Blog post by Sophia Woodman.
Perhaps I am hopelessly naïve, but I imagined that the conclusion of the election for the position of the UCU General Secretary would clear the air, and create conditions for our union to come together to fight what many agree is an existential crisis for UK higher education.
Wherever we are situated in HE, we all see aspects of this crisis. Some are institution-specific; others are related to the systematic devaluation of education in the arts, humanities and the social sciences, and other forms of critical enquiry. Almost every week, a new round of proposed redundancies is announced: Goldsmiths, Sheffield Hallam, QMUL… the list goes on. These are not just jobs lost, but gutting of whole subjects, eliminating vital research and teaching in what can only be called cultural vandalism. So called ‘management consultants’ are usually involved in such ‘reshaping’ exercises that serve to further entrench the failed logic of a ‘market’ in higher education.
Those who work in the institutions doing ‘well’ out of this system face crushing workloads as senior managers seeking to fill perceived or actual gaps in funding cram in ever more students. In this part of HE, managers want a flexible workforce to respond to the inevitable fluctuations in student numbers, resulting in more precarious work, insecurity and stress for many academic workers. Staff with ‘permanent’ jobs have to teach so many students that we do not have the time to get to know them or learn from them. Centralized ‘systems’ are imposed that displace academic self-governance and processes of assessment of teaching and research that make local sense, contributing to the trend of automation and deskilling of our work, as well as vastly increasing our daily digital labour.
We’re also facing a hostile political climate of confected ‘culture wars’, political censorship and the long-term consequences of turning HE institutions into arms of immigration and ‘anti-radicalisation’ enforcement, with the inevitable attendant racism. All of this only adds to the legacies of colonialism and racism embedded in our institutional cultures that we need to work to combat. The real crises of academic freedom are hidden behind media storms around the ‘silencing’ of voices that actually dominate mainstream media outlets.
I could go on, and this list is not intended to be exhaustive, but to provide some pointers to the scale of the impact of the combination of a rightward shifting ruling political class that sees the function of universities in legitimating knowledge as a threat to its hegemony, and a funding crisis that reflects the abandonment of the idea of the university, and higher education, as a public good.
This abandonment is stark: the UK has the lowest rate of public funding for HE among OECD countries, and with tuition fees capped at 2017 levels, income from domestic tuition fees has substantially declined in value. Last year, I asked second year under-graduate students in a sociology class: ‘Is higher education a public good or a private good?’ I asked the students to think about all the functions of the university in their responses. Overwhelmingly, they chose ‘private good’, with only 4 in a class of about 100 choosing ‘public good’. Just one person in the class spoke up to say that education should be a right for all. Obviously the ‘customer’ logic has broad purchase among our students, understandably so with the enormous debt burdens many are forced to take on to attend university at all, and the prevailing narratives about ‘employability’ as being the objective of university education.
Facing such crises, it seems obvious that we have a great deal to fight for, and that we have more that should unite UCU members than divide them. Bridging the divides in interests among differently situated staff in HE is a perennial task that requires constant work of listening, understanding and solidarity. But instead, we have a resurgence of infighting that is paralysing our capacity to work together and putting many members off getting involved. Sometimes I feel that way myself; hearing bits and pieces from the latest National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting, I am actually rather relieved that I didn’t get elected.
I fail to understand why it is in any of our interests to demonize our General Secretary, Jo Grady. We all need to get behind resolving issues that arise in our union, such as addressing and resolving the claims of racism against staff members working for us. I think our starting point should be an assumption of good faith, that our elected officials and representatives want to resolve these problems, rather than weaponizing any internal problems as lines of attack.
Jo has just been reelected; many members, including myself, voted for the platform she put forward during a hard-fought campaign. She deserves a chance to put forward her ideas on how we can face the current conjuncture, with battles on so many fronts at once. Let us debate those proposed strategies, and work to bridge the differences of opinion to seek common ground in the struggle to reclaim our universities.
Other unions have found ways to build common positions across left factions and groups with varying views on political and industrial strategy. A notable example is the National Education Union (NEU), which managed some years ago to form a united ‘NEU Left’. This organizing formation in the NEU is not equivalent to UCU Left, as it includes a range of left political groups. Such alliance-building has been crucial in the NEU’s capacity to fight back against the de-professionalisation of teachers and the attacks on public schooling.
Networks of like-minded members will always exist in UCU, whether they are openly declared as activist groupings or not. Such networks may be called ‘factions’, but factions don’t necessarily imply factionalism, which can be practised by those who aren’t members of openly declared activist groupings just as much as by those who are.
Whether you are in a faction or not, we need to find ways to work across our differences, and do it NOW. We need those on NEC and elected officers and negotiators to find common ground beyond factionalism. We need to do this in our branches too. UCU members and branch activists alike cannot wait anymore—our sector is on fire.
Sophia Woodman is co-president of UCU Edinburgh branch, and organizes with UCU Commons. She also studies the university as an institution, and writes on academic freedom.
UCU Commons a 