Neoliberal strikes for the neoliberal university!

UCU has yet again called for industrial action of academics and Administrative, Professional & Managerial (APM) staff over drastic – and unjustified – cuts to pensions, eroded pay and deteriorating working conditions. Indeed, considering the more general cost of living crisis across the UK at the moment, the situation for action has become even more pressing now than it was a year ago. On last year’s experience, however, it is also clear that striking in the traditional way of everyone out does no longer work. At Nottingham University, management sat out easily 18 days of strike. Considering that learning objectives had not been damaged and students could not, therefore, reclaim some of their tuition fees, management was very relaxed. Only the marking boycott in May 2021 brought them suddenly to the negotiating table resulting in a local agreement (see UCU Nottingham University 2022). In this guest post, Faiz Sheikh outlines what an alternative approach to industrial action in the neoliberal university could look like, potentially overcoming the shortcomings of the traditional approach.

Students are allies in UCU’s fight for decent pensions, salaries, and a just education system, as they are end users as much as collaborators of the learning process whose deteriorating learning conditions reflect Higher Education (HE) workers’ deteriorating working conditions. But students are also consumers, and consumers are the vector through which effective leverage is applied on the HE sector. HE institutions need the consumers’ money and, if withdrawn, this applies real pressure to university managers.

 

Put another way, students are victims of the HE system’s inexorable move to privatisation (£9000 a year in fees for UK students – a minimum of £18,000 of debt when finishing a 3 year undergraduate degree and an increasing need to work part-time while studying full-time!). But consumers are complicit in those same dynamics. The student wants to learn, to attend teach outs, to support UCU in improving our collective working/learning conditions. The consumer, however, wants their degree certificate, their weekly power point and lecture recording. The consumer wants the product they paid for. Consumer-students are at once players in the game of HE privatisation and resistance, and they are also the ball who can win this struggle.

 

Teachers too, are now better understood as the teacher-HE professional. The more precarious among us, especially postgraduate researchers engaged in teaching, are particularly aware of this fact. Such casualised teachers are the Uber drivers of HE, a disposable workforce given and declined work not by the vagaries of an algorithm, but by the vagaries of consumer-student numbers and the institution’s desire to deliver teaching as cheaply as possible. As teachers it is incredibly difficult to face our students and disrupt their education. As HE professionals we should feel more able to face the consumer and withhold the product, and I will outline below how this change in perspective might be affected.

 

Note that the distinction between, and hyphenation of, the consumer-student, is an analytical convenience which does not do justice to the manifold identities our students possess, wield, and are subjected to through their university education. The term consumer-student will be used none-the-less, to draw attention to the two particular dynamics of student-ally, and consumer-complicity. The combination of consumer-student highlights the inherent, though overlooked, tension in our relationship as UCU members towards our consumer-students. Exploring this tension and leveraging it will be key to effective industrial action.

 

 

What consumer-students mean to marketised HE

In the 21/22 academic year, student fees from UK and EU students accounted for approximately £10 billion of the funding for UK HE. Research council funding, meanwhile, (for which universities jump through the hoops of the Research Excellence Framework) accounted for only £4 billion. Adding international student fees to these figures will move the weighting of total university income further towards student fees.

Source: House of Commons Library 2021 briefing on HE funding

At the University of Sussex, data from 2020/21 of actual university income, including sources beyond UK government funding, still showed student fees comprising 64% of total income, at £202.7 million.

 

The funding structure of UK universities shows that successive governments have succeeded in divesting from direct public funding of HE, towards a consumer model where the ‘customer’ – the student – has purchasing power over universities. This trend is more-or-less part of a project of neoliberal economics that sees public services gutted at the expense of the marginalised and poor, in order to give freedom of choice to the privileged and wealthy.

 

This is not the same as saying that students are privileged and wealthy, they too have been subject to, and suffer from, this neoliberal dynamic. In October 2022 Sussex undergraduate students occupied a building which is to be demolished on campus, to protest the destruction of the most affordable housing available, and the construction of luxury accommodation (accommodation being a not insignificant source of income for the university). The tension here is indicative of the consumer-student identity.

Striking to what end?

When UCU strikes using picket lines for 1 working week, we have ‘shut down’ the institution, or all institutions in light of the recent breathtaking success of the national ballot. This looks good, it is a lively and solidarity building performance. But is it effective industrial action in the context of HE outlined above? I argue no.

 

Industrial action should be solidarity building. It should be accessible. It should have student support. But it must be effective. It must hurt the employer materially to be a credible threat and leverage for negotiators. To do this, we must use our leverage over the consumer, while winning the argument that doing so will benefit the student.

 

When the RMT strike for a week, that is a week of travel chaos for the railways and considerable lost income for their employers. When UCU strike for a week, students miss a class or two. Some management projects get delayed. But the university’s income is unaffected in any meaningful way. The consumer-students, who overwhelmingly fund the institution, have already paid their fees. The consumer-student will not get a rebate on fees for a few missed classes. In fact, by collecting fees and not paying staff for strike days, in the HE context, when we strike, we make the institution richer.

 

 

A new approach

So exactly how many weeks of strike action is necessary to impact the consumer-student to the extent that their purchasing power over the institution becomes a liability for the institution? In the spring term of the 2021/22 academic year, UCU called 5 weeks of strike action across both USS and Four Fights disputes. That had the potential of cancelling 5 weeks of classes if your institution was in both disputes and if your classes fell on the days of the week on which strikes were called. My class was such a class, my institution such an institution. Despite this, the University of Sussex argued that learning objectives had been met, and that students were therefore not due a partial refund of fees, despite student efforts to achieve this, notably at Goldsmiths. Universities did acknowledge that they were making money when we went on strike, and offered some amount towards student hardship funds, in lieu of fee refunds.

 

So, presumably, we need to strike for longer than 5 weeks to leverage, activate, or perhaps the word is empower, the consumer-student vector in industrial action. I think that we need to strike for an entire term to make the consumer-student a liability for the sector. By striking in such a way that consumer-students do not receive an entire term of education they can, in their capacity as consumers, demand a refund of their fees. Fees which constitute well over 50% of the sectors funding. This will materially impact the HE bosses in a way UCU has not achieved to date.

 

 

Using the regulatory framework of HE against the institution

 

How many lecturers have taught on a module not because they had knowledge of the subject, but because modules had been ‘advertised’ to students the previous year? This is the HE regulatory framework in action, forcing miserable teaching experiences on staff and students (if only they knew).

 

The Office for Students (OfS) is the independent public body set up as part of the 2017 Higher Education Act. In that Act, section 15 gives the OfS the ability to impose monetary penalties on HE institutions that breach the conditions of their registration with the body. Among these registration conditions, importantly, is Condition C1: Guidance on consumer protection law. Note how the Office for Students, has regulatory power on protecting the consumer.

Condition C1: Guidance on consumer protection law, incudes provisions for providing accurate information about courses and entering into transparent contracts with students. Condition C3: Student protection plan, includes provisions to protect students from course changes. Taken together, this is why universities are compelled to deliver courses their staff have no specialism in.

 

1.     A lecturer develops a course

2.     It is advertised and consumer-students sign up for it

3.     A contract has been entered into with the consumer-student

4.     The lecturer who developed the course leaves the institution

5.    The university is compelled to adhere to its contract with the consumer-student, and protect students from course changes

6.     A non-specialist is brought in to try and teach a topic they are not qualified – at the outset - to teach.

 

So what happens when entire modules are removed from spring term, in ways that the university cannot anticipate (it cannot know before hand who has taken industrial action and therefore which modules are affected). It will surely be in breach of its registration with the OfS. It would need to quickly and transparently explain to students how their contacts remain valid and what the institution will do to make sure student outcomes are not affected (presumably force majeure). What if consumer-students are unconvinced? Enter, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA).

 

The OIA is an independent body which reviews student complaints in England and Wales. An OIA briefing on industrial action outlines the student complaints procedure as regards to industrial action:

 

1.    OIA establishes what the HE institution promised, and what the consumer-student could reasonably expect

2.     OIA then looks at what the institution delivered

3.     Did the institution remedy any shortfall through internal complaints procedures?

4.     If the institution did not recognise or remedy a shortfall in delivery, OIA steps in to put things right for the consumer-student.

 

Note this passage on force majeure: “There is also a debate to be had about whether strike action is genuinely force majeure – that is, out of the control of the provider”. Juicy stuff.

The above is not hypothetical. Case CS052204 from May 2022 resulted in a recommended pay out of £600 to a student who complained about lost teaching due to the previous round of strikes. In this case, the institution had apparently provided alternative teaching sessions, but this complaint was upheld merely because the institution failed to communicate the availability of those alternative sessions to the consumer-student! I wonder how many of our consumer-students know about this case? How many of them complained to the OIA? How many know about their power as consumers?

 

I’ve had enough of being pushed around by the consumer-student relationship as defined in HE’s regulatory framework. I’ve had enough of UCUs transparency and democracy being used by managers to divide us. Let’s use that very same regulatory framework to force the institution to dance to the tune of the consumer-student. Let’s use that regulatory framework to force the institution into transparent plans to mitigate disruption, as they are obliged to by the OfS. Let’s use that transparency to make sure any plan fails, and that consumer-students have recourse to the OIA. Let’s make sure that consumer-student disruption can plausibly lead to material losses for the institution. The more credible the threat, the more leverage we give negotiators, and the less likely we need to use such a strategy.

 

 

How to strike for an entire term at minimal cost to our members?

 

We as members likely cannot afford to strike for an entire term. Though national and local strike funds exist and should absolutely empower us all to take action, the loss of income over such a long period, in the context of unprecedented inflation would be self defeating. But we don’t need to take prolonged action to achieve maximum disruption. Those teaching one session per week, per module, need only take 11 days of action, on teaching days, to knock out an entire module. That’s the kind of efficiency that would make a Vice Chancellor proud!

To achieve this, I am relying heavily on the model of industrial action forwarded by the likes of Nottingham and SOAS UCU branches. In such a strategy, UCU national calls for long periods of strike action, presumably covering the entire spring term. Then, local branches identify and organise a specific pattern of action for their institution. UCU national will of course call for traditional pickets as well, to build solidarity and create a public profile for the dispute. So it becomes necessary to distinguish between two types of overlapping actions: 1) picket line action, and 2) teaching targeted action. Non-teaching staff are still part of picket line action, as always, and such disruption follows its own strategy which I will not elaborate on here. Teaching targeted action, like the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB), includes teaching staff only, and like the MAB, promises big results.

 

The flexibility and unpredictability of such a strategy not only achieves the leverage I have thus far been arguing for, through the vector of the consumer-student, but is also allows us to respond to management pressure.

 

On management sanction:

Institutions where management impose salary reductions for every day teaching is not rescheduled, can respond by limiting teaching target action to only, say, finalist classes. This has maximum impact as university plans to provide alternative teaching sessions, to ‘make up’ the lost teaching, are less and less credible the closer a finalist comes to graduation. Such a strategy keeps pressure on the consumer-student, and transmits that pressure to the institution, but also allows UCU strike funds to support members for the extent of the teaching targeted action. Those members not engaged in teaching targeted action can be mobilised to donate to local or national strike funds. One of us, all of us.

 

On student solidarity:

We must work, as we have been doing, with the National Union of Students, to create broad student support for our action. But what about the many, many students who lean into their consumer identity? No amount of solidarity resolves the tension of the consumer-student. UCU and NUS cannot lift the consumer-student out of the structures of funding and regulation which I have outlined above. Teaching targeted action will activate the consumer, making them unwitting allies to our dispute as they go to the OIA in anger. Teaching targeted action gives the student ally a new way in which to enact solidarity, as they go to the OIA in support. Either way, we create leverage in our dispute with employers.

On uneven implementation:

Four words: Marking and Assessment Boycott. The MAB’s effectiveness was also dependent on uneven membership density. Some departments saw no marking take place during the MAB, other departments saw no disruption, and yet some disruption was enough to extract concessions from the management of many of the institutions who implemented an MAB last academic year. That is how effective action that targets the consumer is. So likewise, teaching targeted action need not be perfectly implemented in order to be effective. Given the aggregated ballot, things are different now, and it may well be the case that there are branches whose teaching targeted action is easily subverted by non-striking colleagues. In such cases of low UCU membership, teaching focused action is no less effective than picket line action. Recruitment campaigns during the autumn term help both types of action. And besides, having some institutions more affected than others might help sow division among VCs.

 

On student communication:

It is ‘easy’ to hide behind UCU national mandates for action. In actuality, as educators in a sector with deteriorating labour conditions, if we’re still here, we must love our students and the relationship we can form with them despite the structural constraints on that relationship. In these conditions, it is never easy to go on strike. UCU national mandates for strikes provide a buffer. “I’m sorry to strike, but my membership to the union compels me”. In teaching targeted strikes, this buffer is removed. “I’m sorry to strike, but I am choosing to do so when your classes are scheduled”. Ouch. But we can engage in teaching targeted action with our heads held high. This is a legitimate strategy because of the structures of funding and regulation in which consumer-students find themselves. These are structures that we as UCU have fought against, as allies to the NUS’s battles against fees. We can remind students of this fact, give them the tools needed (OfS and OIA) to take their grievances to the people responsible; HE managers who could avoid all of this through meaningful negotiation with the union.

 

I do not want students to suffer. But students are already suffering. Increasing numbers in rooms too small to accommodate them. Worsening staff-student ratios. Staff too burnt out to create meaningful relationships. Lecturers here one term, gone the next. Staff too overworked to give more than the most passing of thoughts to curriculum design and teaching methods. Student suffering achieves nothing but further alienate them from the institution which treats them as transient rent providing tenants.

 

Let us feel less sorry for them, and allow them to feel less sorry for themselves, by recognising the power they have as consumers. If the product they buy from HE cannot be provided due to our action, the provider of that product, our employers, are in for a rough ride.

I am advocating for neoliberal strikes for the neoliberal university.

 

In solidarity,

 

Faiz Sheikh