The Senate House occupation: why you should care
Last Friday afternoon, a group of around twenty Warwick students occupied the University Council Chamber in protest against the privatization of the university. They have since released a manifesto outlining the reasons for the occupation, and launched an online campaign to publicize their aims and objectives.
Before shrugging your shoulders, or dismissing the protest as an ill-conceived publicity stunt enacted by a small group of left-wing activists, take a moment to consider exactly what it is they are fighting for.
The headline point, as many of you will be aware, is Vice Chancellor Nigel Thrift’s pay increase. If you believe his £42,000 rise to be justified, please stop reading. I will not waste words explaining why the sum of £316,000 (one of the highest VC salaries in the country) is ludicrous. Suffice to say that in an era of pay-freezes, fee-increases and savage budget cuts, awarding a single employee over three hundred thousand pounds almost constitutes a criminal offence.
Instead I shall assume that, like majority of Warwick staff and students, you believe Thrift’s pay rise to be patently unfair. But recognizing unfairness and confronting it are two very different things. We know Thrift is overpaid. We know our cleaners don’t earn enough. But why protest? What is that going to achieve? Cleaners are not suddenly going to start earning three hundred thousand pounds a year. Thrift is not going to decide to donate his inexplicably huge salary to charity in order to appease the protesters (though he has pledged to match donations to the Against Malaria Foundation – there is a strange irony in the Vice Chancellor pledging his support for an organization that protects the weak and vulnerable from rapacious, blood-sucking parasites).
Photo: Michael Allen
Before becoming embroiled in an analysis of the aims of the occupation, it is worth identifying the causes. It should be pointed out that the protest is not just about Thrift. His pay rise is merely a symptom, a part of the problem, not the problem itself. The underlying issue here is social inequality. The chasm between rich and poor is slowly widening. The privatization of higher education increases this gap by elevating a university education from ‘a public good to a private investment, accessible only to the few.’
We have already seen fees rise to £9,000 per year. Russell Group universities are currently lobbying the government to remove the fee cap. Despite all the talk of bursaries and scholarships, the reality is that fewer and fewer people from poorer backgrounds will go to university. It is this economic apartheid, this discrimination on the basis of bank balance, this segregation of society according to parental income rather than intellectual capacity, that the protesters are standing against.
[pullquote style=”left” quote=”dark”]But university is not Butlins. I do not want to ‘rate my stay’.[/pullquote]
The fee rise goes hand-in-hand with the marketisation of education. Students are becoming increasingly concerned about whether they are getting ‘value for money’. Universities are becoming obsessed with the ‘student experience’, painfully ascribing an economic value to each and every aspect of university life. The student is now a customer, a consumer of this pre-packaged product we call education. The university constantly strives for complete customer satisfaction, and requests regular feedback to see how it can improve performance. But university is not Butlins. I do not want to ‘rate my stay’. I do not want to condense three year of my life to a generic one-word answer in a survey that doubles as a mental anaesthetic. Incessant marketisation, and rigid adherence to market logic threatens the very rocks of free thought and academic exploration on which the public university is built. It is this reduction of university education to a mere transaction, this commodification of knowledge, that the protesters are standing against.
Issues such as those outlined above are not minor, abstract or inconsequential. They are on the frontline of the debate surrounding higher education policy in the UK. If we, as a student body, continue to turn the other cheek as our public education system is dismantled, all we shall receive is another slap. Do not be fooled by the incremental nature of the changes. Do not follow the script the government have written, in which every policy tweak and twist is isolated, and therefore unworthy of resistance. Consider the bigger picture. Public higher education is being completely restructured, one block at a time. If we roll over and do nothing, soon it will be too late. The debate will have moved to another plane, where the stakes will be considerably higher. We must act now.
The protesters are taking a stand. They have opted to take matters into their own hands, to voice their concerns and open a dialogue about the future of the public university. Listen to what they have to say. Get involved in the discussion. Pledge your support. To remain silent, or to deride their protest as an attention-seeking ego-trip is to ignore what they are fighting for. Because the protest is not about them. It is about your public higher education system. It is about your university. It is up to you to show some solidarity.
Comments (6)
If you look at the new tuition fees as a graduate tax (which you don’t pay till you earn over £21k anyway) it doesn’t seem too bad. I fail to see how ‘poorer’ individuals are worse off.
The issue is not just the cost of education now, it is the direction the cost of education is going in, with the current university fees being the first step towards this. The consequences of moving in this direction are a widening between the rich and the poor, and ultimately a re-branding of education to a resource or commodity, rather than an intrinsic good and the development of human knowledge. Did you even read the article!?
Well I read the article and I find it ludicrous that they can make assumptions like “the vast majority” of students find the pay rise excessive. I don’t. Many of my friends don’t. And many more really don’t give a damn about a pay rise that would just about cover one 3 year bachelors, all they care about is getting a 2.1 from a decent uni to get a job. Illegally occupying private property indefinately is, frankly, a childish and immature way of expressing your opinions.
And this is coming from a kid from a “poor” background, receiving a bursary, before I get accused of middle class privilege.
Very well done on the bursary, but your background isn’t relevant to this discussion. Whether you are rich or poor you have a right to an opinion and a say on the governance of your university and your country, and no particular life experience is going to better prepare you to consider whether a policy is logical or just or give you a greater right to express your view. In a market we only have a say in those things we directly invest in as private individuals; we do not live in a market. We live in a civil society, and we are empowered and obligated to care about all of the members of that society regardless of our own particular situation. This is what citizenship is.
Its worth asking yourself why you and your friends feel the VC’s pay rise is acceptable. If it is because you have specific views about the remuneration of individuals working in public institutions then don’t be afraid to present them to us, I’m sure the readers here are all reasonable people, and I imagine many will agree with you, and if you can convince the rest of us that you are right then you’re doing us a considerable service in disabusing us of our mistaken beliefs. Conversely, perhaps in discussing your views we might lead you and your friends to think that there really is something here that you should be very angry and worried about. Have the courage of your convictions and lets see where we end up.
If, on the other hand, you and your friends have no particular views beyond the claim that this really isn’t something that’s worth thinking about, then I think the childishness and immaturity that you attribute to those who are pushing for a public debate would actually be yours. We are spending your money on the VC. This is a massive inequality that is being advocated in your university. This money is being used to remunerate a man who is advocating the raising of the fee cap for people just like you. This is a university that is backing lobbying to remove bursaries of the kind you say you are currently benefiting from. And all of this is being visited on a society that you belong to and have obligations towards.
I like to think you’ve written your post out of conviction. I like to have confidence that my colleagues at this university aren’t so vacuous as to call people immature and childish for pushing everyone to urgently consider something that is arguably of extreme importance to themselves, those they care about, and the society they belong to.
I look forward to reading your arguments, but I’d like to ask you some questions in the mean time: You say ‘many […] really don’t give a damn about a payrise that would just about cover one 3 year bachelors.’
1. Does a bachelors degree really seem so very cheap to you?
2. £42,000 is a lot of money, and as you rightly point out, this is almost exactly the amount that you and your peers will be spending a significant part of your lives paying back, does it really seem right that from now on the VC will be getting that amount on top of his previous salary each and every year that he stays in post? After all, you’re paying for part of it.
3. Does it not bother you at all that, although he will have accrued three times the current cost of a degree in the time it takes students joining this year to graduate, the VC is himself supporting calls to raise fees and slash bursaries?
4. Does it matter to you that while the university is giving this huge increase to the already very well paid VC it is simultaneously, freezing and cutting pay for the staff that you encounter everyday and that your degree depends on?
One of the speakers at the teach-in had a rather pertinent point on this issue that those who received their education before 1998 will pay a maximum income tax of 45% on any pay over £150,000 whereas those students starting now will face a tax rate of 49% on income over £32,000. This is, as the author so elegantly puts it, economic apartheid.
This is without talking about the benefits that come to those rich enough to pay for their student fees up front and avoid all interest payments.
The ‘tax’ analogy fails for several reasons:
1. The vast majority of graduates in this country will not be paying it. Indeed those who started their courses before 1998 will pay nothing, this is not a form of taxation based on whether you have benefited from the country’s higher education system, it is a heavy penalty imposed on the current generation of graduates, and one that is made all the more disgusting by the fact that it is being imposed by graduates who got their education for free.
2. Taxes enrich the public purse, the new fee regime substantially impoverishes it. The coalition argued for students financing their own educations on the grounds that the previous system was costing the tax payer £3bn a year. We are now borrowing £12bn a year to pay up front for the educations that students will putatively be repaying across the course of their working lives. The £12bn is a higher figure than the government expected because they naively assumed the majority of institutions would choose not to charge the higher fee rate of £9k, which almost all of them have. The same optimistic government now predicts a 32% default rate on said loans, which will ultimately leave £450bn worth of debt for the tax payer to cover. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts we won’t begin to break even until 2032, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills reckons it won’t be before 2040. In the mean time we are paying more as a country than we ever have before and our national debt is suffering a significant set back.
3. Taxes are paid to the state, but the government has already sold a large proportion of its old style student loans to banks (at a loss) and is being lobbied day and night to do the same with the new fee packages.
Poorer students (and I don’t use your inverted commas here, poverty is real and growing in the UK) are worse off for the same reason that the vast majority of new students are, i.e. because they are being subjected to a fee and loan structure that is unjust and wrong headed in itself, and which (and you should be very very afraid and angry about this) is not underwritten by the Consumer Credit Act. Those with families rich enough to pay their fees and living expenses up front are shielded from the immediate evils of this intergenerational assault, but they too are being exploited by the things that I mention above. We are all getting screwed here so a government can satisfy its ideological needs and banks can get back into the business of trading in government sponsored debts.
So ask yourself, what tax is selectively applied to a group on the basis of their age rather than their income? What tax drains the public purse rather than enriching it? What tax is paid to the financial sector rather than the state? This isn’t citizenship, its exploitation.
(All of the figures above are taken from the Intergenerational Foundation’s ‘False accounting? Why the government’s higher education reforms don’t add up’ which can be found here http://www.if.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/False-Accounting_-Why-Higher-Education-Reforms-dont-add-up.pdf )