See the original on Worker’s Liberty website here
The universities of Winchester, Surrey, and Queen Mary are added to the list of higher education institutions claiming financial deficits leading to potential job losses and course closures. These follow a wave of proposed cuts and restructures at other universities, each claiming shortfalls due to decreases in student numbers.
The University of Winchester has claimed it has a £6 million deficit and plans to cut, amongst other things, its English language programme and make cuts to psychology, acting and various apprenticeships. So far 40 job cuts are planned. At the University of Surrey there are reports of a £10 million deficit, with staff being offered voluntary redundancies and plans to sell university assets.
Since the start of the academic year the following institutions have faced or are facing cuts:
According to university managements as well as reports from the ‘Times’ and ‘Financial Times’, these reported budget deficits are a result of a perfect storm of declining home and international student numbers. The drop in international student recruitment is put down to a number of different factors including the continued hostile environment, further visa restrictions for spouses of international students, the impacts of Brexit on EU student recruitment, and in other cases the ongoing economic crisis in Nigeria is pointed to as a compounding factor. The ‘Times’ claims there is a “looming loss of a third of overseas students”.
These factors now play an outsized and potentially defining role in higher education financing, due to the shift almost entirely away from central funding to student fees - particularly since 2011. Moreover university management in certain institutions have been overly optimistic in student numbers remaining stable or increasing and turning a blind eye to a funding system that is highly precarious. Many of the Russell Group universities have been the “winners” of this change in financing, while less prestigious institutions have suffered more by comparison.
It must also be noted that in many cases, university management will argue there is a deficit when there is not one - SOAS being a case in point. Often management will weaponise these “deficits” opportunistically to cut courses that are deemed less profitable to run.
So far individual UCU branches have been fighting their own local cuts and doing so with success. The University of Aberdeen successfully pressured management to withdraw a set of proposed cuts and redundancies after UCU members threatened six days of strike action. In many other institutions facing cuts UCU branches are beating strike thresholds and successfully balloting for industrial action and getting vital student support. However, these cuts must be seen as part of a pattern of universities responding to drops in student recruitment. As such the UCU (along with the two other major unions in HE, Unite and Unison), need a national strategy to tackle a continued wave of cuts. The National Union of Students should also be building campaign to bring back central financing for HE and free education.
Individual battles over cuts need to be supported and where possible linked up. What is most important is the struggle happening as much as possible on workers’ democratic terms: workers collectively deciding how to approach the issue and demanding employers open the books on their finances.
Struggles such as these can lay the groundwork for a unions and students to substantially overhaul the university funding system - make it centrally funded by taxing the rich, free for all, with living grants for all.