Tag: HE

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What went wrong with the UCU Rising Campaign?

lobby of UCU HQ in 2018, with 'no capitulation' placards

How the UCU reballot over pay and conditions missed the threshold

The turnout in the reballot, at 42.59%, will be a huge disappointment for every union member who wanted to see a fight over pay and conditions. But a 68.32% vote for strike action, and a 75.57% vote for action short of a strike, shows that tens of thousands of members still wanted to fight.

This is not the end of the campaign. But our union has some hard questions to ask itself.

Did the UCU campaign run out of steam, or did the UCU leadership undermine it? Was there a fundamental problem with UCU’s industrial strategy, or was the strategy that was agreed undermined by inaction and compromising in HQ?

Every success has a thousand parents. But every failure is an orphan.

Let us get one thing straight. Members are not to blame, nor are branch reps. Some may be ‘tired’, but very many are angry and extremely fed up – mainly at the lack of adequate support and the inconsistent leadership from the top of the union.

Many of the members who fought the employers over the USS pension scheme and won are the same members who saw their fight over pay, casualisation, workload and pay gaps frittered away by our union leadership.

We know that the employers can pay staff more – but they don’t want to. On average, universities underspend by about 4% of the pay bill each year. Since 2009, the employers have taken a strategic decision to spend less on staff pay in order to build up surpluses and invest in buildings in their competition to recruit ever more students in the Government’s Tuition Fee Market.

On top of this, from December every pre-92 employer is going to receive a windfall amounting to around 5% of the total pay bill thanks to the fall in USS contributions (won by our members taking weeks of strike action). It’s Christmas all year round for pre-92 Vice Chancellors.

We must not let the post-92 institutions and their leaders off the hook either. Despite additional pressures on recruitment that some post-92s have seen, and the ideological attack on Arts and Humanities from the Conservative Government, many of our post-1992 universities are in good financial shape. There is no justification for the squeeze on pay across the sector. Where the tiny minority of universities plead poverty, why don’t they cut pay and spending on Senior Managers, not on ordinary staff? Why aren’t they vigorously challenging ideological attacks on our subject areas and questioning the broken HE funding model?

Had we won the ballot we could have demanded our share as a national union. Now it looks like we are going to have to put demands on our employers locally. But that risks undermining national pay bargaining. We also have to rebuild the campaign for a new ballot. We have to understand what went wrong to come back stronger for the next round.

The problem is that the resolve that got the fight over the line over USS has not been applied by our union leadership over pay and the other three fights.

The USS campaign won in spite of a wobbling UCU leadership for three connected reasons. First, the 2018 strike which broke the employers’ plan to drive through DC won because it overturned General Secretary Sally Hunt’s plan to fudge a deal. Second, members kept up the fight, with the joint strike action earlier this year keeping the pressure on. This was particularly crucial after the disaster of April 2022, when the leadership organised token strikes (including Reading Week strikes) before the crunch point, and then abruptly called no further action. Third, the political campaign over the valuation (#NoDetriment) coupled with the changes in the financial position of the USS valuation projections due to rising interest rates made it possible to box in the employers and gain an historic victory.

So the problem is not ‘the strategy’, whatever armchair generals might say. The strategy debated at (Special) HE Sector Conferences and the Higher Education Committee has been undermined multiple times. We are facing a bunch of employers highly incentivised to wait out short bursts of action, so if an agreed strategy is not implemented by the leadership, they gain confidence and decline to negotiate. We need to make good on the promises made by the GS in 2022 – to shut down university campuses until we are satisfied we have won, instead of tinkering around the edges with time-bounded action.

Throughout the entire Four Fights campaign this year, members’ determination and organisation was unfortunately not matched by the same resolve at the top. Instead, the General Secretary repeatedly waved the white flag, from ‘the pause’ to foot-dragging over putting strikes back on, repeated e-polls and ballots. The result for ordinary members was confusing. It felt like we were being turned on and off like a tap, with last-minute announcements and late-notice “briefings” – including briefings labelled as Branch Delegate Meetings after reps arrived at them.

The pause was bad enough. The ACAS negotiations went nowhere slowly (yielding a no-strike Terms of Reference for prolonged negotiations, and an offer on the three fights worse than 2019-20), but allowed the employers to harden their position around their ‘final offer’ on pay, while undermining membership control of the strikes. It took members and branches to challenge the repeated consultations and e-polls just to keep the action on. A clearer signal to the employers that the union was divided could not really be imagined.

The silence of the leadership during the summer Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) was deafening. Remember that it was the General Secretary’s strategy to delay the MAB until the summer – or at least this is what we were told when indefinite strikes from February were opposed! But there was no planning from the centre, no adequate support and no strategy from the top on how to use the MAB to win a deal.

Questions from branches were batted back to local officers and reps with minimal answers from HQ, and branches had to fight to persuade the union they should and could take strike action to defend members against punitive MAB deductions. Branches had to lobby for an increase in strike pay, instead of there being an open appeal to build up a war chest across the union for MABbing members in advance.

Ordinary members were absolute heroes. Many bravely took the difficult decision to take part in the Marking and Assessment Boycott, face down threats of massive pay deductions, have difficult discussions with colleagues and managers, and organise locally to keep going. Others felt massively conflicted but did not take part themselves, some giving hundreds of pounds in donations to support colleagues. All of this participation and solidarity was organised in staff rooms and Zoom and Teams meetings, in departments and between colleges. Unofficial ‘rank and file’ organisation, branches, regions and the Solidarity Movement sustained the MAB while there was near silence from the official union structures.

Thus it was that there was no official Branch Delegate Meeting from the start of the MAB in May until the HEC in August when the General Secretary and the HEC majority planned to call it off. The General Secretary’s supporters on the HEC pushed for a fruitless negotiation with UCEA over reducing the pay deductions, but not over the claim (to her credit, the GS attempted to put pay back on the table). And the summer reballot never happened, leaving members out on a limb.

When the August Branch Delegate Meeting voted for winding down the MAB in the absence of a reballot, and called for strikes at the start of the Autumn Term, it was clear that the ability to apply direct industrial leverage was diminishing. Not surprisingly, given the opportunity, some branches voted to call off the strikes when given the opportunity.

UCU members, reps and activists have been busy building the reballot over the last month. We have had numerous conversations and debates with members. Many members tell us that they are fed up. Some said they won’t vote because of their anger at the leadership. Again and again, the message is the same: we trust our local branch reps, but we don’t trust ‘the leadership’.

Not all branches did miss the threshold, with some reaching 60% by their own count. However, it is clear that there is a great deal of frustration even in those branches at being let down by forces external to the branch. There is a feeling of having policy foisted on them and, worse, that those policies were inconsistent.

Some of that righteous anger is directed at the Left – why did we allow the GS and the union’s HEC majority to undermine the action? The fact is that we tried to stop them! But a small shift in the composition of the HEC following Congress towards the GS-supporting ‘Commons’ and ‘IBL’ factions allowed crucial HEC votes to go the way the GS wanted, including over the negotiation approach and the failure to implement the summer reballot.

This is an unnecessary defeat for our union. In the context of a win over USS, it risks dividing us. We should all beware the argument that ‘members don’t care about pay, equality, workloads or casualisation’. That is clearly wrong – members in pre- and post-92 institutions have just taken part in a massive MAB to try to move the employers over precisely these demands!

Indeed, one of the lessons of this action has been that the employers are prepared to wait out hard-hitting industrial action by the union, particularly if the union appears divided at the top, wherever they think an end-date is in sight, be that the end of a bout of strikes, or the end of a mandate for action. But we also know that some VCs were ready to settle, but UCU’s management of the MAB at the top failed to capitalise on the splits.

Their wait-and see approach was not cost-free for the university employers. The action exposed Vice Chancellors’ priorities starkly. Academic standards could go in the bin. Student complaints might be addressed by warm words, fake degree awards and an occasional bribe – but no reimbursement of tuition fees. The administrative chaos in some institutions at the implementation of the disproportionate and unfair MAB deductions exposed the inability of VCs to prepare. A better-prepared UCU could get universities and professional bodies to commit to academic standards from the start. The inconsistency of deductions across the sector show that employers are not as united as UCEA would have us believe.

The 2022-2023 academic year will go down as the most disrupted in history, with students missing weeks of lectures and many not receiving their results until September or October. If you think like a Vice Chancellor, and view Higher Education as a commodity, this has been a terrible year. It should be no surprise that overseas student recruitment has been negatively affected, alongside a drop in home students who now face 40-year loans thanks to the Conservative Government imposing them on the new intake.

UCU members inflicted a major blow on our Vice Chancellors, and given them a year they will not forget in a hurry. They know that they cannot afford for this to happen again.

The question is, what UCU leadership can deliver the victory that members so dearly deserve? How can we learn the right lessons, understand the weaknesses on the employers’ side and ensure we come back stronger and more effective than ever in the near future?

UCU needs a different kind of leadership. We need to ensure every level of our elected officers and representatives believe our members have the power to change the future of Higher Education for the better — and other sectors too.

We need a GS, Presidential team, and NEC that are committed to democracy through our sovereign structures, to implemented policy efficiently, and to deliver the win our members sorely need on pay and conditions. This is what our UCU Left candidates will do.

— Saira Weiner, LJMU

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Victory to the RMT: We marched together now let’s STRIKE together

The RMT strike, the biggest for over 30 years, points to the direction of travel for the whole of the trade union movement. 40,000 rail workers struck across Britain and several thousand Tube workers did the same in London.

The TUC demonstration, which saw tens of thousands march through central London, was not only bigger than most people had expected, but reflected a real appetite to fight. It also looked different to past TUC marches. It was younger, more diverse and the dots were being joined together, connecting the cost-of-living crisis with the need to prevent war, austerity and climate change.

But the most significant reason that made this TUC march feel different, compared to many others, is that it had a focus – the RMT national strike.

Following the march, the NEU announced that they will be holding an indicative ballot of all their members. In FE UCU are balloting members in forty colleges across England after another insulting pay offer from the AoC.

Back to the 70s … I hope so.

There is now lots of talk in the media about how Britain is slipping back to the ‘bad old days’ of the 1970s. When I hear this point being made by journalists my initial response is, ‘bad old days – for whom?’. In 1970 ten million working days were lost due to strike action (in 2018 273,000 working days were lost due to labour disputes, the sixth-lowest annual total since records began in 1891). There were eleven million union members (today there are 6.5 million).

These two facts meant that the distribution of wealth was far more equal compared to today where the huge inequalities, between those with fabulous wealth and those relying on food banks, has grown to historical highs.

It was not just the earning power of workers that was significantly better but also the social wage too. With the rise of a militant trade unionism came more money spent on health and education.

So, when a lazy BBC journalist attempts to scare their viewers by warning of Britain slipping back to the ‘bad old days of 1970s’ my reaction is always, ‘I hope so’. This is not because I have a longing to get back into my high-wasters, flares, platforms, cheese cloth shirts and tank tops but because when our side fought back it dramatically altered the living conditions of all working people and put the fear of God into those who rule over us.

‘Wage rises will lead to Inflation getting out of control  – ‘ yawn yawn…

Listening to BBC Radio 4 the other day Nick Robinson was in Wakefield talking to ‘poor people’. He casually offered the opinion, after announcing a pay rise had been won locally by Bus drivers that matched inflation, that, ‘I hope this doesn’t catch on or we will have a real problem controlling inflation’.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that such a Tory lickspittle like Nick Robinson should make such an unqualified subjective point. Robinson spent much of his youth in the early-to-mid-1980s holding various offices for Conservative Party youth organisations (this was the time when Tory students were proudly wearing, ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ badges around university campuses). But I was surprised to hear Dr Mary Boustead, the joint GS of the NEU concede, ‘It will have some impact’, in response to this same line of questioning on the Today programme, before moving on to defend her unions decision to ballot members over pay.

This is not a helpful starting point for a trade union leader to hold as they prepare to battle over pay with inflation at its highest level in over 30 years. We should not be conceding an inch to this so called ‘common sense’ argument. Instead, we should say loud and clear that wage rises do not cause inflation – adhering to profit margins does.

The old and false orthodox trope of mainstream economics which states that demands for higher wages leads to the rise in the cost of living is a familiar one.

The employers and government argue workers’ receiving higher wages for their labour inevitably means that the employer will have to put up the prices of commodities to pay for the wage increase.  This is only true if you accept the parameters of the argument that has been set by the employer. When striking for a pay rise workers are fighting for a fairer redistribution of wealth in society. As we have seen profit margins have increased throughout the pandemic and with it the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has increased. 

A strike over pay is an attempt to reverse this trend.

The employer’s attempt to blame those fighting for an increase in earnings for the rise in the cost of living is an ideological attack designed to protect their wealth and privilege. Our wage rises can come out of a redistribution of wealth.

Proud to be a Luddite

One of the ways the Tories hope to undermine public support for the rail workers is to dismiss them as Luddites. One of the issues the RMT are fighting over is the introduction of new technology, which the employers and the Tories say makes checking the rail network safer and more cost effective.

It is another ‘common sense’ argument that we are all meant to accept without challenging, that when workers try to take control of technological change, they hold back progress and are therefore ‘Luddites’.

But those denouncing workers attempts to stop employers making people redundant with new technology, fail to understand historically what the Luddites fought for.

The Luddites were a radical movement that arose at the beginning of industrialisation. From 1811 to around 1818 hand-loom weavers secretly organised to stop the closure of their smaller workshops and replace them with bigger and more mechanised machines and factories. A part of their campaign was to smash up the machines that were replacing them.

The Luddites were not against new technology. They were against the use of this technology to make them redundant.

Over 200 years on and capitalism is still developing new technology which is used to make working people’s lives poorer. The potential to liberate working people from dull, alienating and dangerous work exists. But because the ‘bottom line’ rules these liberating inventions are used to make working people poorer and to deskill human labour.

So, of course Rail workers must resist attempts to replace them with a machine. A victory for the rail workers would mean that we are a step closer to worker’s having control over their working lives and technology. This is why we should be proud to be called a Luddite.

We all can play a role in ensuring that the strikes on the rail end in a victory for rail workers. Find out where your local picket line is, take your UCU branch banner, take a picture and tweet it.

Solidarity – in unity lies strength.

Sean Vernell UCU – national negotiator.

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The HE disputes can be won. But members need to take control.

 Our Higher Education disputes are at a crossroads. The strikes this week and next are the last we can take on our current industrial action mandate. USS and UUK have imposed their attack on the pension scheme. UCEA is not talking to us over pay and the pay-related issues of our Four Fights.

Strike action now is still important, of course. Strong visible action shows members require a proper pay increase in the face of rampant inflation, and strengthens the union over local casualisation, workload and pay gap demands. But we are not where we should be.  

Strategic failures

We have arrived at this point through a series of failures by our union. The majority of these have arisen out of a refusal by the leadership – HE officers, full-time officials and the General Secretary – to implement democratic decisions taken by members. This has resulted in members continually having to make the best of sub-optimal situations in order to prosecute these fights.

The first failure was the refusal to ballot members over the summer and hold a Special HE Sector Conference last August, as instructed by June’s Sector Conference. This meant that despite the urgency of the attacks on USS, the ballot was delayed until October instead of taking place over the summer as Conference wished.

The whole point of the timetable passed at Conference was that serious, sustained action could take place in the autumn term. That is how we ended up with just three days of strike squeezed in before the Xmas break. Not only that, but the notifications to employers cited work-to-contract as the only form of ASOS, allowing employers to claim that non-rescheduling of classes was not part of our action because it had, inexplicably, been listed separately on the ballot paper.

The second failure was the decision by the General Secretary and the majority of the pension negotiators to make a compromise offer on USS. UCU conferences voted for a ‘no detriment’ position on the basis that the valuations of the scheme were flawed and there was no objective basis for increasing contributions or cutting benefits, and if there was a need for more contributions, the employers should pay them.. Abandoning this position meant conceding the central argument in defence of the scheme.

USS retreat

Worse, the General Secretary appeared to believe that a compromise deal was possible in February which could end the dispute. As a result, again contrary to the union’s policy and against the wishes of delegates attending branch delegate meetings, USS strikes were separated from action over the Four Fights, soft-pedalled and delayed again to coincide with meetings of USS JNC at which this deal was supposed to materialise.

This proved to be a staggering miscalculation. True to form, not a single employer representative broke ranks and the cuts were pushed through on the casting vote of the chair. The industrial action taken in February was fractured between the two disputes, giving the green light to UCEA to urge punitive deductions for ASOS, a course of action which some institutions have eagerly embraced.

Throughout, the leadership has consistently minimised the action called. The settled policy of the union is for escalating action to win disputes, and the September Special Sector Conference even supported a motion calling for indefinite action. The point of this was to deter employers from sitting out our bouts of strikes by always notifying at least one batch of action in advance.

Token action

Neither escalating nor indefinite action has been implemented. Ignoring the clear wishes of BDM’s, the majority on HEC even opted for a pattern of regional one-day strikes. This kind of token action has been definitively rejected by Congress, not least when it adopted the report of the Commission on Effective Industrial Action in 2017. Fortunately, the left on HEC managed to salvage a degree of credibility for this action by making it the five-day blocks we are currently engaged in. But yet another delay in calling that action means that some branches find themselves striking out of term-time, and members are rightly concerned about the union’s strategy.

The same HEC meeting voted for a reballot window of five weeks. We have ended up with one of only three weeks, throwing another unnecessary obstacle in the way of our disputes. When questioned about this at last week’s NEC, the General Secretary claimed that HEC’s wishes had been ‘unimplementable’. She was also challenged on the assessment of the disputes in her GS report, where she effectively argues that national disputes are unwinnable because the employers are too well organised and we are too weak unless all branches are out. Her conclusion is that unless we can win an aggregated ballot, we should not fight.

This kind of defeatist talk is not acceptable in the middle of a national battle. It contrasts sharply with the positivity and determination of members who have made considerable sacrifices to wage these disputes. It is also, plainly, wrong. In 2018, our union began the dispute with a third smaller union density, and won against employers who were just as organised! But the union led from the top, balloted on a no detriment basis, involved reps to identify optimum strike dates, and called escalating action. 

We can still win

Both these disputes have always been winnable, and despite the set-backs, they still are. But control of them must be in the hands of members. Members have consistently made the right decisions about the strategy required, and UCU Left members on HEC have consistently tried to have those decisions implemented. 

The next phase now hinges on the reballots. Assuming we get a good number of branches over the threshold, the Special HE Sector Conferences on April 20th and 27th will set the forthcoming strategy. Branches need to debate motions for those conferences in time for the submission deadline of 6th April. Crucially, we need a marking and assessment boycott along with a plan for strike action, both alongside the ASOS e.g. to hit exam boards, and as a response to punitive deductions. And we need to insist that Conference decisions are implemented!

Those at the top of the union who don’t have the nerve for this fight should stand aside. Now is not the time to throw in the towel. The employers remain extremely vulnerable to targeted and effective industrial action, as the strikes at Liverpool and the RCA have proved. We need to learn the lessons of those disputes and organise to win.

UCU Left open meeting
Winning the HE disputes: For a member-led strategy
6pm Monday 28 March
Register: bit.ly/UCUL-28mar

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HEC snubs the membership and delays the fights

Report of Higher Education Committee of Friday 2nd July


Meeting for the first time since annual Congress and Sector Conferences, UCU’s Higher Education Committee decided on Friday to delay a Special HE Sector Conference (SHESC) until after the summer. 

This is despite an instruction from Sector Conference (Motion HE3) to hold a Special Higher Education Sector Conference (SHESC) in the first two weeks of August in order to progress the Four Fights and USS campaigns. This delay is unfortunate. It sets back the timing of ballots and threatens our ability to take industrial action over pay, casualisation, equalities and pensions during the autumn term.

UCU Left HEC members voted for the earliest possible date for a SHESC, but HEC voted by one vote for the latest date on offer – September 9th. Branches will now have the difficult task of meeting to submit motions before a deadline of August 23rd. 

The only minor advantage to this delay is that it should give time for the 2021-22 JNCHES dispute (UCEA’s 1.5% ‘final offer’) to come to a head so that the dispute over the 0% award of 2020-21 to be rolled over into it. But this is not a good enough reason to delay getting the campaign under way. Unison is already balloting 48 of its HE branches for action in the autumn over the 20-21 dispute. 

UCU Left motions and amendments attempting to commit USS negotiators to abide by conference positions and to initiate a ballot on USS over the summer were, unfortunately, defeated. Not only are some in the leadership intent on delay, they also want to water down the demands of members and lower the sights of what can be achieved.

This refusal by the majority on the HEC to implement the clear decisions of the policy-making body of the union is not only undemocratic, but sends a signal to our employers and the pension company that we are not serious about the fights that are necessary. The situation can be rectified but only by branches organising seriously for the September Special Conference and insisting that the campaigns are organised and the ballots are initiated.

On the positive side, a motion calling on all UCU members to make a donation of £4 or more to the Liverpool strike fund was carried, as was a motion to set up a UCU campaign group to coordinate opposition to the cuts to funding for arts courses.

A motion on Rhodes Must Fall, which had already fallen off a recent NEC agenda, was again not heard through lack of time, as was a motion on making HE safe for trans and nonbinary students.

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What Rules the Campus: Academic Freedom or the Corporate Bottom Line?

We must debate and oppose the Green Paper

 

Download this article as a leaflet: UCULeft – green paper

The Conservative Government’s Green Paper, Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice, represents the Tory vision for Higher Education. It can be summed up in one word – privatisation.

It should not be a surprise that a Tory government is ideologically committed to privatisation. What is shocking is just how brazenly the Green Paper proposes a process to allow private companies to sell university degrees.
In the US, HE privatisation has been big business, worth billions of dollars. The ‘for-profit’ sector was hit by a series of scandals following an exposé by the PBS broadcaster in 2010. But it is still worth billions.
Many of the ideas in this Green Paper are a resurrection of elements from the HE White Paper that was abandoned in 2011. The Government has bided its time to allow the £9K tuition fee to ‘bed in’. Now it is proposing the next stage of privatisation.

The NHS: a model of privatisation
What has happened to the National Health Service is instructive for those of us in HE. During the period of the last government, there was a continual expansion in the number of private providers that set themselves up in competition with hospitals and PCTs, and which also made money from ‘the NHS market’ by tendering for profitable NHS services.
The picture is predictably complex, from the high-profile retreat of Circle Holdings from Hinchingbrooke Hospital NHS trust, to the less headline-grabbing cherry-picking of service contracts. The Kings’ Fund reports that private-sector mental health providers increased their income by 12% in just two years between 2010 and 2012, while mental health spending declined over the same period. The barriers to private companies making money from government-directed public-sector healthcare contracts have been dramatically reduced.

What does it mean for UK Higher Education to be ‘privatised’?
Until now, Higher Education has not been subject to the kind of serial market experimentation of the NHS. Universities have maintained an effective monopoly on government research and HE teaching funding. Universities are not parts of the State, but are various forms of not-for profit Chartered or Incorporated institutions. They are ‘private’ already. What is there to be concerned about?
There are well-established educational and social reasons for ensuring that research funding is allocated to publicly-accountable, if not publicly-owned, universities. Many scientists, in both the university and private sector, are well aware of the problem of commercial priorities taking precedence over scientific priorities. To take just one example, so-called ‘Big Pharma’ has a poor record in prioritising funding in science (spending twice their research investment in marketing) or sharing scientific breakthroughs with their potential competitors (actively blocking generic alternatives). The Green Paper does not remove the university monopoly on research funding, but it does undermine government protections for academic freedom in the name of ‘deregulation’. If private companies can become ‘universities’, then over time they will be permitted to bid for research funding.
Many of the same arguments apply to university teaching. What is at stake is the idea that a university undergraduate degree is intended to be a qualification that equips students to question received wisdom. It is not just that research should inform teaching. University students are critical learners. ‘Teaching to the test’ has had a hugely detrimental impact on secondary education. The Green Paper proposes, in however an occluded manner, to extend the same principle to higher education.

The Green Paper and the TEF
The Green Paper begins with a long section on the new proposed ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ (TEF). The TEF first emerged as a proposal circulated by HEFCE in the summer of 2015. Without any debate or discussion with staff, many institutions’ Senior Management Teams are now treating the TEF as if it is ready to be implemented and ‘gamed’.
The Green Paper treats Higher Education teaching, not as a complex process with innumerable variations afforded by disciplinary requirements, but as a commodity which can be described in terms of a small number of dimensions (metrics), and the quality of which can be measured by each university’s ‘performance’. The Green Paper mentions ‘students’ and ‘teaching’ multiple times, but nothing in the Green Paper bears any relation to educational theory.
The key mechanism of the Green Paper is an external body (the Office for Students or ‘OfS’, a HE version of ‘Ofsted’) capable of running teaching assessment of all university degrees in order to create a set of market values which can be transposed into licences to raise tuition fees. Ofsted, as the model for this approach, spent many years at war with schools and educational professionals in the secondary sector. The metrics used were changed after intense opposition from the teachers’ unions and from parents.
Colleagues from the Campaign for the Public University have produced an excellent detailed analysis of the TEF, and we strongly recommend that colleagues circulate this document for debate. The question remains: what is the point of the TEF? What is ‘broken’ and why does it need ‘fixing’?
The answer, from the Government’s point of view, is that universities are the last bastion of public-sector monopoly. The TEF proposal accompanies two other chapters of the Green Paper. [1] Part A is the TEF; Part B sets out proposals to allow private companies to set themselves up as universities (including, revealingly, protection for providers to rapidly ‘exit’ the sector, when, as with Circle in Hinchingbrooke NHS Trust, expected profit margins do not materialise). Part C dismantles the regulatory system that protects universities and their staff. The Green Paper asserts that ‘The existing regulatory framework does not provide a level playing field for new providers.’ It claims that deregulation protects ‘institutional autonomy’, but it will be at the expense of staff rights and academic freedom.

Deregulation and the threat to academic freedom
The Green Paper’s premise is that market competition with new providers will trigger a series of restructuring and closures within the University sector. Indeed, even without wholesale competition from new providers, the existing tuition fee regime is already intensifying competition for students, and thus pressure to restructure provision and its administration, and to cut part of existing educational provision.
Noting that private-sector providers are not restricted by academic Statutes or articles of incorporation but may merely be limited companies, the Green Paper’s proposal is to remove regulations that limit the ability of existing universities to cut staff and to restructure in the manner of their competitors. Even though the numbers of private-sector universities are currently very small, and their market share insignificant, the Green Paper proposes extensive deregulation that would empower Senior Management Teams to engage in market competition, and to hire and fire staff accordingly.
Kings College London used to have an Academic Statute that was so restrictive that it ultimately took six years to make one academic redundant. Abolishing that statute allowed them to embark on a series of redundancy programmes of academic staff from 2010 onwards. On the other hand, in 2012, staff at University College London campaigned against the dilution of their Academic Statute and won, a victory that was helped in part by the fact that the University governing body was required to seek Privy Council approval for their removal. The Green Paper seeks to limit the role of the Privy Council.
The Government argues that academic freedom will be ‘protected’ by its new Office for Students quango. How exactly, the OfS will carry out this function is not explained, but since the Green Paper is premised on the aim that private companies should be entitled to call themselves ‘universities’ with limited regulation, the restrictions on existing universities that prevent management interference to direct programmes of study, interfere in curricula, redirect research foci, determine which research groups will exist, and to dismiss academic staff, will rapidly face challenge in the interests of a ‘level playing field’.
Entirely absent from the perspective of the Green Paper is any consideration of the purpose and role of academic freedom. UNESCO’s Recommendation concerning the state of Higher Education Teaching Personnel, states that ‘the right to education, teaching and research can only be fully enjoyed in an atmosphere of academic freedom and autonomy for institutions of higher education and that the open communication of findings, hypotheses and opinions lies at the very heart of higher education and provides the strongest guarantee of the accuracy and objectivity of scholarship and research.’
Public preparedness to fund the university sector depends on confidence that academic independence exists, and that expert opinion is not inflected by special pleading, corporate obligations and debts, or government whims and interests. Corporate scientific scandals, from Thalidomide to Volkswagen, ultimately depend for their exposure on publicly funded, independent researchers in our universities, and the training of specialists in engineering, law, culture and the mass media both in the technical  requirements of their professions, and in the social responsibilities that these entail. Just as the struggle by junior doctors to defend their contracts is also a defence of the NHS and of patient safety, the defence of academic freedom is central to what it is that defines a university. That is the sense in which the Green Paper constitutes the announcement of a systematic assault on what the idea of a university has come to mean.

What you can do
Members of UCU Left, and many others, are currently working with members of the Campaign for the Public University and the Council for the Defence of British Universities, and with the UCU nationally, to try to create the broadest possible opposition to the Green Paper.
The plan is to encourage colleagues to engage in developing critiques of the Green Paper, to promote debate and discussion within universities and among the wider public, and to pressure institutions to mount a critical opposition to the proposals.
The formal deadline for consultation on the Green Paper is 15 January 2016.

All UCU Left supporters are urged to do four things:

  • Campaign electronically. Circulate links to the Green Paper and critiques, and encourage colleagues to consider their own view.
  • Organise on YOUR campus. Organise open union meetings to discuss the Green Paper, the TEF and the privatisation agenda, before the end of this session.
  • Seek institutional opposition. Encourage academic boards to debate and oppose the Green Paper, and debate motions about it at all College or School or Faculty board meetings. In negotiations, but also publicly, call on the management team and the governing body of your HEI formally to oppose the Green Paper.
  • Coordinate national resistance. Come to the Second Convention for Higher Education which will take place at UCL, Central London in February 2016. See http://heconvention2.wordpress.com for up-to-date information and links to critiques of the Green Paper.

 

Notes
[1] Strictly, three others. Part D on Research proposes ‘simplification’ of the REF, but appears to be mostly consequential on the other proposals.