SURELY only the most pig-headed management wonk would argue that This College Would Work A Lot Better If There Weren’t Any Students. Unfortunately, if the AUT/NATFHE strike of Tuesday 7 March is anything to go by, lecturers may have reason to agree. With friends like UCL students, they don’t need the Provost. Their ignorance, apathy and antipathy, demonstrated by Pi Magazine and the Union Executive, is unremarkable but saddening. Just how saddening for some is explained below.
Here, then, are a few facts that have escaped the attention of the average UCL student, for one reason or another.
Lies, Damn Lies and Rayhan Haque
Student reactions to the strike mostly fall neatly into three categories: misinformed, unaware or uninterested. Sometimes all three. Where do you start? The discussions that unfolded during Debating Society’s meet on February 27th (“This House would support the Lecturers’ Strike”) almost perfectly illustrated the lack of knowledge students had at UCL with regard as to why the strike was occurring – and the sheer stupidity of some in thinking about it. Homophobic Pi columnist Rayhan Haque (p.8) and Yair Zivan suggested that it was convenient for the strike to occur now, as lecturers wanted to avoid the more mundane aspects of the job, i.e. the marking and setting of exams. Equally interesting was the postulate that lecturers were just being opportunistic, and if higher pay was awarded this time round, the AUT would support raising the cap on top-up fees in the future (despite the AUT’s opposition to top-up fees when they were brought in). Oh, and Rayhan said lecturers had an easy life: “They can take a toliet break whenever they fancy”. Bang goes our average IQ then.
On the slightest examination, these pathetic arguments fall apart. First of all, why is the strike happening? The strike is over pay. University bosses have not made unions an offer. They asked them to call off the strike and said they’d make them an offer later this month. Why not make the offer now? So they can push back the threat of action until after exam time, when it’ll be worthless. As for being lazy, we asked some lecturers. History of Art department staff are all AUT affiliated. In response to the comments arising from the debate, HoA exams chair Frederick Schwartz feels the situation is “terrible. Our primary loyalty is to the students. That’s why we’re here.” He explains that by withholding labour now, they are increasing the workload upon themselves. “Certain procedures have to be followed, exams have to be marked and deadlines have to be set”. Schwartz emphasises that the strike is convenient for neither teacher nor student. This is backed up by HoA’s deputy head of department, Prof. Andrew Hemingway, who describes Rayhan and Yair’s arguments as “nonsense” – “Now let’s say that the action is settled and the exams go ahead as they’re billed to do. Then the staff will have to mark the backlog of essays which they’ve not done in a much shorter period of time; it’ll be much harder for them. So the idea that we’re somehow being lazy by not doing it is nonsense, right?” The only vaguely informed point raised, it seems, was by Natasha Davies, who pointed out that the strike could potentially affect the mental health of students. Perhaps the most ill-thought out comment came from the floor that evening, implying that lecturers did not deserve better pay as they knew what the wages were like in the academic sector before embarking on teaching careers. The point was they could have become stockbrokers or bankers like all good UCL students, but instead willingly accepted poorer conditions so they should just make the best of a bad situation. Even though these buttock-clenchingly ill-informed views were contested by London Student’s Patrick Ward and Cha-minda Jayanetti, the outcome of the debate was 25 against the AUT strike and 15 in favour.
“We weren’t invited,” AUT branch secretary Sean Wallis told The Cheese Grater: “nobody contacted us for a speaker, nobody asked us about the facts, nobody did a modicum of research... However because we are a union that believes in academic freedom, we don’t mind students talking utter rot.”
Media and Communication
But hold on! Why are students so ill-informed in the first place? A series of quick interviews we conducted during last Tuesday’s strike proved revealing. Many students that talked to us, particularly those in science disciplines, assumed the strike action would not affect them as their teachers were unaffiliated, ignorant of the general disarray the exam marking situation is in if the dispute is not settled. Views such as “if we get to miss lectures, I’ll happily strike” and “exams are in a month’s time so I don’t think it will affect us... we don’t need to worry about it” perhaps indicate an underlying problem which pertains more to dis-information than misinformation. Few students were notified sufficiently in advance through official channels, such as departmental emails. Most students became aware of the strike through word of mouth, national press or even whispers on the Tube. Where was the information from the Union? Education and Welfare Officer Maz Young only sent an email to all students the day before the strike, which arrived shortly before midnight the night before. The Union website only carried a notice from the day before (6 March) also. This despite the AUT and NAT-FHE having told College there would be a strike in February. In response, Young said that an illness prevented the website from being updated, and that she sought to meet with union reps before putting out a statement. When this couldn’t happen, she finally put one out. That much the AUT accepts. Sean Wallis says he had been trying to contact Young: “She replied yesterday,” he said on the day of the strike, “saying ‘I’ve got some dates for meetings’.” Meetings after the strike??? After insisting he wasn’t trying to attack her, he commented: “It clearly is silly if students and the Union are not very well organised or not very proactive about issues like this and it is their responsibility to get more proactive and get more organised.” Why didn’t Young put out a statement before trying to meet them, at lest saying there was going to be a strike? Some students we spoke to didn’t even know on Tuesday! In short, the Union Executive, and Maz Young in particular, has failed miserably in its raison d’être: representing students, and informing them as part of that. But many departments must share the blame for not passing on news of the strike to their students, as the Union asked heads of department to do.
When Union Exec did condescend to inform the students, they said they could not support the strike as it was “so disruptive and harmful to students”, despite recognising and therefore accepting that “lecturers nationwide are underpaid compared to other professions”. Some members of Exec disagreed (see ‘Down Your Union’, p.3). Now, the Union’s position was discussed at Union Council a few days earlier, and even some of those against supporting the strikes thought the Union’s statement unsatisfactory. Read it: it’s just pusillanimous, a ‘sit-on-the-fence’ statement as one council member said.
HoA exams chair Dr Frederick Schwartz was amazed and visibly saddened to hear that UCLU could not support the strike action, especially when the AUT supports them on not raising the cap on top-up fees with regard to Coalition 2010 (see www.coalition2010.org).
London Student was one source of information students had access to in the weeks before strike took place, publishing news about the proposed AUT action a fortnight previously on February 20th. Had the paper been properly distributed at UCLU, perhaps UCL students would have had a better opportunity to form educated views on a matter that not only affects them deeply, but the future prospects of HE and work in the academic sector at large.
We won’t mention the Pi article much, except to note that (a) it was apparently written in someone’s lunch hour and (b) it borrows its title – ‘Lecturer’s Strike Unfairly Affects Students Across The Board’, curiously followed by a full stop – from a quotation of the Provost’s that is essentially meaningless, namely that the strike affects universities of diverse kinds. Well, duh. The strike is a national strike because pay bargaining is done between unions and the Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association (UCEA). If national pay bargaining was broken up, and university bosses could negotiate pay with their own staff, the power of lecturers’ unions would be destroyed. “The UCEA,” commented Andrew Hemingway, “would like to have a situation where the unions were seriously weakened and for a long time they’ve been trying to break down national pay bargaining agreements, and that would be a way of dividing university teachers across the country and make it very hard to achieve the kinds of standards we have now”. per-cutiam pastorem et dispergentur oves: I will strike the shepherd, they say, and the sheep will be scattered*.
Forward Into the Abyss
The Provost’s line is as follows: we can’t afford to raise salaries across the board; wages have gone up this year, an added spend of £9 million. Contrary to what Pi thinks, this is not enough. Lecturers’ pay has increased at 3%, behind comparable jobs and barely above inflation, for a decade, while the cost of living and workloads have gone up – classes increasing from an average of 9 30 years ago to an average of 21. UCEA insist that there is not money to give lecturers the pay they want. Where did it go? Then higher education minister Alan Johnson said in 2004 that university bosses had decided a third of the money from top-up fees would go on lectures’ pay. Johnson’s emollient ways got the bill passed. “Now,” says Andrew Hemingway, “they seem to be telling us they don’t have the money for that.” The other problem with the Provost is his plan to sack one teacher in 7. Suppose the union-affiliated staff are removed: who will protect lecturers’ pay then?
Perhaps the most worrying thing is that students are unaware of the brave new university world being silently built around them. A world where vice-chancellors (and Provosts) get paid like CEOs; staff do as they’re told for whatever they can get, and research triumphs at the expense of teaching. The Cheese Grater asks students, if they won’t do something to oppose this, at least to turn off the lights when the last person leaves UCL as we know it.
*Mark 14:27