By Taisie Tsikas, Postgraduate Student, UCL (photo credit Steve Eason)
Students’ interests are not at odds with the interests of staff. This should be evident for the prosaic reason that many students undertake work for their universities or intend to work in academia beyond their degrees. Moreover, university staff’s working conditions are students’ learning conditions – staff operating under flexibilised and atomised conditions are unlikely to be able to provide an enriching education to their students. Despite this, many student unions have equivocated on support for the strike on the basis that students are being short-changed. While bands of student activists have been proactive in having motions passed in their SUs, putting pressure on management through occupations and encouraging other students to respect the picket line, many students have been reluctant to support the strike in practice, despite being supposedly sympathetic to its aims.
Thousands of students have signed petitions demanding refunds for missed teaching hours. Their case presupposes that the ever-increasing fees imposed by the government are a reflection of the value of education. Did lectures suddenly triple in value when the fee threshold increased from £3k to £9k? Did they have no value when there were no tuition fees? The reality is that student debt is an exercise in value extraction and social control. It embeds the notion that students are investors who should pursue “value for money” and assess their course in terms of their future employability and earnings. Demanding refunds may momentarily increase the pressure on university management, but it reproduces the spirit of the government’s ideological assault on education.
What do we mean when we say the university is a factory? The slogan is not merely an accusation that the neoliberal university operates impersonally or callously, churning out identikit graduates. Neither is it a celebration of the fact that the university is a boon to the productive economy. Rather, it critically situates universities and the labour that goes on in them in relation to accumulation under capitalism. The university does not produce commodities; it produces workers, both ideologically and materially. Student debt, casualisation, the Prevent Agenda and UUK’s attack on pensions – and the resistance to them – are all part of the contestation of the nature of the university under capitalism. Students and staff can find common cause in this struggle for democratic control of education.
