Moreover, our inimitable Prime Minister is dying of hyperthermia. Or at least that’s how education researcher Diane Reay put it at last Sunday’s ‘Where Next?’ event, a collaborative venture from Cambridge Defend Education and Cambridge Academic Campaign for Higher Education. The day consisted of a series of discussions about the Higher Education white paper, or lack thereof, and was one of those much needed reminders that I am not alone, that amidst desperately trying to keep one’s own education on track there are people who care about what is happening beyond our own ever mounting stacks of books. The discussions were extra-topical now that the NUS is planning a mass student walkout on the 14thof March, yet they had that disconcerting air of preaching-to-the-converted that political talks usually do.

As unsettling as the clothesless-Cameron image might be, it speaks a stark truth about the way in which many politicians, and many voters, are being sold a false idea and parading it around as if it were some new kind of luxury. The more poignant of Sunday’s discussions focused on the discursive trickery evident in the language used to discuss policy, particularly that pesky term ‘social mobility’. ‘What does it mean?!’ we chorused. That’s why we’re here, right? Because we want to be a bit better off, in financial and existential terms, than we were when we arrived; we want to have moved ‘up’. But in moving up, moving above, we leave something behind, and we no longer deem it necessary to address the unsavoury conditions present in that stage of life we departed from.

At least that was one argument put forward, another was that we don’t move at all; in the age of austerity (well, the most recent of them) many of us are rendered inert. Amidst discussions of this impenetrable term we wonder if it is merely a set of those devilishly deceiving ‘new clothes’ that we hastily put on because we are told that they are the next big thing, they will set us free, ‘my life is saved – for I am ‘upwardly mobile’!’ students cry as they run forth, their BAs waved aloft, to a crowd of disgruntled onlookers who wonder what all the fuss is about because, ultimately, nothing has changed, graduate unemployment is at an all time low. Conversely, is any discussion of mobility assuming that higher education is of no value to someone who remains working class? Is even talking in these terms submitting to the commodification of learning?

One lecturer went so far as to say that she has pulled out of University led Access schemes after they set next year’s tuition fees at the highest rate. ‘We have to lead by example, we can’t say come in one and all – but only if you don’t mind the crippling debt’. Social mobility is the great farce of modern politics; for the few who have managed to improve their quality of life in the last 10 or so, the first few steps on that upward trajectory were momentous feats of serendipity (mine certainly were), as opposed to public policy working in your favour. We are told, ‘bear with us, things will get better, soon you too will be mobile’, and so we make little effort to change things, we don’t argue, we don’t ‘do’, in anticipation of mobility we remain utterly still. I say ‘we’, I am aware this doesn’t apply to the entirety of the Varsity readership, some of your are activists, and some of you are beyond the reach of the unmitigated slog that current legislation has granted many; redundancy, lowered housing benefit, brick by brick dismantling of the NHS etc etc.

It simply will not do to sit and watch as nothing happens. The deferral of the HE white paper is more likely than not a curse in disguise as many changes to things like the terms and conditions of student loan repayments, rules about degree awarding, the kind of funding different subjects will receive, are passed without primary legislation. ‘Autonomy’ is another one of those political buzzwords banded about on Newsnight and in The Telegraph. But does the kind of corporate freedom engendered by the privatization of education necessarily balance with the kind of personal, intellectual freedom we all hope to gain access to. Does privatization of the public sector more generally inhibit the ‘freedom from’ kind of freedom that many fought hard to ensure.

This is probably a rant. But why aren’t we all ranting? I don’t like to think I have a chip on my shoulder about my background or ‘class’, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t actively care about what happens to the many who won’t ever get to see inside the UL, who have, by a long process of socialization and failure of the places in which they live to inspire,  come to not understand why 8 million books in more or less one place is a really cool thing. I was inspired by the CDE, CACHE talks on Sunday, I learnt a lot – much more than I have relayed here – but I also began to worry that the intellectual community we have carved out for ourselves will rapidly become a gated one.

I propose that we make the most of the NUS walk out, that we take just a tiny amount of time, 1/365thof our year, to talk about what is going on, what we think about it, where we stand in it and what we can do to make it better; if only to give some of us a little more faith in humanity. Students are now in a position to launch a pre-emptive campaign, we have a chance to shape education, not merely to defend it.  If we open our own dialogue we can begin to break down the misleading discourse put forward by naked politicians, we might even make a real difference.