The Silenced Generation
As the old proverb goes, children should be seen and not heard. But what about when they fly the nest to university? Well, in that case, they shouldn’t even be seen.
University students tend to be a left-leaning bunch. The Conservative Party know this yet seem to have given up all pretences of caring. And why shouldn’t they? Despite it often being cited that university students are more politically engaged than the average citizen, voter turn out amongst this group is low. Even those student votes that are cast tend to be dispersed across constituencies and therefore holding little political sway.
What’s more, experience dictates that a little student unrest doesn’t do any harm. After Nick Clegg promised to abolish tuition fees and then stood by as annual fees were trebelled, the student protests that followed were perceived as little more than a mild inconvenience to those in Westminster. With effectively no electoral repercussions at stake, and students being, by their very status as students, too poor to lobby, politicians were able to just bunker down and wait for the storm to pass. In fact, the tiny amount of violence that these demonstrations resulted in, was used to push the agenda that students are reckless and feckless, and therefore don’t deserve to be listened to.
Corbyn and Momentum gave the Conservative’s a little fright and the student body a little hope. But, after a summer of chanting ‘Ohhhh Jeremy Corbyn’, the election results and proceeding factional infighting, meant student needs were relegated to the sidelines once again. Which is where they have firmly stayed.
Time and time again during this pandemic, university students have been treated as an after-thought. Where the countless U-turns around school openings and GCSE and A Level results have been needlessly disruptive and shambolic, at least this chaotic incompetence has generated some level of media scrutiny and criticism directed at the government. Perhaps this is because children of school-age have potentially election-deciding, campaign-funding parents and are therefore seen as politically relevant in the debate?
Conversely, the silence regarding universities has been suffocating. Boris Johnson conveniently failed to mention the word ‘university’ once in tonights announcement of the impending 6 week lock-down. It’d be way too blatantly flagrant to announce on national TV that university students are still expected to pay for extortionately priced accommodation now illegal to live in, plus £9,250 annual tuition fees for what is little more than access to YouTube, all the while producing the same standard of work to pass a degree that will be more vital than ever when entering the workforce in potentially the worst economic downturn ever.
So, perhaps we can forgive Gavin Williamson for thinking that universities are not his business — perhaps he thinks they’re someone else’s? He deals with students and teachers, not customers — right? Yet, if you just focused on the way students are treated like anonymous consumers in a cold capitalist marketplace, then perhaps, yes, it is easy to think that universities should reside in the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills, and not the Department for Education.
To keep the universities stateless in Whitehall is to ensure that student protestations are smothered. I mean, why open yourself up to unnecessary public scrutiny? Much easier to let the angry students rant away in their corner of Twitter, hidden-away in their parents’ house, where they can’t be seen and they can’t be heard by anyone involved in the ‘real’ sphere of serious politics.