Campus politics and student movements have a long pedigree going back to medieval European universities. Students have all along mobilised collective agitations against exploitative social order, oppressive State power, authoritarian educational institutions and outmoded academic practices.
Everywhere in the world, student movements have brought about radical transformations in society and educational institutions, as what campuses like Bologna or Paris exemplify. They have played a very prominent role in democratising the State power in several countries and reforming education towards fairness, equity and access. Movements turned the campus into students’ public sphere and democratic space nurturing normative values, sense of social justice and critical consciousness.
Campus is where students acquire the politics of knowledge that makes clear to them the social dimension of what they learn and empowers them to participate in public policy debates. Campus debates about anything and everything that relates to the life of people and the power structure of the country. This process prepares students as political individuals who go into the making of the responsible citizenry, extremely significant in a democratic country.
Questioning injustice
It is the critical, ethical and political consciousness that helps students to question social injustice. Being political means being social and hence growing altruistic by transcending selfishness. It is this capability to question social injustice which enables them to question epistemic injustice or injustice embedded in the knowledge they acquire. Questioning knowledge is the gate to the world of new knowledge. This would mean that political criticality is the door to creativity. All democratic campuses the world over are critical and creative in this sense. A very significant factor to be remembered is the global context of all this. It is the context of the death of democracy, which is seemingly not a long way off because capitalistic globalisation cannot get along well with democracy any longer. As an extension of the transnational economic imperialism, there is a techno-military robotic disciplining gaining ground on all campuses under the overt patronage of the State that has become crony capitalistic. This situation is utterly intolerant of student politics and campus movements, which question injustice and speak truth to power.
