Over the last few months, students and university staff across the country have been engaged in a wave of struggle against proposed cuts. On 6 September 2009, the management of University College London (UCL) announced a series of cuts totalling £20 million across the university, amounting to at least 6%, with management stating that this would ‘require cuts from staffing budgets’. This means a cut in academic staff and support staff of up to 400 jobs, alongside a swathe of mergers and cuts in specific departments. The departments most at risk are in the Faculty of Life Sciences, facing over £3 million worth of cuts, and the various modern languages departments: a proposal issued in February advocates merging the departments into a new ‘Modern Languages Division’, with a concurrent reduction in administrative staff.
UCL management claims that it is simply ‘balancing the books’. The reality is very different. In 2009 UCL earned over £731 million, and recently gathered over £100 million from alumni and others in the ‘Campaign for UCL’. In fact, from 2008-9, UCL’s income rose by 12.25%, to the point where it does not have an outstanding deficit. There has even been an increase in HEFCE funding for UCL for the next academic year. Meanwhile, UCL Provost Malcolm Grant earns over £400,000 and more than 300 members of staff earn over £100,000 each year.
The education cuts must be seen for what they are. In Britain over the last 13 years, despite its mantra of ‘education, education, education’, the imperialist Labour Party has gone on a wholesale rampage to marketise education. Whether by outsourcing school cleaning and dinner services at primary and secondary schools, creating ‘academy schools’ or introducing heavy top-up fees and education cuts at university level, government policy has been to turn education into an area for profitable business investment. The education cuts at universities across the country are no different – they are attempts to cut costs and maximise profits, to turn universities into competitive business environments. With the recent election of a Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, we can expect more of the same.
Resistance to the proposals has been strong, by members of the teaching union and UCL students. Students have organised a campaign against the cuts across the university. At the UCL students’ union AGM, motions opposing the cuts and supporting unions were passed with overwhelming support. The struggle has united campaigners from a number of other struggles, including the London Living Wage campaign and the campaign to reinstate Juan Carlos Piedra, who was sacked by outsourced UCL cleaning company Office and General for his trade union activity. UCL has declared that it has ‘no plans to join the London Living Wage campaign’. As UCL contracts Office and General to provide its cleaning staff, it can claim that it does pay above the London Living Wage for the staff it directly hires. The London Living Wage is set at £7.60 an hour, whereas contracted cleaners at UCL receive the minimum wage of £5.80, insufficient by far to survive in London – for a UCL cleaner to earn the annual salary of Provost Malcolm Grant, he or she would have to work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, for more than 33 years.
UCL is only one example in the sea of education cuts at universities across the country. At Middlesex University, plans were made to shut down the entire philosophy department – in response, students occupied the Mansion building on the Trent Park campus for 12 days, until a high court injunction forced them to end the protest. At the University of Sussex, students occupied Sussex House in opposition to 112 job losses and education cuts, and are facing severe disciplinary measures.
Proposed strike action by UCL UCU was called off in early May after weeks of negotiations. Plans by UCL to create a redundancy committee for the Faculty of Life Sciences have been scrapped, and no redundancies should be made in Life Science admin, Registry and Museums and Collections, with assurances of no redundancies in Library Services. Negotiations however fell short over other aspects of the campaign, being unable to guarantee the jobs of Modern Language and History of Medicine staff, where at least four members of staff are now facing ‘redeployment’. UCL has however continued to push its aim of £20 million in cuts, so one thing remains clear, despite some advances, the battle is not yet won, and the struggle continues.
Murray Andrews and Robert Barrie
FRFI 215 June/ July 2010
