Unless you are a wicked liberal with a twisted sense of masochistic market indulgence (if you are, read no further), you have probably not only experienced the devastating personal consequences of constituting a neatly calculated brick in the Higher Education Factory yourself, but also seen or heard of the implications this market-driven machinery has for your peers at other institutions, in other places, whether it be anxiety and pressure to complete your degree in no time, the substitution of scientific research for ‘the building of skills and competences’ that can be wrapped in plastic and sold tomorrow, rising tuition fees, unbearable housing conditions or the prospect of a life long dept.

For many, the difficulty lies not so much in identifying the source of these problems – ultimately, they are just different articulations of a university handed over to market forces – as in transforming frustration into constructive action. In this essay, which I have polemically termed a ‘guide’, mirroring the various guides issued for students to conform to yet another restricting university reform, I have compressed some of the core experiences of what proves to be productive undertakings, accumulated by various students protests, into three main democratic tools, roughly put as disturbance, strike and occupation. Not always referring to easily distinguishable or discrete actions, these concepts attempt to capture different aspects of the modes of action at stake in the student protest.

Key words: the neoliberal university; student movements; Et Andet Universitet ('A Different University'); protest tactics