A fine tradition of student occupation

'My name’s Chris Knutsen. I’m a final year Economics and Politics student graduating in summer 2018.

For this memory I’m going to recount my story of the 5th March 2018 which was the first day of the student occupation of the Vice-Chancellor’s suite on campus. I was among a group of about fifteen students who initially occupied the office. As the time kind of wore on people had to go to University lectures or they had to do presentations, graded presentations, or bits of work, etc, this gradually whittled down until there was only three of us in the last few hours of the thirty hours in total.

So, this is famous for ‘the peeing incident’ where basically the University was adamant that we weren’t allowed to leave the room. If we wanted to go to the bathroom we wouldn’t be allowed back into the room. We were there to occupy the space, to continue proving our point and to go to the toilet, to stop that happening, would’ve been a crying shame and also it would’ve rendered our protest useless, so we had to overcome that and pee into bottles at random points in the morning. And, yeah, if, you know, when the prospectus of the University of Bath and I was flicking through it, if I would’ve thought that I was going to be peeing in an Evian bottle at five in the morning in the Vice-Chancellor’s suite in my final year, I probably wouldn’t have believed you, but, you know, that’s how the cookie crumbles!

Anyway, we woke up in the morning, had amazing support from everyone. People giving us food through the window. We had a little pulley system going on with a plastic bag so that we could get the pee out and get the food in. We were really just doing work and also negotiating occasionally with Security and staff. This led to the apex point at the end where we had to go negotiate for a space that we could leave out of, you know, after thirty hours of not really sleeping. We also needed to go to lectures and do our own thing, so we needed to organise something that was sustainable. So, we had to try and negotiate a place where we could have the right to have six people sleeping there every night, to go in and out, and for us to leave the office on those conditions. It was me and Jessie and Clem negotiating with the Head of Security and the University Secretary on this point. It got a bit tense at times, as you can imagine, quite highly charged, but we eventually got there in the end and got what we were after, and it led to some good outcomes.'