Sunday 21 September 2008

URGENT PROTEST: UCL provost undermines student democracy by allowing military recruiters on campus

Last term UCL Stop the War society had a major victory by passing a motion to ban military recruitment on campus. This year the Students' Union has not allowed the Armed Forces to attend Freshers Fayre.

But the school have stepped in and undermined student democracy by allowing the military to recruit for the 3 days running up to the fayre. They will have full use of the 'Quad'-the main area of the college entrance.

Tomorrow 24th Sept to Wed 26th the uniformed Officer Training Core (OTC) along with other military recruiters ULAS and URNU will be on campus armed with leaflets, poster and videos. Along with promises of parachuting, skydiving and travelling the world, they will be offering students FREE education bursaries to anyone who signs their life away to be experiemented on and potentially to be killed, or at least to be trained to kill others.

The school has said that by not allowing recruitment on campus students would be deprived of funding for (what are now very expensive) degree programmes.

Students who opposed the motion at the previous general meeting have prepared a series of action and protests including lecture announcements and are submitting a motion to the first welcome General Meeting of 2008/9 to overturn the ban. Read more on this at in the London Student

UCL Stop the War society has called a counter protest. Details as follows:

Meet 11am outside UCL Quad.

Call Clare on 07958 034 181 for more details.

We need to fundementally oppose the use of public funds to recruit for illegal wars, to call for the upholding of student decision making bodies and to expose the lies that military recruiters tell to our students.

Please spread the word

1 comment:

SG said...

Whether or not the university allows the military to use its other facilities misses the point. The purpose of the Union's policy was to protest the war in Iraq; by baring recruitment from our premises, publications and the union run fresher's fayre, we took a public stance that we would not participate in recruiting for the war. That students in a prominent university were able to impose real material sanctions limiting the military's recruitment efforts rather than just demonstrating symbolically was challenging enough to attract widespread national media coverage. In doing this we contributed to shaping the public debate around the war and publicized a new strategy for meaningful student activism that has since been replicated successfully elsewhere. In this regard we have already achieved more progress for the anti-war movement than it is possible for UCL's administration to undue.

That the University administration is reacting so publicly against its own students just shows the extent that what we did was politically meaningful and not something that could be ignored.

Samantha Godwin
UCL Union General Secretary 2007-2008