Why an Ulster university common room is worth fighting for

Students occupying Ulster University's common room are defending higher education against creeping corporatisation

Common rooms are vital places in universities. In today's corporate-minded, technocratic colleges, where professors are senior managers, junior staff dogsbodies and students consumers, they represent a dim memory of a time when higher education was a rather more collegiate affair. The senior common room in the University of Ulster at Coleraine, run jointly by staff and students on a non-profit basis, is one of the few such places left in the UK. During the years of the Northern Irish Troubles, it provided a safe haven in which Catholics and Protestants could speak to each other across the sectarian divide. Today it represents the sole remaining public space on the Coleraine campus, apart from a dingy entrance hall that looks like a Ryanair departure lounge. It is also one of the only centres open to the general public on a campus that has become increasingly privatised and off-limits to them. Town events have been staged there and local people taking evening classes use it for recreation, as do a host of clubs and societies. In a part of the world where commonality is at a premium, the Coleraine common room has kept alive a notion of the university as a place of dialogue, criticism and open-ended debate, and has recently acquired learned society status.

All this will soon be ancient history if the Coleraine administration has its way. Some time ago, they announced they were appropriating the common room as a corporate dining area. In a magnanimous gesture, however, they offered to replace the room with one containing a kettle and a microwave. Coleraine students, stemming as they do from a deeply conservative region of the world, are hardly noted for their political militancy, but a group of them occupied their common room last week and are set to stay. Some of them are sporting T-shirts reading "Ulster Says Know", an Ulster enlightenment variant on the Paisleyite slogan. They have had messages of support from such diverse sources as Alec Baldwin and the university rugby club, while supportive academics and stout-hearted mums have baked them brownies and made them soup.