Everybody's doing just what they're told to

Kat Fletcher, bless her, in her passionate defence of the British Student Protester, is simply wrong. British students, where they do care, and care passionately, about all kinds of things of varying importance, they're not about to get themselves dirty or arrested defending them. Take students marches, for example, of which I am something of an expert. During my time as a student I attended 4 marches against top-up fees. The usual turn-out for our 19,000-strong student population was around 300, and of these there was always a strong contingent who brought up the rear shouting "Free Tibet!" and waving Save the Rhino banners. The most daring we ever got was to sit down - 100 or so of us - on Waterloo Bridge, thus holding up all the traffic, and even then a first-year Law Student acquaintance of mine got very agitated and refused to actually sit down with us for fear it would destroy his future legal career. Admittedly, we did once stage an all-night sit-in in our library to protest against library opening hours (i.e., the fact that it often didn't), but only after we'd got the agreement of the Head of Library Services and the Academic Registrar. We did redeem ourselves once when the College closed down one of its departments, standing outside the College Council bedecked in labcoats, waving placards and loudly squawking Christmas Carols with the words cleverly altered to make our point. Ah, how cutting edge we were.

So, basically, we're not really very good at it. Where the French burn cars (incidentally, why do they do that? Why cars?) we write slightly miffed letters to the Times Higher Educational Supplement, daringly giving our real name and institution underneath the "Yours Faithfully" (or "yours sincerely", if we happen to know the editor's name.) The only time I remember any actual damage being caused was when LSE rampaged through my department, setting off the fire alarms and bringing down half the ceiling, and this was not some inflamed act of spontenaity in reaction to bad lecturers' pay or any kind of human rights violation, but because they were pissed.

She's right, perhaps, about the wider concerns, and I'm glad about that. I was up in Edinburgh for Make Poverty History and (much to my dad's consternation) on the first of the big anti-war marches. But when it comes to students standing shoulder to shoulder as students, well, British students simply haven't got the time any more.