Jenny Maguire, SU President of Trinity College Dublin, argues that neither students’ nor workers’ unions can be apolitical. That in order to actually affect change, our unions need to be more bold and more radical not less.
The student movement, as said by my predecessor Lászlo Molnarfi, ‘woke up’[1] this past academic year.The fight now is to keep it awake. There will always be waves of action and inaction, but it is the understanding of the very function of a students’ union that we must fight for. We must remind not only ourselves in the unions, but the universities we seek to agitate. Failing to see protest, disruption and agitation as legitimate ways in which a students’ union goal is what will kill the new radicalism we have seen. Colleges are afraid of us now, but it would be naive to say our fight against unions becoming apolitical is over.
Trying to make a union run apolitically is an attempt to make a union run poorly. It is a denial of the role politics plays, both in the traditional and personal sense, in the everyday lives of all people. Politics is the reason so many Trinity College students enter through alternative entry routes. Politics is the reason Trinity College only elected its first woman to be provost in 2021[2]. Politics is the reason, of course, that Trinity College has agreed to divest from Israeli firms[3]. All of these are inherently political, and yet, it is the weaponsiation of niceties and “respectable” progressivism that allows some of these actions to be achieved without calls to gut students’ unions. Calls for an apolitical union, whether trade or student, is an attempt to not “keep politics away” but instead, a call to maintain the status quo of acceptable oppression. It centres the fragility of elites over meaningful progress. Any organisation, institutions or group claiming to achieve progress “apolitically” is setting itself up to achieve mediocrity at best, and a cornerstone in sustained oppression at worst.
The taboo of meaningful “political” action must be broken. For almost a decade, student politics has been primarily led by those hoping to be nominated by a mainstream political party for local or national election. It is not the job they wish for, but the next job. This centering of the individual over community and the collective has brought any form of ‘student movement’ to nothing more than a group of people who hand out goody bags and know how to professionally print the occasional banner and stand indistinguishable beside bureaucracy heavy NGO’s at garda approved protests. Covid saw this come to its climax – but a change has begun. Multiple issues in the past year, including the ongoing genocide of the palestinian people, saw individual universities and higher education institutions not afraid to make the seemingly political faux pas of provocation. From walkouts[4] to blockades[5] to encampments[6], the students showed their teeth for the first time in the post-covid era – and it worked. Colleges fell, one by one, when direct action was taken not just around Palestine, but around rents and more.
Actions taken around Palestine, as previously mentioned, have proved that direct action not only works, but that it is vital. Institutions like my own that stand as a reminder of the colonial memory that cannot be forgotten across this island, were pushed to take bold anti-colonial action once thought impossible. Centuries-old institutions are made to ignore small demonstrations and words. They are built to uphold the status quo, and it is only through mass collective action that the very ground that places like Trinity stand can be moved to fully divest from colonial projects and more. We have seen this, and we must continue to keep our eyes wide open for where else we can move. Students are not a specific ‘class’ of people, especially now. The power held by students may be accessed in all areas of life. Though students are expected to protest perhaps, we must expect our students to then reach and look outwards in a shift toward societal change.
A lot of these actions, it must be acknowledged, were led not by the traditional structures of students’ union; that’s what made them work. The bureaucracy and niceties were pushed aside, it was now the job of union leaders to make it stay that way. How they campaign and fight must fundamentally change to ensure the longevity of a renewed tradition of student radicalism. “Campaign weeks” such as “Shag week”, “Pride Week” and “Christmas week” are usually campaigns only in name. They run as a series of events along a similar theme, without direction or purpose outside of “visibility”. They are often ran by full-time sabbatical officers or part-time officers of the union with consultation from various committees. The importance of fun, sexual health and liberation are important but it is not what these weeks achieve. They must be restructured, alongside year long campaigns that are action focused, community based and unafraid to escalate and cause issues. AMLCT/TCDSU restructured its campaigns committee to be town hall run, without the need of an elected position to have permission to even speak. Campaign weeks/days must be actual campaigns focused on issues, not events. Do we, as students’ unions, care about using all the tools at our disposal to tackle issues affecting our students, or care about posting a linkedin post about all the fun events we ran.
But how do you get students involved? Tiktok? Postering? Voter drives? I attended the national student union training week run by the Union of Students’ in Ireland this month, and the word on everyone’s lips was engagement. Tactics to promote the work of individual unions, some welcomely very new and creative, were shouted out. This move to find new ways to engage an increasingly disengaged student body is a yearly routine – but why does it keep getting worse? Of course, the depoliticisation has made a lot of unions just feel like an extension of the college, however, I believe the issue goes further. We cannot focus on catchy dances, but instead, the roots of the issue. Engagement comes not from posters, but from actions that break down the ever increasing inequality in how students experience university. More students are commuting. More students are homeless. More students are working during their studies just to survive. Students do not have time to engage in college extracurriculars when their studies are already being stretched to its limits because of outside obligations. If unions want to see more students involve themselves with unions, we must be bold and not get distracted by photos with politicians and ineffective campaign weeks. We must fight for barriers not just to education, but to engaging in college life. Students must be given greater financial support or given academic accommodations for working. College’s must run all accommodation not for profit, but for need. Until fees, rent and services are free, they should be priced on a tiered basis of income, it is ridiculous and out of touch to see inequality and provide solutions that everyone has to still pay the same. These issues have not always been the sexiest to campaign for, something seen across so-called “leftist” political parties, but they are needed if you want students and the working class to have the opportunity to catch their breath long enough to engage with a political cause.
As in any movement, I would advise caution within student politics against individualism. We must decentre ourselves and work to create and maintain community structures in all areas of our work. Creating policy without creating a truly collective form of grassroot input and horizontal leadership is worthless. We forget and do not know how to live and act as a community. Individualism isn’t just incentivised, but encouraged. Individuals putting themselves forward for election, maintaining a ‘work-life balance’, getting a promotion…all form structures in which we abandon one class and ascend to another whilst ignoring the true issues at heart. We don’t know how to grow and organise without productivity, and in turn, we forget how to be human. Our humanity must be untethered from the need to be productive. Working and living for each other is where our radicalism must arise and stay.
Our fight isn’t over, it has truly only begun. We must view ourselves as not individuals within this single moment, but instead, as part of a tradition that will follow and has come before us. It is our responsibility to protest. It is our responsibility to disrupt. It is our responsibility to undermine any institution that harms the students we represent and serve. To quote a great scholar (a youtube compilation of reality tv contestants), “I didn’t come to make friends, I came to win”[7].
[1] Healy, Trinity News, https://trinitynews.ie/2024/04/constitutional-review-of-tcdsus-apolitical-status-to-be-examined-next-year/
[2] Fisher, Trinity College Dublin, https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/professor-linda-doyle-set-to-become-trinitys-first-female-provost/
[3] Rory Carroll, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/08/trinity-college-dublin-agrees-to-divest-from-israeli-firms-after-student-protest
[4] Loughlan, The College View, https://thecollegeview.ie/2024/03/25/dcu-students-call-for-ceasefire/
[5] Boulter, Goes, Payne and Roche, University Times, https://universitytimes.ie/2023/09/tcdsu-block-entrance-to-book-of-kells-in-protest-of-rent-increase/
[6] Henshaw, Kenny and Skidmore-O’Reilly, Trinity News, https://trinitynews.ie/2024/05/breaking-trinity-students-begin-gaza-solidarity-encampment-on-campus/
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w536Alnon24&ab_channel=richfofo
