Thursday 01-07-2021 - 16:44

Why should students care about the wider world? It's a question often asked when students branch outside of the Durham bubble to make change in the world beyond. SU President, Seun Twins, discusses the reasons why students are political.

When we arrive at university, we might arrive with the intention of “doing a degree”. Maybe we want to meet new people and have the typical “student experience”. We might be forward thinking, focused on our career. What reason, then, do students have for spending their time engaging critically with the wider world?

The bubble does not exist

We would be remiss to think the world starts and ends at the gates of our university experience.

During my Culture Commission interviews, I kept hearing the phrase “Durham is like a bubble”. I heard this idea so much that it is underlined multiple times and highlighted in red. There is this recurring idea that, at university, time and space stand still and the only thing that matters is everything that exists within this bubble. How idle or active you are is your choice, since university can sometimes feel like theatre, an unreal low-stakes world.

Though university may feel like a bubble, it is important to know that this is just a feeling that brings some comfort but is not true. Whilst we cannot ignore the hedonistic or academic reasons why people have an enclosed, bubble-like university experience, the truth is that as students we are constantly wrestling with competing ideals and identities. In fact, higher education today is strongly influenced by the converging power dynamics of the economy, politics and greater society, and these elements define your space and university. This means that everything is political, whether you are aware or not.

Take this for example: the higher education sector is both monetised and publicly funded, our curriculum needs to be decolonised, but our government has also identified a crisis in freedom of speech. It is fair to say that to be a student is to operate in a state of contradiction that society positions you in. In higher education, there are agents, actors, motives, objectives and diverse populations that are all politicised and driven by contravening and contradicting ideals – which makes being a student inherently political. 

Politics is not always a choice

Most students have intersectional identities. They have lived lives before and outside of university that inform their values and beliefs. There are student sex workers, refugees, first generation scholars, mature students, entrepreneurs, volunteers and many more examples of students who lead interesting and enriching lives that are politicised.

For these students, engaging in politics is not just theatre – it is their reality. For these students, the university experience is not a bubble but a tool, which they may use to craft and engage on a local or global stage. We have students that run in local elections or set up charities or lead protests not to pad out their CV, but because it means something to them on an existential level.

For these students, their identity as a student is not transactional. They do not, and often cannot, sacrifice their politics because they are in a “bubble”. Some students are not able to speak up for themselves, and must rely on their more privileged peers to speak with them or advocate on their behalf. For these students, their communities and their allies, being political is not about being self-righteous – it is being a part of a greater collective. 

The world after Durham

Producing top graduates is a key part of what makes Durham, Durham. These graduates become leaders, academics, entrepreneurs, and therefore our university community has a civic duty to produce graduates who will benefit society. 

Our university must nurture our greatness, but also stimulate our empathy, perceptiveness, and ethics. Our contribution to the world as a community is political and our university is responsible for making us aware of that. We have a civic duty to leave this community as ethically literate citizens and our education must ensure we do so.

Being political is not about being self-serving. Our ultimate job is to the leave the world a better place than how we found it and to do that, we must understand that a Durham education not only serves ourselves, but serves the wider world.  

What does this mean in practice?

Students care about the world and are political in many ways. They might join groups to learn about different worldviews, take part in activism that makes the world a better place, or be part of debates on current issues.

Some of that debate happens at the SU’s Assembly and June’s Assembly meeting was no exception. Students discussed and successfully passed motions standing up for asylum-seekers, supporting student sex workers, and declaring solidarity with the people of Palestine. As an organisation whose role is to facilitate educational development, the SU creates space for discussion through Assembly, so that we learn to stand together, challenge each other and develop a greater understanding of the world.

But I don’t think we should obsess over process. Whilst our democracy is essential, what we should also be concerned with is our values. What, as Durham students, do we stand for? What do we represent and how can we utilities our privilege to make change in the world? These Assembly motions, Durham student volunteering, running in local elections, setting up charities, and ultimately graduating into the workforce tell us that everything is political. Instead of shying away from that fact, we should embrace it.