#occupyual

For about four week between March and April I was involved in direct action against the university. UAL announced that it is cutting 580 places across foundation.. FOUNDATION! The grounding in art education, the last remnants of a free, experimental creative education. Cutting these places is an attempt by university management to sweep the opportunity of creative empowerment  out from under the feet of prospective students. It will make an art education even more exclusive and inaccessible ... 

This seemed to be the thoughts a lot of people were having so momentum gathered quickly and the reception area at Central St Martins was taken over by students for just under four weeks.

For me, one of the most exciting elements of the occupation was this reclaiming of space... the privately owned reception spaces, usually an office for Arts Com, the company used to make profit from students art work... was transformed into a space for debate, action, creativity and collective working and thought. 

You’re likely to have heard by now that OccupyUAL was forced to leave their occupied space at CSM Tuesday 14th April. Management refused to meet any of our demands, but this does not mean that our fight has ended. Rather, it means that we KEEP FIGHTING HARDER.

In the words of suartspresident Shelly Asquith on C4 news, “we haven’t lost, we just haven’t won yet.”

This Saturday 25th April, OccupyUAL have organised a feeder march to begin at LCC at 12pm, to join the March for Free Education called by UCU. If you’re at all interested in OccupyUAL, defending free education, or the student movement more generally, come and march with us. We need noise, bodies and banners.

UAL students campaigning against the University’s proposed closure of LCC’s Foundation course, and further cuts at CSM and CCW, have successfully occupied CSM's reception for 3 weeks.

OccupyUAL is demanding that there are no cuts to the Foundation courses, as well as that the University proactively grants students a bigger role in decision-making, cuts the cost of studying, and publish how the colleges spend their money.

Over 3,400 people have signed the petition in support, and as your representatives, we encourage you to join them. The occupation continues at CSM, and all UAL students are invited by the students occupying to visit and join them.

Today’s demand is taken from students occupying UAL: follow the occupation on Twitter at @OccupyUAL, or on Facebook: facebook.com/occupyual

UAL students: Why We’re Occupying Our Art School

On the 16 March, news was spread amongst University of the Arts London (UAL) students that management had decided to cut over 800 places on their Foundation courses. Three days later, students and SUARTS sabbs are occupying management rooms at Central St Martins, King’s Cross in a peaceful yet poignant protest.

Foundation courses in the arts provide students with a year in which to further their education, opportunities and creative development. These courses are free for Home students aged 19 and under. As such, they remain one of the last areas in which students can be creatively expressive, pushing the boundaries without the heavy weight of student debt hanging over their heads.

The decision to dramatically cut places on Foundation courses follows news that the government is cutting the budget for Further Education (under which Foundation courses fall. The University College Union (UCU) estimates that this cut, alongside the 35% cut to the Adult Skills Budget, could lead to a loss of 400,000 students studying at college.

By cutting funding for Further Education, and by cutting places on Foundation courses, both the government and UAL are once again undermining and devaluing student’s access and rights to a free education. On top of this, a large number of teaching positions will be scrapped, meaning staff now face redundancies.

UAL is making money from Foundation courses, just elsewhere. With its new ‘UAL Awarding Body’, the institution accredits courses in a number of colleges across the UK in exchange for funnelling those students on to HE courses (where the real money is!). This represents the marketization of education, where the UAL brand can be outsourced as an income stream.

Thus, demand #1: No cuts to foundation courses

The notion that the university can’t afford to maintain the 800 courses they’re cutting becomes a cheap argument when you consider the Vice Chancellor of UAL’s six-figure salary, and the £200m cost for Central St Martins’ new ‘campus’. It doesn’t take a London School of Economics student to see that a simple reshuffle of funds might solve some of the problem.

(Coincidentally, LSE students have also been in occupation for the last few days – solidarity!)

And so, Demand #2: Democratise our university

We want greater transparency on all decision making processes at UAL, as well as total financial transparency. This year, it was quietly released that the budget for Widening Participation, the programme at UAL which works towards creating better access to arts education for people from working class backgrounds, is being cut by £500k. This, combined with the cutting of places on Foundation, courses which provide one of the few areas in which the ‘attainment’ gap for Black students does not exist, mean that access to arts education for students from diverse backgrounds is diminished.

This leads us to Demand #3: No institutional racism

While our demands and concerns are centred on our anger and frustration with the institution of UAL, our fight is part of the larger struggle. Under this Conservative-led government; undergraduate fees have tripled for Home/EU students, our loans have been privatised, school curriculums have been narrowed, and bills have passed which require lecturers to report students who express ‘radical’ views.

Demand #4: Free education

The building in which we are occupying epitomises the notion that our university now feels and behaves more like a business than an art school. We are sitting in a fish-bowl room, with floor-to-ceiling windows, round glass conference table and chrome swivel chairs. UAL rents this building from Argent, a property developer who ‘make places for people’. Argent’s owner is one of the major donors to the Conservative Party. Their security, wearing the infamous red beanie hats branded with ‘King’s Cross’ have already notified the police, and are circling the site with sniffer dogs.

So, Demand #5: We have the right to protest

This university should first and foremost be an establishment for education, not for money-making. Students should have the right not only to move in and out of this occupation as they wish, but should always have free access to the university buildings.

The cuts to over 800 placements on Foundation courses at UAL without any student consultation is unacceptable. But this forms just one of the issues students and education staff are facing and fighting against. We need to make a stand against privatisation, nepotism, commodification of education and lack of diversity now.

#OccupyUAL #LiberateUAL

Since March 17th 2015, students of LSE have occupied the university’s Vera Anstey Room in rejection of the marketisation, bureaucratisation and commodification of our university. In the UK, LSE is leading the way towards a US-inspired, privatised ‘business model’ of higher education. We’ve transformed the Vera Anstey into a space for education and knowledge and critique, renaming it the Free University of London.

From the outset, Occupy LSE has been proactive with negotiations and has met with LSE management four times. We engaged in these proceedings in good faith, believing that these were genuine negotiations, with the aim of collaborating on common ground to meet our demands and better the current university structure. Yesterday morning (March 27th), LSE management released a letter, which puts an end to current negotiations. LSE authorities threatened that unless the occupation ends immediately, they will “escalate this to legal proceedings”.

The threat of legal action is in direct contrast to the school’s public assertions so far, which claim that “LSE was founded on the principles of open discussion and fervent debate” and that Occupy LSE is part of “dynamic and vibrant campus life”. Given this openness to student protest, the occupiers demand a public guarantee that no student’s continuation of education at this institution will be jeopardised by their participation in this occupation. We believe that this kind of intimidation is unwarranted and unbecoming of LSE, particularly given our willingness to engage in negotiations and dialogue, and our peaceful and non-confrontational actions. We are reclaiming our education, learning for free and learning freely, but the school is aggressively trying to close this space down.

The statement fails to meet any of the detailed demands that were put forward by Occupy LSE. It contains no concrete proposals, but instead resorts to vague references to existing processes and structures, thus confirming management’s unwillingness to genuinely consider our demands. The only discernible proposition in the document is a tripartite meeting with the SU and the Provost of the school, which falls far short of our demands and will only be granted if we vacate immediately. Rather than engaging in negotiations and collectively building genuinely democratic processes within the university, their response merely directs us back to the existing formal and undemocratic channels. Directly challenging such ineffective and exclusive avenues was a core motivation for the initial occupation.