Universities or shopping malls?

Submitted by Matthew on 20 February, 2013 - 7:13

While less well-off universities are losing thousands of applications, overall university finances are set to increase by billions: and these billions are to be spent on Vice Chancellors’ prestige projects.

Overall, 2012 saw a fall in university applications of around 28,000. This particularly affected universities like Bolton, Greenwich, Leeds Metropolitan, East London and Bradford — and especially London Met, which saw a fall of over 4,000 students.

The government’s plan to allow the fees system and intensified competition to send some universities to the wall — to experiment in failures and buy-outs — is clearly progressing.

However, overall, business is booming. The ability to charge £9,000 fees is allowing universities to increase their incomes.

Much of this new loot is being poured into projects to make the sector more competitive. To give one example, Nick Petford, vice-chancellor and CEO of the University of Northampton has published an article in which he lays out a vision of the sector going the way of professional football!

£8bn of the sector’s projected income is slated to be spent on “infrastructural” and restructuring projects before 2015. An article in the London Review of Books by NCAFC supporter Oscar Webb about the “UCL Masterplan” for redeveloping University College London gives the flavour:

“As academics and students are crammed ever closer together, commercial projects will fill the spaces they vacate. Up to ten new cafés will open, on top of the six that already exist. The masterplanners aren’t shy of talking about ‘commercial opportunities’. The campus they want looks like a shopping centre. Almost every accessible ground floor space is glass-fronted in the plan. Malet Place will be turned into a ‘teaching and learning “high street”’. Retailers will be invited to set up shop in ‘under-used areas’.”

The flip side of these glass-fronted, Premier League fantasies of Vice Chancellors is the wave of attacks on workers’ rights, such as the mass outsourcing of support jobs at Sussex University and attacks on teachers’ pay, job security and union recognition across the sector: the glittering shopfronts and “commercial opportunities” require a flexible, cheap, compliant workforce.

We need a rational organisation of the sector — based on free education and democracy, where universities are publicly-owned and managed by those who work and study in them. Fighting unity between students and workers, not the market, is the way to get the sector we need.

Furthermore, students and workers should demand that the new billions are ploughed, not into wasteful monument building but into wages and pensions, services such as nurseries and improved disability access for staff and students, affordable accommodation, and improved library services!

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