The marketised system of higher education is in meltdown, but resistance is growing and must be built further, report Counterfire HE members

‘The financial crisis facing English universities is the result of a failed free market experiment.’

Those are not the words of a UCU activist or a Counterfire member. Instead, they’re from an article in the Financial Times by Philip Augar, a former banker tasked by former prime minister Theresa May with leading a review of post-eighteen education in 2019. This review was littered with references to ‘low-value degrees’ and policies designed to stimulate courses ‘better aligned with the economy’s needs’, while it contained relatively few criticisms of the market.

Augar seems to have changed his tune in the last six years and yet he’s right: Higher Education in the UK is on a precipice with three-quarters of universities expecting to be in the red in the next academic year with some 10,000 jobs under threat and the risk of bankruptcies – or as the regulator, the Office for Students, prefers to call them, ‘market exit’ – increasing day by day. The ‘UK HE shrinking’ page, a terrifying but extremely helpful resource managed by Queen Mary University UCU, shows a regularly updated and ever-growing list of the redundancies, restructures, reorganisations and closures in the sector.

This is a situation caused by failed government policies and management greed. Even Augar is forced to note how a significant number of universities ‘leveraged their balance sheets through assets sales and debt, rather than building reserves as a protection against future headwinds.’ 

Instead, we saw new overseas campuses and bumper salaries for vice-chancellors at a time when staff were facing real-terms pay cuts. So, for example, Deborah Prentice (Cambridge) had to put up with a £577,000 pay packet last year that included £42000 for relocation and £22,250 in travel expenses. Irene Tracey (Oxford) had to slum it on a mere £573,000, which included an astonishing £100,000 for housing costs.

How has Labour reacted to this situation? To restructure pay across the board? To restore free education? To promise that no university will be left to collapse? Of course not. We’re likely to get a policy statement in the summer which, according to the Financial Times, will announce a further increase in tuition fees while, according to The Times, the education secretary Bridget Philipson, is planning ‘to publish league tables detailing pay at universities where significant numbers of graduates do not go on to good jobs or further education.’

Moreover, the government reacted to the recent successes of Reform in the local elections by disgracefully promising a further crackdown on overseas students applying for asylum in the UK, as if that will do anything to increase Labour’s share of the vote or do anything other than make life worse for universities (and of course to scapegoat international students who are not to blame for this crisis).

Fightback

Meanwhile, staff are fighting back against the cuts. Last week alone, UCU members at Sheffield, Birmingham City, Keele and Newcastle took strike action. Newcastle UCU members are on strike again this week, from Wednesday 7 to Saturday 10 May. They will hear from management later in the week on whether they intend to press ahead with the threat of compulsory redundancies, given that the University has made most of the intended ‘savings’ through colleagues volunteering to go under the voluntary severance scheme. Meanwhile, twenty miles down the A1, UCU members at Durham University took five days of strike action last week in their fight to stop £20 million of cuts to jobs over two years after 72% of members voted to strike.

And we have seen some successes. Cardiff UCU won an important victory recently, with the university agreeing to take compulsory redundancies off the table for now in the face of serious industrial action. According to one member of the branch, ‘it’s a win for sure. We fucked them up and made things much more difficult. Gotta keep going now.’ Meanwhile, Dundee has won a ballot for strike action, which saw the number of planned redundancies reduced from some 700 to more like 300, still an unthinkable reality.

Others are likely to be joining the campaign soon. Essex University, for example, has just concluded its first round of VSS, which saw 260+ employees departing the university at the end of April. Since then, the Vice Chancellor called an all-staff meeting and has warned that further savings are needed over the next couple of years. Essex UCU is currently holding an indicative ballot to defend jobs, protect workloads, and fight for a university that works for staff and students.

In this context, it is very welcome that UCU has called a national rally against the jobs cull in London on Saturday, 10 May. All university branches and student unions should be mobilising to come down to London for 1pm in Pimlico.

Yet, in reality, this is a protest that should have taken place at the start, not the end, of this academic year. This should have been the beginning of a national campaign that ran throughout the year.

Meanwhile, we still lack a national commitment on the part of UCU to join up the disparate struggles that have a common source and a common enemy: a failed market system and Tory and Labour governments that have clung on to this disastrous system. This needs to be the focus of UCU’s national conference later this month.

One place to continue that discussion is on the streets of London on 10 May and to keep organising on our campuses over local issues, solidarity with Gaza and opposition to austerity more generally. The latter is the focus of the People’s Assembly protest in London on 7 June, which is already supported by a whole range of unions and campaign groups.

The crisis in our universities is just one part of a Britain in crisis. Just as we need sustained action on our campuses, we need urgently to develop a national network of activists determined to fight for jobs and a system of free and accessible Higher Education.