Lecturers’ strike
We had a national lecturers’ strike here yesterday, part of a campaign by the AUT and NATFHE unions (which will soon be amalgamating to form the University and Colleges Union) to improve pay and conditions for lecturers at British universities, which have been declining for the last 20 years or so. I must admit that I took the lazy option and stayed at home rather than come into SOAS to show my support for the strikers, so I don’t know first hand how well things went here. According to a report on the AUT website though, support from us SOAS students was ’solid’. The latest Socialist Worker also has reports from picket lines aroung the country.
It seems symptomatic of the somewhat downtrodden position of lecturers these days that this strike was barely reported at all in any of the mainstream media, despite it being a national strike that apparently affected some 1 million students. John Sutherland writes in the Guardian’s education supplement on this theme, providing an informative history of the decline of lecturers’ status and pay as well as the gradual but growing businessification of UK universities. It’s an object lesson in a particular sort of neoliberalisation:
Insecurity was factored into the profession and with it docility. The whole university system, under Tory ministers such as Keith Joseph, was weakened by cut and freeze. It was “brought to heel”, throttled by government purse strings. The new externally imposed discipline was institutionalised by the inspectorial regime - standards, via the research assessment exercises, the Teaching and Qualifications Authority -introduced in the 1990s and administered by bodies wholly outside the campus whose primary responsibility was to the government of the day, not the academy. This has now reached the point of low-grade, perpetual, tyranny.
The final split came in with tuition fees. Henceforth, academics were no longer teachers, but service providers. They did not “give” classes, tutorials, or seminars. They were vendors selling a product. And beneath them was a restless, surly, ever-growing underclass of short-term, “adjunct teachers” underselling them. And, of course, in the eyes of the accountant offering better value for money…
The administration is remote, stern, unfeeling and, for the most part, unknown. It may not be friendly.
His conclusion is very depressing - that lecturers basically now lack the muscle to improve their lot or reverse the tide of commercialisation, fragmentation etc - but perhaps it doesn’t take into account the fact that lecturers have actually won a few disputes recently such as last year’s pay dispute and the recent library dispute at SOAS which was won just on the threat of all-out action. Now that universities are charging fees (soon to get a lot bigger) the pressure from students to avoid strikes is going to be bigger. I think the responsibility for students is to ensure that that pressure falls squarely on the university managements and the government who have been treating lecturers so badly for so long.
