70 students came to a public meeting on the evening of the 28 October, called to oppose the appointment of Jamie Shea as a visiting lecturer in the International Relations (IR) department. Shea is a leading spokesperson of Nato who has worked for the organisation over the last three decades.
Having worked for Nato since 1980 Shea originally made his name touring university campuses promoting nuclear weapons against the attacks of the disarmament movement, and went on to be the organisation’s leading spokesperson during the bombing of Serbia in the 1990s.
Today he is leading apologist of the Afghan occupation by Nato officers. From the former Yugoslavia to the Middle East, Shea has blood on his hands.
There has been disquiet in the IR department over the appointment.
At the meeting, Simon Englert, from Sussex Stop the Cuts, connected the Shea appointment to the wider programme of attacks on Higher Education and the idea, increasingly eroded by these attacks, that universities should be a critical space for debate with a degree of autonomy from powerful military institutions and business groups.
The other speaker, Steff Wyn-Jones, one of a group of PhD students and staff who had campaigned against the appointment over the summer, continued on the same theme and also made the case against Shea, arguing strongly our aim should be to force the university to drop the appointment.
Update: on 29 October 50 students protested outside the Shea lecture. After the lecture, Shea got a lot of hard questions and criticism from the audience. He had overwhelmingly focused on the ‘technical issues’ of warfare – more troops, less reliance on planes etc – in explaining the ‘lessons of Afghanistan’, but as many pointed out, this missed the point. Why are Nato forces involved in a protracted and bloody colonial occupation? This campaign is not going to go away. We need to reclaim our university space from private and military bureaucratic interests and link the anti-cuts movement to the fight against war.
About John
