UCU Strikes, Winter 2013
Disclaimer: The following diatribe was written for my students (with the possibility of wider circulation in mind) to explain my reasons for taking part in the UCU strike action on 31st October 2013. Some of the numerical information may be incorrect, as newspapers are neither peer-reviewed or required to give full sources—I have tried to indicate where I am particularly concerned about incorrect information. This discussion describes my personal views, and makes no attempt to be balanced. Interested readers should seek out alternative points of view. It (unfortunately) does not represent the views of the University of Bath. Update Nov '13: Further strike action is being taken on 3rd December 2013, and I will be taking part again. Since the last strike, the university Vice-Chancellor's salary has been increased by £28,000 to £384,000 a year (not including non-cash benefits). For comparison, staff employed by the University at minimum wage (of which there are many) earn £6.31 per hour, which works out as £13,125 per year assuming they work 40 hours every week. (Note that in particular this means that the VC's pay increase is more than twice the annual pay of many university employees). The living wage is currently set at £7.65 per hour, or £15,912 a year under the same assumption of 40-hour weeks. Update May '14: The industrial action is now suspended after concessions by the University. The pay offer of 2% is poor, and does very little to correct the damage of the previous five years of cuts. However, a major concession that I am particularly pleased about is a (slightly confusing) commitment on living wage. Many of the university's lowest-paid staff will now be paid (at least close to) living wage; this is a significant result that would probably not have been achieved without strike action from staff.On the 31st October 2013, myself and many other teaching and administrative staff at the University of Bath are taking part in nationwide industrial action, organised by the University and College Union (UCU). You can find the announcement from the union here, and a letter of explanation from Bath UCU President Marie Morley here. The purpose of this note is to explain my reasons for taking part in the strike, primarily for the 20 or so students that I would normally teach on the day, although it may also be relevant to other people with an interest in higher education in the UK. The most important point I wish to make is that, at least for me, this is not primarily a strike about pay. It's certainly about pay to some degree—in real terms, the average teacher or administrator at a UK university has seen a pay cut of 13% over the last five years. But personally, I'm not overly concerned about my earnings. I would teach for free if I didn't need to pay the bills—it's a fantastically enjoyable profession. As things stand, I would be able to live with a small pay cut if the money was to be reinvested into providing better education to our students. However, that isn't where it's going. Instead, management pay is skyrocketing; reports by Bath Impact suggest that this year, management at the University of Bath are, on average, being awarded a 10% pay increase. (This is probably not in real terms, but even factoring in inflation it reveals a fairly extreme double standard). As a particular example, the average Vice-Chancellor now earns approximately £250,000 per year; twice the salary of the Prime Minister. (Bath's own VC is among the highest paid in the country, with earnings of £384,000 annually.) I feel quite strongly that this is a phenomenal waste of money. If we must charge students such excessive fees, the least I expect is that they are reinvested in providing education, rather than to grant extreme luxury to managers. The usual justification for these pay hikes is that they are necessary to retain talented people in high-ranking positions. This seems a somewhat flawed argument for several reasons. Firstly, I am not at all convinced that there is a great shortage of talented people willing to take up these positions, and the current pay levels should be more than sufficient to attract them. Further to this, the more extreme the benefits package, the more likely we are to end up with managers more interested in personal wealth than doing anything useful. Secondly, it is not clear to me that senior management contribute significantly in a positive way to teaching or research at the university. Indeed, their main role seems to be marketing, trying to attract more students, particularly international students who pay even higher fees, to further increase the university's income. (This wouldn't be so bad if a little more of the money raised ended up being invested in education). Moreover, if I may be allowed a moment of petulance, given that our management have just overseen the construction of two new, expensive, 350-seater lecture theatres with no proper mathematics teaching equipment (i.e. boards) in them, it doesn't appear that there is much talent worth retaining anyway. Increasingly, the pay structure at the university resembles that of a major corporation. And here lies my primary reason for supporting the industrial action; the attack on staff pay is just one symptom of a corporatisation of higher education in the UK, which should be resisted as forcefully as possible. University education is not a commodity to be traded, but a public service that should be available to anybody able to benefit from it. With this in mind, I suggest the following principle:
A university is not a business, and should be run as a not-for-profit organisation. (To be as precise as possible, "profit" does not include money spent on reasonable investment in campus facilities, but it does include excessive pay and bonuses for managers, as these are essentially "dividends for shareholders" anyway.) If the university takes in more money than it spends, the surplus should either be reinvested in education and research, or returned directly to the students as a fee rebate.Sadly, UK universities largely do not abide by this. Indeed, it is claimed by unions that the university sector in the UK now has an operating surplus of £1bn annually (this is disputed by UCEA, according to whom the actual figure is closer to £380m—this would still be a travesty). Instead of resisting the disgraceful decision by government to raise the fee cap from £3k per year to £9k per year, thus allowing them to essentially end all state funding of higher education, many university leaders, particularly those in the Russell Group, welcomed the change. This is hardly surprising; the reduction of government funding left the universities free to take on more undergraduate students, thus widening their profit margins, while investment in staff and facilities to teach the ever increasing number of students is severely lacking. As one example, funding available for graduate students, who take on a significant teaching load, is in decline, and the number of grad students is falling. At Bath, we are already struggling to find enough postgraduate tutors for certain courses, and the numbers will continue to fall unless the university uses some of its profits to compensate for withdrawal of government funding. It is extremely distressing, as somebody who is passionate about teaching, to see our students paying more and more for their education, while the standard we are able to provide is falling due to underinvestment. This kind of trend seems to be an inevitable consequence of the privatisation of public services; something similar has already happened to the UK rail network, and will probably happen to the NHS in the near future. The current outlook appears to me so bleak, that I would strongly recommend that any secondary school student looking to apply to universities (or any parent of such a student) looks seriously into opportunities to study outside the UK—many European countries have universities providing excellent education (in mathematics, often better than that in the UK) for extremely low fees, if any, with many courses given entirely in English. To end on a personal note, I'm often asked why I decided to pursue a career in academia when, with high probability, I could earn a lot more working in the finance industry. There are many reasons for this, but the one most relevant to this discussion is that by teaching students and doing scientific research, I'm providing some tangible benefit to our society. I would hate for the primary output of my time and energy to be a little extra cash for an already obscenely wealthy CEO. Sadly it seems that even academic work no longer provides an escape from this. If you made it this far, thank you for reading, and I hope this reassures you that my decision to take part in strike action is a considered one, based on moral principles rather than desire for wealth.