Universities are at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19, this manifesto protects them post lockdown

Our higher education system was in crisis before the coronavirus emerged. It now risks collapse.

Before the pandemic, a quarter of all universities were already in deficit – the result of unregulated competition in the sector that was unleashed in order to construct a higher education market. This has led to increased instability, far higher levels of government and student debt following the trebling of fees and introduction of loans in 2012, and the emergence of a corporate mentality and market logic that puts higher education at odds with its status as a public good. As the Public Affairs Committee put it in 2018, the ‘Higher Education market [is] not working in interests of students or taxpayers’.

Universities have been effectively privatised – dependent on tuition fees and accommodation revenue and, increasingly, reliant on income from international students.

The UK comes bottom of OECD countries in relation to the proportion of public spending as part of overall spending on tertiary education. Only 25% of its spending on higher education comes from the public purse, a mere 0.5% of GDP. Compare this to the US where 35% of spending on tertiary education comes from the government or 97% as in the case of Finland.

Covid-19 is going to intensify the problems that were already there. International – and possibly home – students are likely to sit out the year leading to a ‘black hole’ of at least £2.5 billion in the sector producing enormous operating deficits and heaping yet more stress on an already creaking system.

Yet much like the pandemic itself, we are not all in this together. Universities are ‘hoarding’ some £44 billion of reserves, with Oxford and Cambridge alone sitting on almost £21 billion of wealth, and the sector as a whole regularly runs a surplus over more than £1 billion.

Management teams are now drawing up contingency plans and recovery packages and are set to announce mass redundancies, pay and recruitment freezes, promotion pauses, and programme cuts. Again, as with the pandemic, the axe will not fall evenly with casualised workers, BME staff, and women set to bear the greatest brunt of the cuts.

Many employers will attempt to take advantage of the pandemic to institutionalise a form of ‘shock higher education’ where online delivery becomes standard, where surveillance becomes routine, where precarity becomes acceptable, where the right to a pension becomes obsolete and where funding becomes ever more tied to employability.

Our response has to be national and local, short-term and far-sighted, practical and visionary. We need a set of actions based around solidarity with the most vulnerable and a commitment that the burden should be borne by those most able to bear it: institutional reserves should be used; excessive salaries of vice-chancellors and senior staff cut dramatically; vanity capital expenditure projects suspended; marketing budgets and the use of consultants scaled right back; government intervention as described below.

We will need to resist the imposition of a ‘new normal’. In the immediate future, we need to collectivise the risk of redundancy by demanding that instead of job cuts, we have smaller classes; instead of sacking hourly-paid staff, we should make sure that excessive salaries are curbed and the money used for contract extensions for casualised staff; instead of scrapping research leave for the year, we should use this time to investigate the political, economic and cultural challenges posed by coronavirus.

Higher education is at the centre of the scientific and critical response to Covid-19. It is not just another industry like aviation and energy. Instead, it needs a full bail-out and a massive increase in public funding. We have to reject a return to the ‘old normal’ of cut-throat competition, market logic, endless bureaucracy, and rampant managerialism.

Thus we also need to build a radical new settlement for the period following Covid-19. The scale of this crisis provides an opportunity to undo the damage that the market has caused in the last decade: to restore free education accessible to all as a vital public good; to reintroduce incentives, like the Education Maintenance Allowance, for marginalised communities to study; to restructure higher education so that it is no longer dependent on casualised and zero-hours contracts; and to abolish the gender and race pay gaps that remain endemic throughout the sector.

Higher education is on the brink. This is a time for imagination, solidarity, and resistance. 

THE MANIFESTO

DEMANDS ON GOVERNMENT

• A full and immediate bailout of the higher education sector to compensate for revenue lost as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

• Immediate introduction of an institutional (not overall) cap on student recruitment for 2020/21 that is based on a fair distribution of students across the sector and that will protect more vulnerable universities.

• Set a target to increase the proportion of UK public expenditure devoted to higher education from 0.5% of GDP to at least 0.9%, the OECD average.

• Restoration of maintenance grants and the abolition of fees to be paid for through an increase in corporation tax and an increase to the top level of income tax.

• Scrapping of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) to be replaced by a new means of evaluating research based on respect for the ability of individuals and groups to define their research aims and priorities.

• Scrapping of the National Student Survey (NSS), Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and other examples of audit culture that perpetuate cultures of ‘customer satisfaction’ and quality control, to be replaced by forms of feedback that encourage meaningful reflection on teaching and learning.

• An end to UK Visa and Immigration (UKVI) monitoring of the attendance of international students and the scrapping of the Prevent programme.

DEMANDS ON UNIVERSITIES

• Immediate salary reduction of vice-chancellors and senior management in order to provide continuing employment for fixed-term and hourly-paid workers to 2022.

• To safeguard jobs as a matter of priority by drawing, where necessary, on reserves, loans, salary savings (as above) and cuts to non-essential budgets.

• Full transparency in relation to financial data to allow for maximum, informed staff participation in recovery plans: open up your books.

• No re-opening of campuses until it is fully safe to do so with evidence of plans for effective social distancing, extensive testing, and contact tracing together with full provision of PPE.

• Health and safety committee meetings to take place at least once a month – with minutes available to all – for a minimum of 12 months.

• Urgent changes to governance structures to allow for staff and student participation in decision-making.

• Agree to hold regular campus assemblies as part of the formal decision-making structure of the institution.

• Commitment to devise strategic plans in meaningful consultation with campus unions; a consultation cannot start after the plan has been generated.

• Act as community hubs by offering fee waivers to people made unemployed by the Covid-19 crisis and devising new academic programmes that respond to specific community needs.

• Immediate suspension of capital projects and outsourcing plans for a minimum of 12 months and a commitment to end all outsourcing of staff, including cleaners, security, and catering workers, after the pandemic.

• Insertion of ‘sunset clauses’ into all agreements for online delivery required by the Covid-19 crisis

• Commitment by employers nationally to take steps to abolish gender and race pay gaps, to reduce workload, and to defend pension entitlements.

• Salaries of vice-chancellors and senior managers to be subject to a nationally agreed scale with a fixed income differential of no more than ten.

• Pledge not to accept donations from individuals, companies, or regimes that refuse to guarantee the rights of academics to teach and research without fear of any external intervention.

DEMANDS ON STAFF

• Consideration of appropriate solidarity actions by senior staff, for example, a voluntary solidarity levy ring-fenced for continued employment of casualised staff members (dependent on senior management implementing actions listed above).

• Permanent members of staff should agree not to cover work that was previously assigned to hourly-paid or fixed-term contract staff who are now being targeted for redundancy due to the Covid-19 crisis.

• Creation of joint campus coronavirus action groups (of staff representing all grades working collectively with students) to devise institution-specific ‘Corona Charters’ to protect working conditions and health and safety, support student campaigns for ‘no detriment’, and press for democratic governance arrangements.

Please sign here or email [email protected]

Initial signatories: Des Freedman and Michael Bailey (editors. ‘The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance’), David Graeber (LSE), Natalie Fenton (Goldsmiths), Colin Leys (Goldsmiths), Lynne Segal (Birkbeck), Nick Stevenson (Nottingham), Feyzi Ismail (SOAS), John Pilger, Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Marian Carty (Goldsmiths), Paul Thompson (Essex), James Curran (Goldsmiths), Annie Goh (Central St Martins), Adam Ramsay (openDemocracy)