUs see this as part of their overall purpose, according to Silver and Silver (1997, p 92), ‘the story of student representation in British higher education can be told in part as a shift in emphasis from governing bodies and councils, senates and academic boards, to the role of students in monitoring and influencing institutional processes at the point at which they are most directly affected, the course committee, the board of studies.’ NUS-​UK supported this work by developing training programmes for academic affairs sabbatical officers and providing training materials for officers to develop their own in-​house programmes, These reflections are included in an unpublished paper that a student activist forwarded to us, via email, out of courtesy after our interview For example, in the mid-​2010s UEQ requested a fee of C$4.5 a year per student, while AVEQ requested C$3.5 and ASSÉ C$3. Normally, local associations have higher fees than the provincial unions. AFESH charges C$25 a year. CSU

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Notes

8

charged between C$157.80 and C$184.50 in 2015–​16 (depending on the faculty of enrolment), which included the fees for the national federation (CSU was a member of FEUQ at the time), the fees of the various faculty associations (ASFA, CASA, ECA and FASA), advocacy centre, housing and job bank, legal information clinic, and a Health and Dental insurance plan obtained through CSU (C$65), among other items. One can assess the complexity of such a landscape by looking at the myriad of lists presenting candidates to the election of CNSU, which is a consultative council for the Italian Ministry of Education and Research, composed of 28 students elected every three years. Unlike other countries, Italian law does not set any legal provisions; financing of SUs is for instance completely dependent on student projects, membership fees, and more or less transparent partnerships with political parties, unions or interest groups (Genicot, 2012). In this sense, Italy is a typical case of a pluralist field of HE (Klemenčič, 2012).

Chapter 5 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

We do not consider here the legislative initiatives that concern other areas such as early childhood, primary and secondary education. The bill establishes that students from the seventh income decile will receive exemption from tuition fees only when fiscal revenues represent at least 23.5 per cent of the GDP trend for two consecutive years; 24.5 per cent for those from the eighth income decile; 26.5 for the ninth income decile, and 29.5 per cent for the tenth income decile. Analysts have suggested that, in a very optimistic economic forecast, Chile could offer universal free education in 2036. Paradoxically, this development is closely related to the creation of a new state programme of doctoral scholarships in 2009 (Becas Chile), which has increased the number of PhD holders in recent years. Yet IRIS also observes that tuition rose from C$ 1,768 to C$2,294 between 2007 and 2015, a 30 per cent increase. Estimations also show that if indexing continues, tuition will rise to C$2,965 in 2025/​26 (Daoud et al., 2012). In McGill, while the tuition for Quebec students is C$79.50 per credit, it increases to C$246.76 per credit for Canadian students (irrespective of the programme). For international students in arts education it increases to C$545.78 per credit, while those enrolled in nursing, architecture and medicine pay C$609.63 per credit. International students in management pay C$ 1,360.09 per credit, and those in engineering pay C$ 1,182.76 per credit (2016/​17). France was the country that contributed the highest number of foreign students to Quebec, 38 per cent of the total, followed by China with 2.884 (1,661 students enrolled in BA programmes) and the United States with 2,623 (2,062 enrolled in BA programmes), 9 and 8 per cent of the total respectively. An agreement between the Quebec and French governments signed in 1978, established that French students would pay fees equal to those of Quebec students. In 2015, the Quebec government announced that French students would now pay the out-​of-​province Canadian tuition rate at the universities of the province. Official data shows that there were 12,495 students from France enrolled in the university system in 2013, 8,693 in BA level, 2,632 in Masters and 1,170 in PhD level. See:  http:// ​ e c.europa.eu/ ​ C OMMFrontOffice/​ P ublicOpinion/​ i ndex.cfm/​ General/​index.

195

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Index Note: Page numbers for tables appear in italics. #FeesMustFall movement  183 #RhodesMustFall movement  183 1968, events of  16, 17, 18, 29–​30, 120 2008 student protests, Italy  56–​7, 61 2010–​11 student protests, Italy  58–​61, 92, 120–​2, 125, 126, 158, 160–​1, 162–​7, 175 2010 student protests, England  40–​5, 62, 142, 144–​7, 148–​51, 168 2011 student protests, Chile  31–​40, 132–​41, 164–​5, 168 2012 student protests, Quebec  45–​55, 83, 152, 155, 156–​7

A academic life  178–​9 academic managers  75–​6 academic opportunity structure  130 accountability  66, 89, 90, 92, 117 accreditation  68 ACES (Coordinating Assembly of High-​School Students)  103–​4 activism  18, 97, 98, 99, 127, 128, 179 1968 wave  29 and academic opportunity structure  130 Chile  31, 100, 104, 168 England  106, 109, 112, 175 Italy  22, 56, 59, 121 micro-​level  17 Quebec  46–​7, 84, 116, 119, 181 US  20 Adimark  34 admission system  32, 86–​7 AFDs (direct fiscal contributions)  68, 70, 72 AFESH (Student Faculty Association of Human Sciences at the University of Quebec in Montreal)  116 AFI (indirect fiscal contribution)  32, 68, 133

Agasisti, T.  11, 13 agency  97, 131 Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL)  43 alliances  1–​2, 62, 131, 132, 169, 174, 183, 185 Italy  163, 165–​7, 175 allies, powerful  182–​3 Altbach, P.  172–​3 Amenta et al.  130 Anglo-​American universities  14 anglophone students  119 ANNEQ (Association Nationale des Étudiants du Québec)  114–​15 anomalous wave  120 anti-​tuition fees movement, England  23 ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of Higher Education and Research)  92–​3 Arcand, Pierre  155 ASSÉ (Association for a Student Syndical Solidarity)  46, 47, 48–​9, 113–​14, 115–​16, 117–​18 assessment, performance  81, 89, 93 associational student politics  179 Atenei in Rivolta  59, 123, 161 austerity  65, 66, 86, 152, 157, 176, 187 England  41, 145, 146 Austria  17 authoritarian management style  15 authoritarian-​paternalistic model  179–​80 authoritarian regimes  18 ‘Autonomia’  122–​3 Autonomous Left  38, 39, 104, 139 autonomy  17, 66, 67, 85, 89, 90, 92, 99 AVEQ (Association for the Voice of Education in Quebec)  114, 116, 117

B Bachelet, Michelle  104, 134–​5 Bachelet administration  132–​3, 141

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Beauchamp, Line  53 Bédard-​Wien, Jérémie  48 Bergfeld, Mark  43 Berlusconi governments  92 Bill 38 (Quebec)  118–​19 Bill 78 (Quebec)  53, 54 Blackburn, R.  121 Blair, Tony  79 board, student (Chile)  101 board of administration (Italian universities)  94 Board of Trustees (NUS)  109 Boric, Gabriel  136 Bouchard, Lucien  83 Bourassa, Robert  82–​3 Bourdieu, P.  8 Britain  106 see also England Brooks et al.  108 Browne Review  40, 80 budgeting  90 Bulnes, Felipe  34 Bureau-​Blouin,  Leo  55 Bureau de coopération interuniversitaire  85–​6 Burstein, P.  130, 161 Byrne, P.  106

C CAE interest rate  134 CAE loans  31, 69–​70, 72, 133 California  17 Callender, Claire  74–​5, 78–​9 Campaign for Fractional Staff  145 campus life  178–​9 Canada  15, 22–​3, 24, 31, 62, 81–​6, 152–​8 Maple Spring  45–​55 student politics  99, 113–​20, 127–​8 Canadian Millenium Scholarship Foundation  83 Cariola, Carol  137 carré rouge  46 CASSÉÉ (Coalition de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante élargie)  46, 83 les casseroles  54 Catalano, G,  11, 13 Catholic University of Santiago  103 CEFECH  139 CEGEPs  82, 113, 119 CENDA (National Centre for Alternative Development)  72 Centre of Public Studies (CEP)  141 Centres of Technical Formation (CFTs)  67, 68, 69, 132 CFE (Student Broad Left)  112, 113

CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro)  57, 58, 122, 165 Charest, Jean  152, 157 Charest administration  47 Charities Act 2006 (UK)  109 Charte de Grenoble  114 chartered universities  85 Charter of Rights and Freedoms  54 Chessum, Michael  41 Chile  15, 17, 23, 24, 168, 177 challenges to neoliberal policies  130 coordinated fields  181 forging alliances  1–​2, 167, 174 funding  32 HE system  66–​73 left-​wing parties  183 and pressure on the political system  184–​5 student associations  180–​1 student politics  22, 99, 100–​5, 127, 128 student protests  31–​40, 62–​3, 132–​41, 164–​5 Chilean Winter  23, 31–​40, 104, 134, 135, 140 Cini, L.  130, 160 CLAC (Convergence des Luttes Anti-​Capitalistes)  53 class  3, 14, 78, 79 CLASSE (Coalition large de l’ASSÉ)  46, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54–​5, 84, 152 coalition government, UK  40, 62, 74, 80, 142, 147, 175 coalitions  59–​60, 99, 120, 128, 131 Cockburn, A.  121 collective action  16, 21, 128, 171, 173, 179 in Chile  105 and coordinated fields  99 Colombia  17 Comitati Unitari di Base (CUB)  57 commodification  10, 14, 15, 81, 177 Communist Party (CP)/​Chile  104, 136–​7 Communist Party (France)  114 Communist Youth  38, 39 comparative historical analysis  24–​5 competition  10, 11, 12, 66, 76, 99, 128, 177 Concertación  34, 35, 134, 135, 136, 137 Concordia Student Union (CSU)  117 CONFECH (Confederation of Chilean Students)  34, 35, 37, 38–​9, 102–​3, 104–​5, 134 and day of protest  32 unique voice of the students  63, 174 Confederazione Cobas  57 Conseil Central  116

220

INDEX

Conservative governments, UK  73–​4, 76–​7, 79–​80, 107 conservative groups, Chile  103 Conservative Party HQ, occupation of  41–​2 Constitution, 1980 (Chile)  39 coordinated fields  98, 99, 100–​5, 113–​20, 128, 181 Corbo, Claude  153 cost benefit principles  10 Couillard, Philippe  153 Couillard administration  155 Council of Vice-​Chancellors (CRUCH)  133 countercultural groups  103 Courchesne, Michelle  46, 53 Crea Foundation  139 CREPUQ (Conference Des Recteurs Et Des Principaux Des Universités Du Québec)  85, 118, 154 Croatia  17 Crossley, Nick  19, 178 CRUI (Conference of Italian University Rectors)  163 curricula  10, 11, 14, 16, 121, 177 Cyr, M.-​A.  51

D debt  17, 78–​9 decommodification  12 DeFronzo, J.  8–​9 Delgado, S.  19 della Porta, D.  172, 173 democratic collegiate institutional governance model  180 Democratic Party (PD)/​Italy  166 Democratic Revolution (DR)/​Chile  138 democratization  18, 59, 61 dense networks  178, 179 in-​depth interviews  24 deregulation  81 Desjardins, Martine  53 Diani, M.  173 didactic autonomy  92 DiMaggio, P.  8 Dufour, P.  54 Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al.)  6

E EAN (Education Activist Network)  42, 112, 113 economic crisis, 2008  65–​6, 87, 88, 176 education, free  18, 44, 46 Education Act 1994 (UK)  109 Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA)/​UK  40, 80

education policy, Chile  135, 136, 138–​40, 141 efficiency principles  10 elections  2, 62, 132, 168, 174, 184–​5 Chile  101, 102, 104, 134, 135, 136, 138, 183 Quebec  54–​5, 118, 152, 153 EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance)/​UK  44 England  2, 15, 17, 24, 132, 175, 177 2010 student protest campaign  40–​5, 62, 168 HE system  105–​13, 142–​51 student groups  106, 180, 181 student politics  73–​81, 99, 127–​8 student protests  130 student representation  22 tuition fees  23, 30–​1, 186 enrolment, university  67, 69, 72, 73, 87–​8, 143 ENS (Education Not for Sale)  112, 113 entente minimale  47–​8, 52, 53 état-​providence  47 Éthier, Philippe  47 European universities  14 evaluation  15, 73, 89, 90–​1, 92–​3 eventful temporality  7 executive committees, federations  101

F FAECQ (Fédération des Associations Étudiantes collégiales du Québec0  115 families’ expenditure  10, 75, 176–​7 far-​left parties  113 FEC (Universidad de Concepción)  101 FECH (University of Chile Student Federation)  31, 36, 100, 101, 104, 139 FECQ (Quebec Federation of CEGEP students)  47, 48, 83, 113, 114, 116–​17, 153 federations  100–​2, 105 fees  13, 14, 15, 30, 31, 179 England  77, 79, 80 Quebec  47, 55 see also tuition fees feminist subcultures  19 Fernandez, J.  184 FEUACH (Federación de Estudiantes, Universidad Austral de Chile)  101 FEUC (Students’ Federation of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile)  101, 103, 105 FEUQ (Federation of University Students)  47, 48, 83, 113, 114, 116–​17, 152–​3

221

CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION

FEUSACH (Student Federation, University of Santiago)  37–​8, 104 fields  8, 98–​9, 105–​27, 128 financial accountability  90 financial assistance  31 financing  10, 17, 57 FIOM  165 Flacks, R.  6 Fleet, N.  175–​6 food scholarships  31 Fordism  74 francophone students  119 free education  18, 33, 44, 46, 86, 136 Frente de Estudiantes Libertarios (Libertarian Students Front)  104 FSCU (University Credit Solidarity Fund)  69, 70, 72 Fundación Sol  140 funding  10, 66, 94, 176–​7 Chile  67–​9 England  40, 44, 73, 77, 79–​80, 111, 143, 144, 151 Italy  31, 162, 163, 166 ‘The Future of Higher Education’ White Paper  80

G Gelmini, Maria Stella  93 Gelmini Law  166 gender, and student numbers  78 general strikes  58, 84 Genicot, G.  122 Gill, J.  8–​9 global justice movement  120, 127 Gobeil report  82 Goodwin, J.  6 governance, university  14, 15, 17 Chile  32, 132–​3 England  75 Italy  31, 59, 62, 90, 93, 121 Quebec  118 grants  13, 52, 68, 83, 110–​11 gremialistas  103, 105 Greton, Guy  155 GRIP UQAM (Public Interest Research Group of the University of Quebec in Montreal)  116 Guzmán-​Concha, C.  175–​6

H habitus  19 Hearn, A.  11, 20 HEIPR (higher education initial participation rate)  77–​8 HE summit, February 2013  152–​4, 174 Hetland, G.  6

historical analysis, comparative  24–​5 humanities departments  40, 80

I indebtedness, students  13, 31, 72, 134, 156, 177 inequality  8, 14, 135, 176 INGRESA  69–​70 institutional activists  131 institutionalization of student representation  97, 99, 100–​27 institutional power  163–​5 institutional sensitivity  184 intellectual labour  175–​6 international students  157 inter-​organizational networks  5 interpersonal networks  5 interviews  24 Ireland  17 IRIS (Institut de recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques)  156 Italy  24, 132, 177 HE system  15–​16, 31, 86–​94, 175 protests  2, 17, 19, 23, 56–​61, 62, 158–​67, 168 student groups  180, 181 student politics  99, 120–​7, 128 student representation  22 Izquierda Autónoma (Autonomous Left)  38, 39, 104, 139

J Jackson, Giorgio  136, 138 la jota  104

K King, B.G.  130 Klemenčič, M.  10, 17, 19, 179–​80 knowledge production  139 Korea  17

L labour  intellectual  175–​6 precarization of  10, 12, 14, 17, 177 Labour Party  113, 151 labour unions  33 see also trade unions Lagos, Ricardo  69 Latino politics  19–​20 Lavín, Joaquín  34 Law 12 (Quebec)  152 Law 32 (Quebec)  115 Law 133 (Italy)  56, 57, 92 Law 168 (Italy)  90

222

INDEX

Law 240 (Italy)  56, 58–​9, 93–​4 left-​wing groups/​parties  103, 183 Lesage, Jean  81 Lewis, T.E.  173, 184 line item budgeting  90 Link  59–​60, 61, 123–​5 Loader et al.  19 loans  10, 13–​14 Chile  31, 32, 68–​70, 133 England  77, 79 Quebec  52, 83 lobbying  112, 113, 165 local student unions (SUs)  106, 107–​9, 110, 113–​14, 120 LOCE (Ley Orgánica Constitucional de Enseñanza)  68 London School of Economics (LSE)  106 ‘long 1968’  120 lower classes  3, 78, 79 Lowi, T.  3 Luders, J.  130 lump sum budgeting  90

M maintenance grants  110–​11 maintenance scholarships  31 managerial class  14 managerialization  10, 11, 17, 175, 177 England  44, 79, 81 Italy  58, 59, 62, 93 Manifesto for Partnership  109 Manifesto for Self-​Reform  60–​1 Maple Spring  23, 45–​55 marches  33, 173 Marie-​Victorin CEGEP  49 the market  5–​6, 12 marketization  6, 9, 16, 17, 30, 65, 66, 95, 174, 178 of curricula  10, 11, 14, 78, 177 English HE  40, 74, 75, 76, 79, 146, 151, 175 Italian HE  61, 62, 92–​3, 94 market model  13 Marois, Pauline  152 Maroy et al.  84 Marxist-​Leninist orientation  60, 125 Mason, G.  78–​9 massification  86–​7, 176, 177, 187 Mathieu, Lilian  18 Matthei, Evelyn  135 McAdam, D.  7–​8 McVitty, D.  111 media  144, 145, 147–​8, 149, 160, 161 mediators  131 Meyer, D.  127 middle classes  78 Minkoff, D.C.  127

MIUR (Ministry of Education, Universities and Research)/​Italy  90–​1 mobilization campaigns  172–​5 see also student protests moderates  112–​13 Mont-​Laurier CEGEP  49 Moscati, R.  89 Movement of the Panther  19 Movement of the Wave  19 movement politics  17, 22, 25, 27 Movimiento Marginal Guachuneit (Marginal Movement Guachuneit)  104 municipalization of education  33

N Nadeau-​Dubois, G.  49 National Center for Alternative Development (CENDA)/​Chile  140 National Council of Universities (Quebec)  153, 154 national sovereignty  18 nationwide student organizations  180–​1 NCAFC (National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts)/​UK  42, 43, 112, 113 neoliberal capitalism  74 neoliberalism  81, 183 neoliberalization  20, 76 neoliberal policies  9, 10, 66, 176–​7 England  15, 41, 42, 73–​4, 130, 145–​7, 148 Quebec  47 Network of Researchers of Chilean Education (RIECH)  140 networks  5, 178, 179 New Democracy  139 ‘For a New Education’  140 New Labour government  79–​80 New Majority (NM)  104, 134, 135–​6 new public management (NPM)  73, 89, 94, 180 Nigeria  17 Nodo XXI foundation  139–​40 Noi non paghiamo la vostra crisi!  56–​7 NOLS (National Organization of Labour)  112, 113 Nordic countries  21 Nueva Acción Universitaria (NAU)  38, 39 Nueva Izquierda (New Left)  104 numerus clausus  14 NUS (National Union of Students)/​ UK  40, 41–​3, 106–​7, 108–​12 NUS Services Limited (NUSSL)  109

O Observatory of the Universities  91 Occupy Montreal  53

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CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION

Occupy movement  47 OIs (Organised Independents)  112, 113 Onda Anomala  120 opposition parties  1–​2, 33, 132, 166–​7, 168, 184–​5 Organic Constitutional Act of Teaching  33 organizational fields  8 outsourcing  12, 17, 79

P ‘Pantera’  120 Parent, Msgr Alphonse-​Marie  81 Parent commission  81–​2 Parti Quebecois (PQ)  45–​6 partnership working  109 PD (Democratic Party)  166 Penguin Revolution  31, 32, 103–​4, 135, 140 performance  10, 66, 81, 89 petitions  47 Piñera, Sebastián  32, 33, 34, 35, 136 Piñera administration  37, 133, 134, 141 Pinochet constitution  135 Pinochet dictatorship  15, 69 PLQ (Parti Libéral du Québec)  31, 47, 83–​4 Polanco, Mella  104 policy change  25, 81, 99, 130, 167, 168, 178 policy fields  129–​30, 169 political alliances  183, 184–​5 see also alliances political economy  6 political expression  19–​20 political factionalism  165 political mediation model  130–​1, 182 political movements  29 political opportunities  5–​6 political opportunity structure  129, 168–​9, 182 political parties  1–​2, 132, 168, 183, 184–​5 Chile  33, 134–​8 England  113 Italy  166–​7 political process approach  131 political sociology  2 political systems  5, 169, 184–​5 politicization  29, 103, 110, 125, 143–​7, 168 politics, student  16–​23, 21–​2, 30, 98–​128, 173, 180–​1 positional good  75, 148, 174, 177, 179 Powell, W.  8 power  121, 163–​5 power relations  121 PQ (Parti Quebecois)  54, 55, 83, 117, 152, 154

precarity  179 precarization of labour  10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 177 private foundations  57 private good  75, 147, 148 private investment  10, 11 private sector  9, 13, 15 private universities  15, 32, 34, 67–​8, 70, 105, 177 and CAE  72 no public aid for students  69 privatization  10, 11, 13, 94, 177 England  73, 79–​80, 81 Quebec  82 Professional Institutes (IPs)  67, 68, 69 professionalization  107, 139 professors, and control of universities  11, 14, 56, 67 for-​profit schools  33 Profs Contre la Hausse  53 Programa de Credito con Aval del Estado (CAE)  31, 69–​70, 72, 133, 134 protests  see student protests Proulx, Robert  155 provisional administrator bill (Chile)  132 PSU (University Selection Test)  32, 33 public education  3, 178 public expenditure  12 public-​funded research  68 public funding  73, 94 cuts  31, 40, 44, 79, 162, 166 public good  18, 75, 92 Public Interest Research Groups  116 public loan scheme  15 public opinion  140–​1, 151, 183 England  145, 147, 148, 149, 175 Italy  160–​1, 167 Quebec  157–​8 public schools  57, 68 public sector  9, 33 public spending  16–​17, 32, 92 public transport passes  33 public universities  15, 32, 33, 69, 70, 72, 82, 178 PUC (Pontifical Catholic University of Santiago)  105

Q QPIRG Concordia (Quebec Public Interest Research Group at Concordia)  116 Quebec  1–​2, 132, 152–​8 HE system  15, 24, 81–​6, 177 Maple Spring  45–​55 protests  17, 62, 130, 152–​8 student associations  22–​3, 113–​20, 180–​1

224

INDEX

student politics  99, 127–​8, 167, 168, 174, 183, 184–​5 tuition fees  31 Quebec Human Rights commission  54 Quebec Student Roundtable (TaCEQ)  114 Quebec Without Poverty  46 Quiet Revolution  47, 81, 83, 86, 114

R radicalization  37, 52, 151, 174, 182 radicals  112, 113 Radical Student Alliance  106 radical tradition  121 RAEU (Rassemblement des Associations Étudiantes Universitaires)  115 rallies  16, 32, 33, 40, 52–​3, 54, 58, 106 Rathbun, B.  24 recruitment, universities  57, 90 rectors  93–​4 Red-​Net  59, 60, 123, 124, 125 Regini, M.  89 representation, student  21, 22–​3, 99 see also student associations; student unions repression  34–​5, 51, 52, 54, 152, 184, 185, 187 la Repubblica  160 research, public-​funded  68 resource mobilization approach  5 Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolution)  104 Reyes, D.  19–​20, 130 RIECH (Network of Researchers of Chilean Education)  140 right-​wing groups  103 Ritter, D.  25 Robbins report  73 Roger, J.  20 Rojas, F.  20 Ross, E.  19 Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education (Canada)  81 Rucht, D.  172

S Salas, V.  70 Salon Plan Nord  52 La Sapienza  58 Savard, A.  51 Savoie, L.-​P.  54 scholarships  32, 52, 83 schools  43, 57, 68 secondary students  32–​3, 103–​4 self-​academic government  75 self-​funding, universities  67 self-​government  62

self-​managerial government  75–​6 self-​reform, universities  60–​1 senates  14, 93, 94, 102, 118, 140 sensitivity, institutional  184 Sewell, William H.  7–​8 ‘short law’ on free education (Chile)  132 Sindacato dei Lavoratori (SdL)  57 Sinistra Critica  123 Smeltzer, S.  11, 20 social classes  3, 78, 79 social inequality  14 see also inequality social justice  18, 100, 186, 187 ‘social movement for education’  102 social movements  2–​3, 4–​5, 6, 7, 24, 130 social right  3, 82 Solomon, Claire  42 Somos (we are)  104 South Africa  17, 183 South Korea  17 sovereignty, national  18 Spain  17 spending, public  16–​17, 32, 92 St-​Amand, Pier-​André Bouchard  153 the state  and education  11, 12–​13, 67, 136 funding  10, 32, 66, 94, 176–​7 and the market  5–​6 subsidies  68–​9 universities  72 statist model  13 St-​Pierre, Renoud Poirier  47 strikes  57, 58, 173 Chile  31, 32, 39 Quebec  45–​6, 48–​54, 83, 84, 85, 114 student activism  see activism student aid programmes  72 student associations  22–​3, 83, 84, 86, 113–​20, 122–​8, 180 student board  101 student centres  100 student debt  17, 78–​9 student demonstrations  58, 83 see also student protests student federations  100–​2, 105 student fees  30, 77, 79, 184–​5, 186 see also tuition fees student financial assistance  31 student life  178–​9 student loans  see loans student maintenance grants  110–​11 student politics  16–​23, 30, 98–​128, 173, 180–​1 student power  121 student protests  17, 23, 29, 30, 62, 128, 130, 168, 169, 172–​5, 183–​5 Chile  22, 31–​40, 104, 132–​41, 164–​5, 167, 168

225

CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION

England  2, 40–​5, 106, 142, 144–​7, 148–​51, 158–​67 Italy  2, 19, 56–​61, 92, 94, 120–​2, 125, 126, 158, 160–​1, 162–​7 Quebec  45–​55, 83, 152, 155, 156–​7, 167 role and centrality of the state vis-​à-​vis the market  177–​8 student representation  21, 22–​3, 99 see also student associations student transportation pass  103, 104 student unions  20–​1, 30, 45, 106, 107–​12 subcultural groups  103 subsidiarity  68 subsidies  68–​9, 70, 71 summit on HE (Quebec)  152–​4, 174 SUs (local student unions)  106, 107–​9, 110, 113–​14, 120

T TaCEQ (Quebec Student Roundtable)  114 Tarrow, Sidney  7 Teillier, Guillermo  136 tempered radicals  131 Thatcher, Margaret  73–​4 Tilly, Charles  7 Tomlinson, M.  148 trade unions  86, 165–​6, 183 Trainer, Douglas  111 transformative events  7–​8 transportation pass, student  103, 104 Tremonti, Mr  162 Trotskyist ideological orientation  43 Trow’s typology  77–​8 tuition fees  2, 10, 12, 13, 16, 31, 66, 94–​5, 177 Chile  33, 67, 68, 70, 133 England  40, 44, 62, 78, 79, 80, 111, 130, 142, 151, 175, 186 Quebec  46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 82–​3, 84, 85, 152, 154, 155, 156–​8

unions  student  20–​1, 30, 45, 106, 107–​12 trade  86, 165–​6, 183 Uniriot  59, 60, 122–​3 unitary protest fronts  62 Units of Internal Evaluation  91 Universidad Central de Chile (UCEN)  32 Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD)  34 Universidad Diego Portales  141 Université de Québec network  82, 85 Université du Québec a Outaouais  52 Université Laval  118 universities  67–​9, 70, 105, 177, 178, 179 budget cuts  81 Chile  72, 135, 140 England  73, 75–​6 and federations  100–​2 Italy  86–​91, 92–​3, 121, 159, 163 Quebec  82–​6, 155 and SUs  108 University Credit Fund  68–​9 University Credit Solidarity Fund (FSCU)  69 university fees  see tuition fees university governance  see governance, university university governing bodies, managerialization of  see managerialization university marketization  see marketization University of Chile  102 University of London (UL)  40 University Selection Test (PSU)  32, 33 upper-​class students  78 UQAM (L’Université du Québec à Montréal)  46, 118 US  19–​20 UUK (association of university vice-​ chancellors)/​UK  151

V

U UCL (University College London)  43, 44 UDI (Unión Demócrata Independiente)  105 UDU (Unione degli Studenti)  122, 124 UEQ (Union Étudiante du Quebec)  114, 117 UGEQ (Union générale des étudiants du Quebec)  114 UK  see England Unión Nacional Estudiantil (National Student Union)  104 union politics  21–​2 see also student unions

Vallejo, Camila  32, 137 Valleyfield CEGEP  49, 52 vice-​chancellors  75, 151 Victoriaville  53 Vietnam Solidarity Campaign  106

W ‘Wave Movement’  23 welfare state  2–​3, 18, 74 Williams, J.  148 UN Women  134 Workers’ United Center of Chile (CUT)  33 working classes  78 World Bank  70

226

Manja Klemenčič, Harvard University

“This book will enlighten anyone interested in student movements, the policy consequences of movements and contentious politics more generally.” Jeff Goodwin, New York University

Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University

Donatella della Porta is Professor of Political Science, Dean of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences and Director of the PhD programme in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore. Lorenzo Cini is Research Fellow in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore. César Guzmán-Concha is Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Geneva.

Using new research on higher education in the UK, Canada, Chile and Italy, this rigorous comparative study investigates key episodes of student protests against neoliberal policies and practices in today’s universities. As well as examining origins and outcomes of higher education reforms, the authors set these waves of demonstrations in the wider contexts of student movements, political activism and social issues, including inequality and civil rights. Offering sophisticated new theoretical arguments based on fascinating empirical work, the insights and conclusions revealed in this original study are of value to anyone with an interest in social, political and related studies.

DON AT E LL A DEL L A P O RTA, LO R ENZO C INI AND C É S AR GUZ M Á N- CON CH A

“This is a welcome addition to the literatures on student movements, comparative political economy and new forms of contentious politics in an age in which neoliberal orthodoxy is being challenged around the world.”

CONTESTING HIGHER EDUCATION

“This is a theoretically advanced and empirically rigorous investigation of contemporary student movements in international comparative perspective. It is a must-read for all students and researchers interested in student politics.”

ISBN 978-1-5292-0862-7

@BrisUniPress BristolUniversityPress bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

9 781529 208627

B R I S TO L

@policypress

CO N T E ST I N G HI GHE R E D UC AT I O N ST U D E N T MOV E ME N T S AG AI N ST N EOL I B E RAL U N I V E R S I T I E S D O N ATE L L A D E L L A PO RTA , LO RE N ZO C I N I A N D C É S A R G U Z M Á N - CO N C H A