#nocapitulation

I get it. You see people with the guts to stand up for something. You want to feel like you’re above it all, that you’re the most rational person in the room. After all, why on Earth would students want to support the people who teach them? But like so many opinion pieces, repeating falsehoods with a veneer of smugness will only get you so far. Anyone who opposes marketisation and the impact it has on students, as the author says he does, should be fully behind the strikes and glad that their fellow students were willing to put themselves at personal risk to strengthen them.

The writer asks why left wingers would support a strike by such high paid staff. But the THE article linked in article as evidence for the high rates of pay enjoyed by academics also states that academic staff have seen a real-terms fall in their pay every year from 2010-11 to 2015-16. Research by UCU, which compares these pay cuts to the rate of inflation, suggests that staff have faced a 14.5% cut in real terms pay since 2010. Furthermore, there has been explosion in the use of casualised contracts. In particular, 75% of junior academics, who do the majority of teaching, are on insecure contracts. It is these academics, who are younger, on less secure contracts with fewer prospects for advancement, who are going to bear the brunt of these pension changes. This is why we’re seeing lecturers, alongside other sections such as the Junior Doctors back in 2016, picking up working class weapons such as the strike to defend themselves - the direction of travel in this sector is towards the low paid, insecure work which characterises much of the British economy.

The link between marketisation and pensions is anything but a dogma. The process which has raised fees is the same one that has launched this attack on pensions. The USS scheme is a collective agreement between 68 pre-1992 universities. The scheme is made possible by a principle of “last man standing mutuality” - if a poorer university is unable to pay its pension contributions, richer universities will step in to ensure the scheme remains viable. While such a scheme makes a lot of sense if the university sector is made up of bodies which cooperate, it is less compatible in a marketised sector in which universities compete for funds and students. Why would a successful competitor want to bail out a weaker one?

This thinking is at the root of the current pensions dispute. In their response to the USS consultation Cambridge complains that, “The University (and the other financially stronger institutions) continues to lend its balance sheet to the sector, which contains the cost of pension provision for all employers. In a competitive market for research and student places the University would be concerned if this appeared to be having an adverse effect on the University’s competitiveness.” Cambridge and Oxford have a disproportionate influence on UUK’s policy, with each college having a vote on its board. The root of this dispute is rich universities scuppering a decent pension scheme which did not benefit them as profit maximising institutions.

The justification for these cuts, the existence of a massive deficit, is based on very faulty accounting. According to UUK, the USS pension scheme is in a £6.1bn deficit. But this figure is predicated on the whole fund having to be paid out at once. Such an event would only occur if the entire Higher Education sector collapsed at once, and pensions would probably be the least of our concerns if this happened. These changes are an entirely unnecessary attack by university bosses. It’s perplexing when the writer states that “when we come to retire, we won’t get nearly as sweet a deal” in an article dedicated to slagging off people trying to keep that deal in place.

If the writer cares about the lowest paid workers, perhaps he should consider donating to the strike fund of the IWGB at the University of London, who will be launching the largest strike of outsourced cleaners in the HE sector hot off the tails of the UCU strike. Their union has welcomed the wave of student occupations and applauds the occupiers for identifying with their teachers’ struggle. I suggest the author should do the same.