Staff and students at Goldsmiths are, once more, mobilising against threatened cuts to jobs and courses, report Counterfire members in UCU

In response to the College’s announcement of its third restructure in five years, members of Goldsmiths UCU have voted overwhelmingly in favour of resisting ‘Future Goldsmiths’, management’s term for an austerity package that promises a dystopian future. On a 63% turnout, 81% voted for strike action and 92% voted for action short of a strike.

Future Goldsmiths proposes to save £22m by the end of the next academic year, £20m of which will come from staff cuts. Given that the College spends £83m on staff, this could mean some 25% of its academics and professional-services staff facing the axe.

Staff are furious that two previous and extremely painful rounds of restructuring failed to address financial problems.

The first restructure in 2021, which management, with some irony, called the ‘Recovery Programme’, cut administrative capacity to the bone and likely resulted in a decline in admissions with many potential students staying away because of a perceived lack of admin support. The second restructure, the ‘Transformation Programme’, generated £16m of savings and led to the decimation of popular academic departments, including History, Sociology, Anthropology and Politics. This will also have had an impact on recruitment.

Yet the College’s senior management team has singularly refused to explain precisely where all this money has gone. Staff were led to believe that it would be the last restructure, and that Goldsmiths would be stronger and more stable after the mass redundancies of 2024.

Yet we now know, thanks to a Freedom of Information request, that Goldsmiths has spent more than £14m on private consultants since 2019, including over £2.5m to the giant audit company KPMG for its role in the 2021 restructure. This is just one example of what an article in the Financial Times addressed in terms of management consultants ‘ruining UK universities’.

Members of UCU have now voted to undertake a marking and assessment boycott with immediate effect, to work to contract and not to undertake any voluntary activities. Escalation will be considered if management refuses to back down.

The Students’ Union has also signalled its enthusiastic support for staff and vowed to co-operate with the branch in mobilising students in support of the boycott and any future industrial action. Staff and students are set to participate in a joint rally against the cuts at 12 noon on Monday 20 April.

The attacks on staff and courses at Goldsmiths are just the latest example of the wave of academic vandalism sweeping across UK higher education. Dozens of universities have been faced by redundancy programmes, with strike action at institutions including Aberdeen, Bristol, Essex, Gloucester, London Metropolitan and Sheffield Hallam.

In this context, solidarity is crucial. All branches engaged in industrial action urgently need the support of the rest of the sector to minimise the financial burden and maximise confidence.

Yet we also need a national response. Individual branches can’t be left to fight alone. It’s time for a national fighting fund and coordinated pressure from all the higher-education unions to resist the attacks on jobs, conditions and academic programmes.

Meanwhile, staff and students at Goldsmiths are increasingly determined to fight back. We want a ‘Future Goldsmiths’ based on a vision of high-quality teaching and learning and not of a diminishing business unit or experiment in austerity.

We want to send a message to both employers and government that, while the funding model for higher education has run out of steam, our commitment to resist it is far from over.