[Trigger warning for suicide and violence]

In 1962, a group of anti-war and progressive students in the United States gathered in Michigan to publish the Port Huron Statement, which would become the founding mission of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a major force during the global New Left movement. That statement opens as follows:

Every generation inherits from the past a set of problems – personal and social – and a dominant set of insights and perspectives by which the problems are to be understood and, hopefully, managed. The critical feature of this generation’s inheritance is that the problems are so serious as to threaten civilisation, while conventional perspectives are of dubious worth. Horrors are regarded as commonplace; we take universal strife in stride; we treat newness with a normalcy that suggests a deliberate flight from reality.

Now, as in 1962, we find ourselves at a crossroads. The economic, social, and political crises of our time are not peripheral concerns – they are existential. The university remains one of the last arenas where these crises can be confronted, debated, and overcome. Yet that arena is under siege. Decades of neoliberal hegemony have hollowed out the independence and educational purpose of our institutions. In Britain, 14 years of Conservative austerity – now continued, without shame, by the current Labour administration – have chewed up students and spat out living commodities. In 2026, the average graduate will leave education poorer and with no guarantee of employment. The pursuit of knowledge is drowned out by the daily grind of shifts and side jobs – all just to afford rent, food, and the basic dignity of getting by. In turn, student mental health has greatly suffered, with at least a thousand higher education students taking their lives since 2016 in the UK.

Meanwhile, academic institutions themselves are increasingly focused on pursuing endless profit, regardless of the human cost. As war and genocide rages throughout the Global South in the name of imperialism, universities seek to contribute their own funding and resources to the mass murder of millions in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Kashmir, and elsewhere.

This begs the question, where is the representation for our outrage? The National Union of Students (NUS), a body founded in 1922 to collectively represent our concerns, has itself bent the knee to this new normal. In the summer of 2024, thousands of students sacrificed relative comfort and privilege to protest the complicity of universities in the ongoing Gaza genocide. It has since been revealed that hundreds were illegally spied on by private investigators acting on behalf of universities. Many international students who took part faced deportation, and others were subjected to state-sanctioned violence. Despite this, the NUS refused to address these protests or defend the victims of repression. Moreover, when confronted over its weak stance on the genocide, the organisation barred students and sabbatical officers from entering its conferences. It’s no wonder that several major Student Unions, including Liverpool, Cambridge, LSE, and Leeds Beckett, have now disaffiliated.

Now that we have exited the NUS, we must address the question: what comes next? The Education Act 1994 was introduced to curb the power of Student Unions by defining them as charities subject to the relevant regulations, explicitly restricting political campaigns. This often leads politically conscious students to become frustrated by the inaction of their student unions; they are, however, unaware of the tight restrictions forced upon them by the government.

Attempts have been made to refound the student movement in recent years, but this has proven to be challenging due to the nature of the Education Act as well as a decline in student politicisation. In the absence of a prominent organisation, recent waves of student protest (rent strikes, encampments, etc.) have been spontaneous and leaderless. While effective at quickly mobilising individuals around a common cause, this too has failed to produce a lasting movement. As feminist Jo Freeman explained in her pamphlet The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972):

If the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development, it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organisation and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these. They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development. We need to [recognise that] “structurelessness” does not work.

The task ahead

At last year’s The World Transformed (TWT), the question of a new student organisation was debated, and a founding conference was proposed for this year. But ideas alone are not enough. The energy at TWT appears to have stalled since, but the need for a new student organisation is, if anything, more urgent than before. Now that several major student unions have parted ways with NUS, we need to begin the work of constructing an alternative organisation capable of representing our demands. Otherwise, student unions will lose their bargaining power. It must be democratic, accessible, and explicitly political in its mission:

1. It must be organised: Structurelessness is not an antidote to authority. As Jo Freeman correctly observed, informal power hierarchies tend to emerge when there are no formal leadership structures and clear roles, producing a group of elites that are not accountable to the rest of the movement. At the same time, movements lack the necessary mechanisms to redress this oppressive organisational culture, diminishing both their liberatory potential and political efficacy. A new student organisation must have a constitution, democratic structures, and accountability sessions.

2. It must be political: From the 1960s until the 90s, the NUS was actively involved in anti-apartheid struggle, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and the anti-fees movement. Today, it refuses to do even the bare minimum, avoiding subjects which threaten its image as a state-sanctioned NGO. Any new organisation must be committed to anti-imperialism, the abolition of tuition fees, and oppose the neoliberalisation of universities.

3. It should provide education to its members: In the words of Nelson Mandela, “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. Any new organisation should provide a basic curriculum on subjects such as capitalism, imperialism, and anti-racism. This will keep the movement grounded in material reality.

4. It must serve a purpose: More than just unifying students, this organisation must provide direction to its struggle. A new world cannot simply be willed into being; we must work practically towards it instead of simply sloganeering.

5. It must be connected to wider struggles: While it is true that students are increasingly challenged by rising costs and social pressures, we remain privileged in the sense that education is still not accessible to everybody, namely, non-intellectuals and large sections of the working class. Moreover, like all struggles, ours does not exist in a vacuum. Universities are increasingly complicit in the crimes of imperialism abroad. Therefore, it is our duty as students in the imperial core to disrupt the supply of weapons produced on our campuses to Israel, the United States, and other genocidal regimes. Domestically, we must support the struggle for trans rights, migrants’ rights, and ecological justice.

The above provides a broad framework for a future student movement that is democratic, accountable, and grounded. Its construction will require the effort of both students and sabbatical officers together.