Sunday, 17 November 2019

What the strike means for students

You’ll be leaving university thousands of pounds in debt, while those who teach you can barely afford to pay their bills. Remember: staff working conditions are student learning conditions!

Staff at 60 UK universities, including UCL, will be going on strike from the 25th of November until the 4th of December.

Concretely, the strike means that staff who are on strike will not be teaching you during the strike days, they will not answer email, not mark essays, and not hold meetings with you. It is a reasonable assumption that you might hear from your lecturers whether they are going to participate in the strike, though you should know that they are not legally obliged to tell you (or anybody) beforehand if and when they will be on strike. 

On the strike days, members of the union will create a picket line at the entrance of Chandler House (and all other entrances to the university). This picket line is a symbolic barrier. The strikers will ask colleagues who are not striking yet to support the strike and refrain from entering the building. The picketers will also ask students to support the strike. You can support the strike in a number of ways. You can refrain from entering the building, you can chat with the picketers, you can bring warm drinks and food to those standing out in the cold… 

If you want to support the strike in this way, please consider finding places away from UCL to work. You could work from home, your favourite cafe, or you could use the library facilities around that don’t belong to UCL such as the SOAS library, the Senate House Library, or the British Library. 

The union has asked lecturers not to reschedule missed classes, so you will end up missing eight days of teaching. Lecturers in linguistics will make sure that missing lectures and tutorials during the strike will not affect your marks, for example, by adjusting exams so that they do not cover material that was not taught, or in some other appropriate manner. While the strike should therefore not affect your marks, it will negatively affect your education and your educational experience here. We understand that this effect will be frustrating to you, and we hope you make the provost and senior management team at UCL aware of your frustration.

The Students' Union, UCL has their own information page on the strike, which includes information on compensation. You might be interested to know that the NUS and UCU have issued a joint statement, saying that students stand 'shoulder to shoulder' with staff in these disputes.

No comments:

Post a Comment