Act: Inspiration

This isn’t just About Pensions Anymore – There is a Revolution Afoot!

March 16, 2018

It was a strategic error, on their part.  Universities UK and USS thought they could score an easy win, but they started a revolution.  The pension thing was the straw that broke the camel’s back, apparently, and it has triggered the greatest wave of staff-student mobilization the sector has seen in decades.

What did they think lecturers would do while on the picket lines for three weeks?  Chat about the weather?  Snack on cucumber sandwiches?  And what about students?  Were they going to stay at home and sleep?

Hardly.  For starters, we learned a few things.  We learned that there is no “deficit” in the pension fund; in fact, there is a surplus.  We learned that the whole thing is a ruse to justify offloading financial risk onto pensioners so that universities can get cheaper credit to buy new buildings – which has somehow become the raison d’etre of higher education in the UK.  We learned that richer universities, like Oxford and Cambridge, were instrumental to this scheme.  We learned that women are going to be hardest hit by the pension cuts.  We learned that pension bosses make obscene amounts of money, in excess of £1.2 million per year.  And we learned that UUK and USS are opaque and anti-democratic.

But we’ve also been thinking way beyond pensions.  Pensions are the last thing on our minds now.  What we’re really after is nothing short of reclaiming our universities from the banal and reductive logic of neoliberal capitalism – including the uberization of lecturers, the CEO-ification of managers, and the customerization of students.  Because really, what’s at stake here is the public university itself.  Across the country, staff and students are forming groups, sharing ideas, discussing strategy, even staging occupations toward the goal of making our universities fairer, more caring, more democratic places.    We’re not content to weed around the edges of this broken system.  We’re going straight to the heart of it.

Demands are snowballing.  Everything is on the table.  Some of us have found inspiration in a list of ideas posted by Jacob Bard-Rosenberg from Birkbeck.  I’ve reproduced some of them here, and added others that seem to be gaining traction.  This list is only partial, of course – and it’s just the beginning.

• Reject the proposed cuts to pensions.  More specifically, demand an immediate re-valuation of USS.  There is zero reason for this process to take 3 years.

• Abolish tuition fees, and restore adequate block-grant funding to higher education.  Public universities should be publicly funded with progressive taxation.

• Democratize university governance. Open the Academic Board (and the vote) to all academic staff, including post-docs and fractional workers, and extend the powers of the Academic Board to include the right to review decisions made by the Council and the Vice Chancellor.  Once we have meaningful democratic power over university management, we will be able to enact much of our broader vision, including many of the points listed below.

• Include service staff on university management committees all the way to the top, including those on the lowest pay such as cleaners.

• Demand transparency at UUK and USS.  Subject UUK to the Freedom of Information Act, and require USS to publish its valuation reports and methodology.  Bring UUK/USS salaries in line with normal salaries in the HE sector.

• Demand that all university staff receive annual pay rises in line with inflation as a contractual right.  And introduce reasonable fixed pay ratios between lowest-paid workers and highest-paid managers.

• Demand an end to outsourced labour; bring all university staff in-house and guarantee them equal working conditions (pensions, holiday, sick leave, etc).

• Demand an end to zero hours contracts in the sector.

• Refuse to take part in REF and TEF, which show no evidence of improving research or teaching and which create destructive competition and hierarchies.

• Refuse to publish anything held behind paywalls (the knowledge monopolies of Elsevier, Springer, and Co. must be ended).  Set up free online alternatives where necessary (as anthropologists have done with Hau and Anthropology of This Century).

• Refuse to publish books with academic presses where books are so expensive only institutions can purchase them.   Set up alternative presses where necessary (publishing is now remarkably cheap).

• Refuse to take part in league-tables, which create destructive competition and hierarchies.

• Demand a student-staff ratio cap, so that increases in student numbers are matched by new academic hires.

• Demand an end to PREVENT, and an end to the use of lecturers as a surveillance mechanism against students who are not UK citizens.

• Allow departments to review the use of marks and time-bound exams, which often narrow the meaning of learning and trigger unnecessary anxiety for students.

• Ensure that students have access to adequate and affordable accommodation.

• Abolish the position of Vice Chancellor and replace it with an internally elected role in service of democratic bodies like the Academic Board and Council, paid like a public sector worker rather than a corporate CEO.

After the pensions dispute is over, the status quo will no longer be an option.  Our employers are kidding themselves if they assume otherwise.  Ideas are proliferating like a thousand butterflies.  What once seemed impossible now seems imminent.

 

Teaser photo credit: By Alarichall – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67169125

Jason Hickel

Dr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.  He is Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Chair Professor of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. He is Associate Editor of the journal World Development, and serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the National Academy of Sciences, the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the Harvard-Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health.

Jason’s research focuses on global political economy, inequality, and ecological economics, which are the subjects of his two most recent books: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017), and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020), which was listed by the Financial Times and New Scientist as a book of the year.

Jason’s ethnographic work focuses on colonialism, anti-colonial struggles and the labour movement in South Africa, which is the subject of his first book, Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa (University of California Press, 2015). He is co-editor of two additional ethnographic volumes: Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in KwaZulu-Natal (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014) and Hierarchy and Value: Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order (Berghahn, 2018).


Tags: alternative education, building resilient communities, Education