To our friends
We are writing to you to announce the formation of, and invite you to participate in, the Brisbane University Staff & Students Assembly. BUSSA plans to be a city-wide organisation where workers and students from all universities in Brisbane can fraternise and organise to create conditions of dignity.
Universities play a central role in contemporary society and are increasingly becoming places that are exploitative, unpleasant and dreary. Whatever pretence that cloaks the university as a place of learning, knowledge and free inquiry is betrayed by the daily experience of universities as being dominated by the accumulation of profit and an atmosphere of conformity which makes life at university both stressful and banal.
Whilst campuses have become sites of social struggle globally they remain quiet here, with many of us simply burying out dissatisfactions and trying to ‘get on with it.’ We hope that by creating a space where workers and students from universities can get together we can do more – that we can start to better understand what is going on, the various fault lines that cut through these institutions, and start to agitate around the daily conditions of staff and students.
Our first step to this is to attempt to reach out and contact others that might share with us their dissatisfactions with how things are and a desire to live lives with dignity. We want to hold our first organisational meeting within the next few weeks. If you would like to participate please email either Dave d.eden@uq.edu.au or Jake jake.fournier@uqconnect.edu.au