ABSTRACT
Though there had been protests against the introduction of fees in 1998 and against their rise in 2004, it was in reaction to the Browne Review that Britain saw the re-emergence of large-scale student activism. The student protests actually defied that neoliberal governmentality and relocated higher education within an ethical and political discourse. The large-scale protests of 2010 lend themselves to a comparison with the protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s – a comparison that also many protesters, activists, and journalists made. While the protests in general were primarily concerned with defending higher education, some protesters explicitly demanded to move beyond the mere reactionary. The creation of a community can be read as a rejection of the competitive individualism that the neoliberal discourse of marketisation proclaimed, and, the moment the protests included academics, also as an overcomming of the oppositional relationship between customers and service providers.
