Presentation slides for students
What is happening?
Many universities, including Newcastle university, have begun a process of voluntary redundancy and threats of job cuts. This has been blamed on the lack of international students coming in from abroad who are paying international fees.
Newcastle University is currently facing a budget shortfall of £35 million. The proposed solution from the University Executive is the current voluntary redundancy process and following that as many as 300 job cuts across all departments in the university.
The reason for the short fall is that international student recruitment was lower than predicted by the University Executive. Teaching and research at UK universities is subsidised by high international tuition fees. This is an unsustainable way to fund universities, but it is a strategy university leaders across the country have pursued. University leaders were warned that predicting ever increasing numbers of international students was unrealistic.
Because of this incorrect presumption of continuous growth in international student numbers, the university faces a shortfall from the predicted income. It is staff who are being made to pay the cost of the failed strategy of the universty executive.
Crisis in Higher Education
Across the country today, there is a crisis in higher education (HE). Many higher education institutions are facing budget shortfalls. The new Labour government has increased tuition fees for home students.
But no amount of tuition hikes will be able to fix this problem and the current plans of redundancy will begin a death spiral for higher education, if implemented nationally and equally so at the local level. The current plan of cuts without strategy will result in overworking the already overworked staff who remain. As a result, staff will not be able to offer a quality education or conduct quality research. If the planned cuts go ahead then future students will be paying more for a worse service. This is not even to mention the effect this will have on the physical and mental health of staff, both remaining and redundant. Remaining staff will be worked to the bone, contributing to a crisis of health as a result of stress, and staff made redundant will have to face unemployment in a vastly curtailed HE sector. This spiral will continue with wave of redundancies after wave of redundancies and deteriorating quality until we, staff, students and members of the public alike, can bring it to an end and rebuild from there.
This is a crisis years in the making and will not be healed overnight. However, if we act now, we can halt the spiral of decline. The current funding crisis represents an existential crisis for higher education as we know it.
Why Strike?
A strike is an action of last resort for workers. It means going unpaid and a massive disruption to the regular life of the striker and the people who rely on that striker when at work. In the current climate, university staff have decided that this is worth it. The scale of the crisis cannot be overstated. University staff have made the decision to strike because they are defending their livelihoods and because all else has failed. Particularly at Newcastle University, the Executive Board (UEB) have shown a markedly authoritarian hand, forcing changes to the student charter without consulting the Student Union and ploughing recklessly ahead with voluntary redundancies. This is an existential crisis for HE and must be met with proportionate action. University staff have decided that withholding their labour is a sufficient response to the current crisis and to the way their livelihoods are being treated as mere numbers on a spreadsheet. The UEB have euphemistically referred to redundancies as ‘Work-force resizing’. This is not that, it is an attack on the livelihood of university staff who are already under pressure of casualisation and previously attacks to pensions.
It cannot be said for certain what a strike will mean for the person reading this specifically but it will likely mean your lecturers do not come to their regularly scheduled teaching hours. Mental health counselling sessions could be cancelled, as professional services are in the sights of the UEB’s ‘cost-cutting’ measures. Seminars and labs will likely not go ahead as well, if the member of staff in charge has decided to strike. It is also worth noting that many members of staff cannot afford to strike and as such there will be some inconsistency in whether teaching hours go ahead.
A strike is a protest like any other and aims to disrupt business as usual by workers withholding their vital labour. A strike is proof that without staff and students all the UEB have are a collection of nice buildings.
What can you do?
There are many things you can do, you can sign the petition to the UEB, the open letter to Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson or write to Chris Day, the Vice-Chancellor, personally at this email address: chris.day@ncl.ac.uk. We ask you to copy in all members of the University Executive Board when sending this letter:
stephanie.glendinning@newcastle.ac.uk
Jane.Robinson@newcastle.ac.uk;
Colin.Campbell@newcastle.ac.uk
jacqueline.scott@newcastle.ac.uk
Nigel.Harkness@newcastle.ac.uk
Ruth.Valentine@newcastle.ac.uk
Matthew.Grenby@newcastle.ac.uk
You can come support staff on the picket line and you can talk to any and all members of staff who might be taking strike action, it is a difficult choice to make to choose to strike and any words of support you can offer will be appreciated.
The most important thing you can do is remember that the university is yours, staff and students can continue on fine without Chris Day and the UEB but they haven’t much without us.