Students are taught usually to see themselves as completely distinct from and usually above the working class. Through our work on campus, we would like to unite the struggle of students with those of working people. In addition our work on campus should be directed against ways that the universities oppress students as students.

Students and young people have been in the forefront of various progressive movements in the past decade. The university flays a distinct role in capitalist society. Along with training a new educated sector of the labor force, it researches and develops theories and programs for the purpose of maintaining present power relationships in society and furthering social and economic development at home and abroad in the interest of the ruling class. Further, as an institution employing thousands, supporting many more through grants and scholarships, and involving millions of people in its practices the university is a major force in maintaining the dominant order.

Student NAM chapters should attempt to regenerate a radical presence on campus. The difference between NAM and previous organizations, however, is that NAM groups are a concrete part of a broader movement. What this means is that NAM chapters will organize students in terms of the NAM priority programs. NAM student chapters should focus upon the class relation of the university as an institution both in its internal structure and in its relation to the outside community.

We recognize that these relations take a specific form at each institution. Hence the programs which deal with these relations must be worked out by the people who live them in the course of struggle. In other words there must be local autonomy for NAM student chapters allowing them to work out programs which relate to the general NAM program, in terms of the specific conditions at their school.

Specific types of programs which may be viable at different universities are:

  1. Programs to support workers and high school students in their struggles within and outside the university community.
  2. Programs to open university facilities to all people in the surrounding community. Specifically, the university facilities should be open to community and campus workers. These facilities include education, health and recreation.
  3. Programs for combatting discrimination in hiring practices and in admission standards.
  4. Programs for stopping tuition increases and fighting for cut backs in tuition.
  5. Programs on curriculum-making community contacts to establish women’s studies, Black studies, labor studies, anti-imperialist studies and penal studies. These should be community influenced study programs.
  6. Programs to bring workers to campus to dis- cuss various aspects of their occupation and unions-including information on unemployment in various occupations and literature such as “Vocations for Social Change” and “Radicals in the Professions.”·
  7. Programs to fight against the educational methodologies of the university which contribute to student alienation and prepare them to be instruments in the functioning of capitalist society. That is, combatting rigid systems of requirements arid prerequisites which teach obedience to existing authority, fighting systems of grading which encourage competition and elitism and stifle resistance by dividing those oppressed, fighting a lecture system which promotes passivity and teaches people-not to raise critical questions.
  8. Programs pointing out and combatting the way a university oppresses a community and sets the community against the students and vice-versa. Some people suggested that the formation of an independent national student union would be a positive direction for the future.