Secure staff mean secure students
Early last year, in the final stretch of a BA, I came to campus early one morning to be confronted by a picket line across the main doors of my former university. Universities and Colleges Union members from across the country had voted for 14 days of strike action, to protest proposed changes to their pension by an upper management who, they felt, were aiming to shift the burden of pay from employer to employee.
If this sounds familiar, it’s simply because it is. Fast forward a year and a half. I’m an MA student at UCL now, as well as a paid up member of UCU myself having taken a position at my former university, and there is a grim sense of deja vu about how the last few months have played out. Industrial action has been taking place in UK universities for almost two years now. And the infuriating thing is that in 2018, it worked. In April last year, Universities UK (who represent our universities) agreed to withdraw all the proposed changes, and an indepedent panel review was set up to bring the unions on board and construct a pension scheme which would satisfy all involved. But over the last year, those changes have been chipped away, bit by bit, until the dispute was back where it started. And now there are further concerns on the picket - the racial and gender inequality which has been totally unaddressed, an increasing reliance on fractional and casual work, the insane workloads.
So the question is : why should students care? It’s not our pensions, right? Well, at one point in history, universities were closer in shape to guilds. They were controlled by colleges, bodies of academics - both students and teachers and many who were both - who spent their time sharing knowledge. But that legacy has come perilously close to evaporating. Take my case. I’m a mature student; when I started school University tuition was free. When I first attended further education in 2010, it cost me £3,000 per year. The past four years have cost me £10,000 pounds each. My student debt is almost six figures once maintenance loans are factored in. Clearly, there is a hierarchy established here : as a student, I am less a member of a college now, and much more a consumer of a product. And yet, over these past years, the value of that tuition has plummeted. My previous faculty was a thriving research hub when I arrived. It has now been essentially dismantled, as it was not ‘profitable’. Less than half the staff who used to teach me remain at that university; they have left for greener pastures, for places where they can concentrate on their work rather than defending their existence. And all this has meant a total lack of morale on the part of remaining staff. I voted to strike this year. But anti-strike laws, which in Britain demand that unions reach a very high threshold of voting, have barred my workplace from taking part. People are just tired, fed up of fighting.
From my perspective, this is equal measures baffling and terrifying. On three fronts. Firstly, as a student, where is my money going? Where have they put the tens of thousands of pounds which I handed over? Secondly, as a fledgling academic, why would I want to sign up to a profession which so many seem to be fed up with? I want to work in academia because i love the subject; but if I have no time for the subject, then what is the point? And as an employee, why in hell would I want to sign up if my employers will refuse to see any value in my presence, and in fact will actively lie to meabout any kind of deeper engagement with my wellbeing?
This is why students should support the strike. Because our attendance is being slowly siphoned away from knowledge-sharing. Because the pensions and pay disputes are not distant unconcerning things. They are symptomatic of a wider lack of care in ‘the academy’ as to the value of its actual role (i.e., education and research). Our money is trickling more and more into obtuse procedural management; into shiny coffee tables and ‘open plan student mess rooms’; in short, it seems to be going into advertising. Universities in the United Kingdom are investing in politics and advertising at the cost of the product they exist to produce. They claim to address inequality and unfair pay, but do nothing of substance to address it. They are becoming far more minded with attracting profit than in producing the learning, the debate, the insight which made them world famous in the past. And at the end of the day, that means that not only are universities aiming to shift the burden of cost onto staff - they are aiming to shift it onto students as well.
There’s only one day left of this industrial action. If you can, join the picket. But beyond this week : email the provost one more time, talk to fellow students about how these things affect us in a very direct way. Secure staff mean secure students.
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