In honour of the national week of action declared by the National Union of Students (NUS), Charles Fedor sat down with Education Action Network coordinator Nicole McEwen.
Charles Fedor: What is the National Week of Action?
Nicole McEwen: The National Union of Students (NUS) is the peak representative body for all university students across the country. This body has decided at its recent conference that because a bunch of universities were being attacked across the whole country – courses being cut, staff being cut at different campuses around Australia – that we needed a coordinated week of action against this. So that looks different on every campus, at UWA it’s promotion for the next Senate protests that we’re having on the 23rd of August. We dropped a massive banner off of Reid balcony, put posters around campus and we’re going to set up a display in the library.
CF: Does the NUS typically get involved with these kinds of things or is this an extraordinary circumstance?
NM: I mean, it’s kind of the role of a student union in general to be involved in defending students and our rights. The last time it was involved in a national coordination to defend our education was around 2014 when the Abbot government tried to deregulate fees completely and make it so that students would have to pay $100,000 for a degree. The NUS was integral in protecting our education and coordinating to fight that off.
I wouldn’t necessarily say extraordinary, but something of national importance.
CF: In terms of moving forward the protest doesn’t fall within this national week of action?
NM: The Senate Protest doesn’t fall under this week. However, this week is about building momentum and getting everyone aware of what’s happening on their campus and coordinating actions across the country. It’s meant to be one step in a whole campaign across this semester for every campus to fight back against what’s happening. Our protest will be just after the week of action but what we’re going to do is protest outside the Senate where all of the managers of UWA, the top elite sections of the university will be meeting to decide on our futures and on what happens to our degrees and staff here at UWA. The point is to hold them to account and to say that they can’t just make these decisions in some private secluded room together with no accountability or pushback.
CF: A lot of our readers have pressures both economic and otherwise, how could they get involved?
NM: Basically, you should come by Reid library foyer and leave your message of solidarity for staff. We’re going to have little post-it notes so people can write up whatever they think the staff might need to hear at this time. You can also support them by signing the petition to call a referendum during the student Guild elections; if we get 500 signatures then the question will be put to all students of whether they reject the changes that Chakma is making with this 40-million-dollar restructure. There will be pieces of paper in the foyer of Reid for people to sign and you can come and find me. Message the UWA Education Action Network page.
CF: Now, a few of our readers have said they have already signed the referendum?
NM: If you signed it a few weeks ago you have to sign it again as the question was discounted by the WAEC on a technicality so we have had to begin getting signatures all over again.
The only way we are going to defend our education is with a mass student campaign that shows students are angry and that actually threatens the reputation of the university – because that’s what management is going to care about and that’s what is going to make them listen to us. So beyond the petition you can come and actually vote in the referendum during the elections on the 20th-23rd of September. But the key thing is that everyone comes to the Senate protest on the 23rd of August; switch your work shift, skip your class, ask for a makeup from your tutor, rearrange lunch with your friend. If we don’t have a lot of people there at this meeting where we can put pressure on them as they are going to make these decisions, they will feel like they can do just whatever they want with our education and forget that they’re accountable to us.
CF: There has been this disagreement on priorities between protests or creating ‘discussion’. Can you explain why protest is so important to advocacy?
NM: Firstly, it’s the only way that we can actually make everyone’s voice heard and historically it’s been the only way that real fundamental change has actually occurred and happened. You can sort of be grandiose about it and think about the student movements against the Vietnam War or against segregation in the 1960’s. You can also think about Hong Kong today and the attempted Abbott reforms. We wouldn’t have been able to stop the government putting that through if it hadn’t been for a mass protest campaign and I think strategically it’s where we actually have power. People can write all these emails, and have discussions with people, but you know these fall on deaf ears if you don’t have masses of students angry and raising their voices in resistance to back it up.
CF: Why have you chosen to use a referendum as a method of public engagement on the issue?
NM: Well, basically, it’s an official vote of all students. So, there’s a number of ways you could go about this. One of them would be a student general meeting however our Guild refused to call one.
So instead, I’ve decided that if we call a referendum and we can have an official vote of thousands and thousands of students come out and officially say that they reject the proposal and the forty-million-dollar restructure and any staff and course cuts that result from it then that’s something that we can take to Chakma and say do you just not at all care about student democracy?
I think that’s kind of why it’s important to have that. It seems to also indicate that it’s going to damage the uni’s reputation because there’s obviously media already following the story. But also to that I do think that that kind of official vote is quite powerful in terms of at least getting the question to students. Since we have never been asked about this or been consulted before the restructure had been announced.
CF: What else can students do?
NM: You can put up posters around campus, help out at stalls, email everyone on the academic board, and on the Senate to tell them that you’re furious about what’s happening and that you disagree with it. There’s a million things that someone can do, do a lecture announcement in your class or another class that’s on after your class. You can pop in and just say, ‘hey huge restructures are coming to UWA, they value profits above our education, so we’re having a protest on the 23rd of August at 2:30 pm please come along it’s really important’.
CF: What is the EAN’s job?
NM: The Education Action Network is part of the Education Council here at UWA and so it’s basically just one of the committee members, but with the specific role of engaging in activism, protecting our education and other issues that students really care about. This year it’s also done things like fighting for refugees.
It’s not necessarily a new position but you would be forgiven for thinking so because in previous years, it hasn’t really done that much in terms of activism and really getting out there to students and getting them involved. But now that there is this very central issue on our campus it has galvanised people and an actual network has been created which is really fantastic!
CF: There has been this idea of ‘fatalism’ among students as they feel like attending a protest or writing a petition isn’t going to help. Can you tell us – is this really true?
NM: I don’t think that’s true at all. When this was first announced – that Anthropology was being cut, that a bunch of the positions in the Social Sciences will become teaching only, that Asian Studies is basically going be abolished into just a language course, what we did was called a protest and over 250 people showed up. There were media stories about it, there was a huge outcry, support from organisations across the world poured in and it really put management on the back foot.
They care about their reputation; it’s very notable to me that they haven’t announced any future cuts and they haven’t been able to just push this through during the holidays when no one’s on campus and no one’s paying attention. So I think even so far we’ve been having a few minor wins like delaying – this is still important. It gives us time to grow our campaign, but then even beyond that; I mean at Curtin in 2013, they stopped the sacking of a business school lecturer by occupying the business school. They’ve also stopped the abolition of cultural studies over at Curtin. So, there’s lots of examples of students actually fighting back and winning. I think this should be at the forefront of our minds because I think it’s definitely possible to win this.
CF: This is a lot of work. I cannot imagine the sacrifices that you are making to coordinate. Can you explain why you got involved originally. What drives you?
NM: Well, partially, this is obviously because I am an Anthropology and Sociology student – that’s what my post-graduate research is in. So personally, it impacts me, but obviously I was in EAN before that. I think what drives me is an understanding that students actually have a lot of power if we can use it and stand together. I’m a socialist so I look to those sorts of movements like I mentioned earlier of students fighting back and I think we can really just stand together and fight.
CF: There’s been a question that’s sort of been coming around quite a lot for students of “Well I’m a science major, I’m a business major. Why should I give a flying fig?” Are these students going to be affected? Should they be caring?
NM: Yes so, our forty-million-dollar restructure from the whole budget of UWA and 400 staff being sacked is definitely going to affect every single student. Chakma said on the radio that seven to eight more schools would be cut after the social sciences; there’s not even enough schools for it to just be Arts. So there’s definitely going to be cuts to sciences and to business and other areas and we don’t know what exactly that is yet, but if we defend social science that actually puts us on a really good footing to defend education in other areas as well, so basically if we put them on the back foot here they won’t feel as confident to attack other sections as easily; so this is an important first step in fighting for our education across the board.
Beyond that, with 400 staff forced out, some of them will inevitably be in other areas. A lot of them are professional staff, they’re not area-specific; they’re the people who work in the libraries, or in IT or on the grounds. The people who do all of the work that makes this university run; how is our education quality going to be remotely the same if these already overworked people have more dumped on to them?
So yeah, it just definitely does affect every single student on this campus. They’re trying to divide and conquer and we shouldn’t let them, we should be united in opposing it.
CF: Why should students care about staff?
NM: There’s a really good quote that I’m not sure where it came from but I like a lot which is that ‘staff working conditions are student learning conditions’, they’re kind of inseparable really when you think about it. If your lecturer’s overworked, underpaid, and stressed they can’t give you good feedback on your assignments. They can’t teach you as well as they otherwise would, they can’t do the research that makes them experts to be able to teach you the things that you’ve come to this university to learn. I mean you think about even the quality of Unifi on this campus and things like that, the staff conditions matter a lot for us and I think it’s really important that we show solidarity with them because if students fight back and staff fight back together that makes us even stronger, because they have a lot of power here too.
They are the ones that make this university function and together we’re sort of the life blood of UWA, so yeah, I think if we show solidarity and we stand united with each other then we can actually fight back against what the management’s trying to do. I think sometimes the phrase gets thrown around like ‘UWA care so much about student experience’. Well student experience rests on staff experience and I think something that even the people in our Guild say is ‘we want to protect student experience’. Well, there’s no way to do that without protecting staff.
That is central to this whole thing – we have to be opposed to all of the cuts. In a report in WA Today from Aja Styles, she said that last year over 500 staff including casuals had been lost from UWA, so that’s already a massive cut to the workforce that’s basically gone unnoticed, and now they want to take 400 more? It’s completely absurd and ridiculous that our university can be expected to function without the people to make it function.
CF: Have staff supported students?
NM: Yeah, absolutely. Staff have come down to all the demonstrations, we’ve had the staff union (NTEU) speak at our demonstrations and we’ve also had staff who sit on the Academic Board speak out for students, which our own student representatives didn’t do. They didn’t speak out in that meeting, so they’ve been actually in some ways more proactive in defending students than some of the student representatives. I think we really owe it to them and that’s part of why we have this message board of solidarity in the library foyer and why we need to come out and attend the next protest.
I walk around this campus and staff stop me and say thank you so much for doing this and that it gives them some actual hope for the state of our education; this thing they deeply care for. They want us to learn, they want us to have a good educational experience, they’re really inspired when students come out and protest. It is essential that we keep showing solidarity with staff.