Challenges of Student Movement Leaders in the Era of Disruption – Critical Notes for Ega and Justiawan

The excitement of the student movement in state politics was recorded brilliantly during President Soekarno until the early decades of the New Order. The seeds have been sown since colonial times. Not half-hearted indeed, a handful of students gave birth to the National Awakening movement. Student leaders, both those who studied in the Indies and in the Netherlands, ultimately became idealistic national leaders with pure national statesmanship. Call it Hatta and Syahrir.

The peak of the Indonesian student movement was reached in the decade before President Soekarno fell. At that time, students did not think about themselves getting a degree and living a decent life after holding a bachelor’s degree. They chose universities to fight to fulfill the call of their nation’s conscience. Large campuses in the country are like parliaments without political parties.

They don’t care about the study period. Students are transformed into honorable citizens. This is where the expression emerged that students are agents of change. This is by no means empty rhetoric or a figment of the imagination. Students have principles of truth that they fight for. Campuses and lecture systems actually follow the flow of student movements. This is proven by the emergence of campus programs to build the nation. KKN (Real Work Lecture) is a program for students to get involved in national issues and play a role in them. An IPB student went to Buru Island for KKN and just returned after 13 years of working with village residents.

The New Order attracted Indonesian students to campus with the NKK BKK program, returning students to the political version of the New Order on the right track. Student movements agitated on campuses and adopted an anti-government stance. Then this movement exploded in 1998. However, students did not have the power of money or capital, while they were a movement on campuses, the New Order completely changed the nation’s ideological and political order.

So, the student movement after 1998 or after the Reformation, no longer seems meaningful. Furthermore, there was indeed a change in generations, when student figures such as Soe Hok Gie or Hariman Siregar, were increasingly buried in the folds of the history of the student movement.

Students, who were previously intellectual subjects forged on campuses, have now become objects or raw materials for labor products that must be formed by universities to supply the needs of cheap labor in capitalist factories.

Students are becoming more pragmatic. College is an increasingly expensive investment. So

There is only one goal of college: to get a job. Being unemployed after graduating from college is a disgrace to the family and the university. So behind the aim of producing workers who were sold at the job market to drive factories, as well as to hide, a new ideology called entrepreneurship was introduced.

Students are prepared to become successful capitalist candidates and create factories that employ hundreds of people. This changes the portrait of Indonesian students. There are no more practical social and political movements. What exists now is a movement of student thought that is economically productive.

The student movement is already dead, even more so when campuses accept millennial students. This situation is disrupting the campus. The college curriculum was changed solely to serve them. They do not know the gap that occurs, for example, among lecturers.

And, student organizations are really no longer able to play a total role. Student organizations with various activities are used as scapegoats to hinder the study period. However, student organizations or institutions continue to survive because there are militant student figures. Unfortunately, they played less of a role because there was no support from the ideological and political infrastructure of the student movement.

Since the Merdeka Belajar and Merdeka Campus programs were launched by the Ministry of Education and Culture, there has been a backflow of student movements. The Ministry has prepared various idealistic programs that students can take part in to play a role in overcoming the nation’s problems. The state appreciates this involvement with SKS so that the students involved do not suffer academic administration losses.