"They aren't even pulling batons, they are just chasing and punching people … it's weird."

My colleague is breathless and his tone unusual for someone so familiar with the worst excesses of public order policing. It reflects the speed with which events have unfolded since Wednesday afternoon, when about 70 students occupied the management office of Senate House at the University of London. The demands of the occupiers, reflective of shifts in student activism over the last 18 months, were not only couched in opposition to tuition fees, but also to redundancies and outsourcing throughout higher education as well as to the closure of University of London Union. By 8.30pm last night, nine police vans were present, five from the territorial support group, and occupiers were being violently evicted. The TSG is specifically deployed to deal with public order situations – many would claim, however, that it is more likely to provoke them.

Such events should be understood within a wider context. In the past two months, both the president and vice-president of ULU have been arrested: the latter, Daniel Cooper, for questioning police officers as to whether they were stop-and-searching a fellow student because he was black; the former, Michael Chessum, because he was seen to be leading a protest on campus in opposition to a university management that is seeking to abolish ULU and with it his office. University of London management say this is to avoid duplication of services, while ULU activists insist the move represents political opportunism. "The federal university is dying and college management are taking their chance to get rid of an activist base," Chessum told me.

Other police-related incidents in Bloomsbury recently include the arrest by 16 officers and subsequent strip-search of an activist in response to her writing the demands of the 3Cosas campaign in chalk on a University of London building.

The campaign 3Cosas, which means "three things" in Spanish, is fighting to gain the same sick pay, holiday pay and pensions for outsourced workers at the University of London as is currently reserved for those in-house. It is emblematic of a kind of student activism that sees increasingly little difference between students and highly precarious workers. Undergraduates understand they will face an unfavourable labour market, while graduate students working as teaching assistants often receive the same kinds of pay and working conditions that those within the 3Cosas campaign are organising against. Last week, the campaign won major concessions after a two-day strike organised by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, the union within which some 120 support staff at the University of London are now organised.

Such campus activism has endured surveillance by the University of London, including the filming of protests. Dozens of police have turned up for lunchtime protests, some equipped with stun guns. Over the past year, independent trade unions, free association and free assembly have felt increasingly at odds with the principles seeming to guide the governance of the University of London.

Elsewhere, five students were suspended from Sussex University for their involvement in a similar occupation that was done in solidarity with Tuesday's strike by unions across higher education. Sussex, like London, is seeing an increasing set of networks between not just students and teaching staff, but also support staff, activists and recent graduates. Efforts to create a "pop-up" union there last year, in opposition to the outsourcing of 235 jobs, should be understood within the same context as 3Cosas. Just as forms of organising are being replicated across campuses, so, too, the message from university managements is the same: protest, when it is fundamentally at odds with their aims, is not permissible.

Students and graduates, whose real pay has declined by 12% since 2008, increasingly have no institutions through which to voice legitimate grievances on not just fees and the privatisation of student debt, but also issues of rising prices, rent and working conditions. For democracies to work people need to feel that institutions are in their interests, not against them.

As well as being a day of repression of a newer kind of campus activism, more details emerged this week from the inquest into Mark Duggan, whose fatal shooting by police in August 2011 triggered riots across England. One of the chants that emerged as police became increasingly violent last night was, "Who killed Mark Duggan, you killed Mark Duggan". My suspicion is that some of those chanting, many of whom could be considered historically privileged students and graduates, increasingly feel they share more with those rioters in August than the institutions to which they have historically given their tacit consent. A generation, across economic divides, is quickly learning a simple truth: that debt, austerity and wage repression necessitates police repression.