Dear subscribers,
Strikes are yet again upon us! We hope you all enjoy these two strike days - whether you are picketing, relaxing, spending time with your loved ones, or (like us) organising politically. Claiming back our time is an important act of resistance.
Today we want to talk to you about Student Number Controls. Our member Vivek Thuppil, running for Migrant Rep (non-EU), has made a video (above) which explains the problem. It is one which affects his institution, Bangor University, in beautiful north Wales. At institutions like Bangor, courses often do not recruit enough, and therefore staff are under constant threat of redundancies and cuts. On the other side, those of us who teach at large (mainly Russell Group) institutions are overwhelmed with workload, students are crammed into lecture theatres (with some not even in the same room as their lecturers, who are streamed to them from elsewhere), and university staff do not have adequate time and space to dedicate to students. This usually means they work far beyond their contracted hours in an effort to dedicate as much time as possible to students anyway. Other staff are employed on fixed-term contracts ‘to cover temporary increases in student numbers’ that are in fact rooted in this structural crisis. This is something Tilly Fitzmaurice (running for HE casualised rep) has also mentioned elsewhere. Of course, the issue of uneven student distribution puts huge pressure on professional services colleagues as well. Our candidates for UK-wide PS reps Francis Clarke and Caroline Proctor both work at the sorts of large Russell Group institutions that overrecruit on a yearly basis. Elsewhere, candidate for Vice President Emma Battell-Lowman has spoken of her own heartbreaking experience of being made redundant from an open-ended contract at a post-92 institution, followed by a period of precarity at a pre-92 university. This is everyone’s problem - whatever role they work in, and for nearly all of our members. We say nearly all, because Becca Harrison at the Open University, standing for South and UK-wide HE rep, works in an institution which is responsive to student demand, and doesn’t have any centrally-set limits on how many students it can accept, but because its student numbers tend to change gradually and in predictable directions, it can plan for the long term. This made it easier for its branch to decasualise its teaching staff. Structurally, the Open University is an outlier, and its existence is not an argument for uncontrolled student numbers generally.
The neoliberal governance of universities is a problem for us staff, and some Vice-Chancellors also acknowledge the issues it creates, but most are ambivalent about it, and the UK government does not care at all. “The market” in education is working as the Tories intended: it forces HEIs to compete with one another and to behave in nearsighted and short-term ways. One day, perhaps soon, it will attain one of its key aims: driving a UK HEI out of business in order to frighten the rest into contorting themselves into a shape that pleases banks and plutocrats and supposedly attracts “consumer” students. Neoliberalism is the problem. Student number controls are the solution until we defeat neoliberalism altogether.
Bijan Parsia, running for re-election on NEC as Disabled Rep, has already blogged on this topic. And, in May 2022, members of UCU Commons who sat on UCU’s HEC finally got a motion to investigate student number controls passed on its fourth attempt. This was moved by Ruth Holliday (whose term has now sadly ended) from the University of Leeds - a large Russell Group institution. It was seconded by Chris O’Donnell (running for re-election to NEC as post-92 rep and in two UCU Scotland seats) from the University of the West of Scotland - a post-92 university. Passing this motion won’t magic the problem away, of course, but what it will do is allow research staff at UCU to gather data which we can use to face the problem head-on. Another version of this motion was first moved in early 2020, before UCU Commons even existed, by Mark Pendleton (running for LGBT+ rep) and David Harvie (running for Honorary Treasurer), who were then on HEC. It was authored by Mark and Dave Hitchcock, who are now UCU Commons members, and Leon Rocha, who has since left the sector. However, the motion fell. We’d hoped for more support but NEC members from a surprising variety of factions opposed it. So instead it fell, or fell off the agenda, on two more occasions.
UCU Commons candidates are committed to ending this gross imbalance which leaves none of us better off - apart from VCs and managers. Please, if you care about this topic - vote for our candidates, and encourage others to. We can do this - together.
In solidarity,
UCU Commons
