If you are starting university this autumn, you are arriving in the middle of a funding crisis. Across Britain, universities are cutting jobs, closing courses and reducing student support. A Universities UK survey published in May found that 79 per cent of the institutions responding had pursued voluntary redundancies during the previous three years and 44 per cent had closed courses. Bursaries, hardship funds and research are being cut as well.
These cuts are not abstract. Fewer staff means larger classes, less contact time, longer waits for support and more work piled onto those who remain. When a course or department closes, students may have no realistic alternative. Working-class students, commuters, disabled students and those with jobs or caring responsibilities are hit hardest.
For students, this comes on top of the basic problem of affording university at all. Fees are only part of it. Rent, food, travel and study costs force many students to work long hours alongside their courses. Cuts to hardship funds, libraries, disability support or contact time therefore fall hardest on those with least money and least time. A campaign against university cuts has to fight for students’ living conditions as well: proper non-repayable maintenance grants, affordable housing and fully funded support services.
At Goldsmiths in London, staff have faced repeated rounds of cuts. This year UCU members began a marking and assessment boycott against plans for around £20 million in staffing cuts. Management responded with deductions of 100 per cent of pay, including from staff who continued teaching and carrying out other duties. The branch then moved to indefinite strike action.
Similar disputes are developing across the sector. The basic question is the same everywhere: who is going to pay for the crisis—workers and students, or the government and the wealthy?
How did we get here?
University managements often present cuts as if they were unfortunate but unavoidable accounting decisions. They are not. For decades governments have pushed universities away from stable public funding and towards competition for fee income. Labour introduced tuition fees in 1998. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition raised the English fee cap to £9,000 from 2012 while cutting most direct teaching funding.
Universities were encouraged to expand, borrow money, build new facilities and compete for students. International students became especially important because universities could charge them much higher fees. When recruitment falls, inflation raises costs or debt repayments bite, managements balance the books by cutting staff and courses.
That model turns education into a market. A course can be socially useful, academically important and popular with the people who take it, but still be closed because management decides it does not bring in enough income.
Labour is now raising fees again. That shifts more of the cost onto students without fixing the underlying problem.
Funding systems differ in Scotland and Wales, and free tuition for eligible Scottish students is a real gain. But universities across Britain are still pushed to compete for students, grants and commercial income. The answer is not a better-managed market. It is to replace the market with public funding and democratic planning.
Another education is possible
Every campaign should start from a simple demand: no redundancies, no course closures and no cuts to student provision.
Managements will say there is no alternative. Workers and students should demand to see the accounts, borrowing agreements, contracts and financial plans. They should know what has been spent on consultants, buildings and senior management, and what conditions lenders have imposed.
But exposing bad management is not enough. Even the best-run university cannot solve a national funding crisis on its own. The government has to provide the money needed to protect jobs and education. That means emergency public funding now, followed by a permanent replacement of tuition-fee dependence with stable public grants covering the real costs of teaching and research. And if public money is going in, management should not keep the power to decide what gets cut.
Workers Power argues that university budgets, staffing, courses and major partnerships should be controlled by elected, recallable bodies of workers and students.
That is very different from giving students or trade unions a few advisory seats on management committees. If management still has the final say, it still has the power to close a department, sack staff or sign a commercial deal.
Democratic worker–student control means the power to reject cuts, inspect the accounts, remove failed managers and decide how resources are used.
It also means deciding what universities are for.
The Home Office already makes universities police international students’ immigration status. International students pay enormous fees and can face threats to their right to remain if sponsorship is withdrawn. Universities are also being drawn more closely into military research and training. In July the Ministry of Defence launched a Defence Universities Alliance involving 35 universities, explicitly linking higher education to the needs of the arms industry and the military.
Students have shown that these questions can be challenged. The Palestine solidarity encampments forced university investments and partnerships into public debate. Workers and students should demand full disclosure of investments, research contracts and military links, defend the right to protest and organise, and end universities’ role in policing immigration.
Build locally, organise nationally
The first weeks of term matter. Freshers’ fairs, introductory lectures, halls and society meetings bring thousands of students together. They are an opportunity to organise. Where cuts are threatened, call an open meeting of students and workers. Invite the campus unions, student societies and affected departments. Agree demands. Elect a committee that reports back to regular meetings and can be replaced if it stops carrying out their decisions. Take the campaign into lectures, libraries, halls and workplaces. Do not limit it to the people already involved in student politics.
Students should support workers taking industrial action. Join picket lines, raise strike funds and oppose punitive pay deductions. Workers in turn should support student demands over fees, rents, grants and democratic rights. Petitions and public meetings can help build support, but they are not enough if management refuses to move. Campaigns need to prepare action that can disrupt business as usual: walkouts, occupations, rent strikes and coordinated support for staff strikes.
These actions work best when people understand what they are trying to achieve and have democratic control over them.
Local campaigns can win, but universities should not be left to fight one by one. In August, activists from around two dozen universities met in Sheffield and founded a national anti-cuts campaign to begin coordinating resistance. Every campus campaign should join it, send elected delegates and push for common days of action.
The campus trade unions—UCU, Unison, Unite and others—should organise a national campaign against redundancies and closures, prepare coordinated industrial action and demand government funding for the whole sector.
If national union leaders refuse to act, members should organise to change those decisions rather than accept another round of isolated disputes.
The student movement also needs serious organisation. Student unions have money, offices, mailing lists and elected officers. Use them. Pass motions, contest elections and demand resources for campaigns. But organisation cannot stop when an officer refuses to act or graduates.
We need a fighting national student organisation rooted in democratic campus bodies, with elected leaders, accountable delegates and the ability to organise sustained action.
That is one of the lessons of the 2010 student revolt. Tens of thousands marched, walked out and occupied against the tripling of fees and the abolition of Education Maintenance Allowance in England. The movement showed enormous militancy, including among school and college students. But it lacked a democratic national organisation able to decide strategy and sustain the fight. We should not repeat that weakness.
What are we fighting for?
Defending individual courses is necessary, but the movement needs an alternative for education as a whole.
Workers Power fights for free education, living grants and the cancellation of student debt. We want secure jobs, decent pay and manageable workloads for education workers, with casualisation and outsourcing ended.
We want a state-funded national education service under worker–student control. Education should be free throughout life, from school and college to university and adult education. Provision should be planned according to social need, not what can make money in a competitive market.
That means education for useful work, science and technology, but also for history, literature, languages, art and culture. People should have the time and resources to learn throughout their lives.
A society organised around profit cannot fully deliver that. The fight over universities therefore raises a wider question: who controls society’s wealth and resources?
Workers Power argues for taking the banks and major industries into public ownership under workers’ control and planning the economy to meet social needs rather than private profit.
You do not have to agree with all of that before joining a campaign against cuts. Everyone who wants to fight should be able to organise together. Socialists should argue openly for their programme and win support through what they say and do.
But the fight needs to start now.
If your university is cutting jobs or courses, find out what is happening. Get the plans and the accounts. Contact the campus unions. Call a meeting. Elect organisers. Link up with other campuses.
And if you want the fuller argument—on the funding crisis, the lessons of past student struggles and a programme for transforming education—pick up our new pamphlet, Universities in Crisis.
