We are writing to you as student and faculty members of Cambridge Defend Education, a group which has, over the last three years taken a principled stance to defend the university against privatisation and increasing social exclusion, the retrograde forces about which you spoke so eloquently last week. Our vision of the university is that of a place of critical thinking and contestation; we have fought for this vision at some personal and collective cost—in the case of some individuals, a very great cost.  We were, therefore, heartened and reinvigorated by your inspirational fighting words last week.

In November 2011, after months of struggle in which we had joined our fellow students and teachers across Britain to resist the Coalition government’s swingeing cuts to publicly-funded higher education and the tripling of tuition fees to unaffordable levels for many, we were impelled to undertake a form of nonviolent direct action.  Over the many months leading up to this action, large numbers of us had been part of a year of protest which included the ‘Occupation’ of the university’s Senior Combination Room, petitions, letters, peaceful blockades, national and local demonstrations, and strikes. We had elicited no response from those in power; they continued undeterred on their destructive path.

The Universities minister, David Willetts, who was responsible for the most destructive and ideological changes to the public university in Britain, had been invited to speak on the same platform you are now occupying under the aegis of CRASSH.  We decided to use the only resource we had to hand as we faced the monolith of the neoliberal decimation of the public university: the spoken word. As Willetts took the stage, thirty of us, both students and lecturers, used the ‘people’s microphone’ technique to perform a poem containing our message to the government about the policies that Mr Willetts was implementing at the time.  Following the example set by so many student sit-ins and anti-war protests over the last century, we then ‘occupied’ the stage as a symbolic act of recovering our university.  Mr Willetts chose at that point to leave.

It is what followed next that we feel you will wish to know about.  One of our number was singled out for prosecution and punishment by the University authorities even as scores of faculty members and students turned themselves in noting that the action had been collective. As it happened, only one academic not acting as a Court official was prepared to collude in this patently unfair process and testify against this lone student, made even more vulnerable by being singled out thus: the director of CRASSH, Professor Simon Goldhill.  To our regret, he did so zealously.

The subsequent ‘exemplary’ punishment awarded to this student made national and international news for its severity: he was suspended for a staggering seven terms (two and a half years) and debarred from entering the university premises during that period. After a sustained campaign and enormous support from across the university and nation (including a petition signed by 3000 people), the student’s punishment was reduced to one term with a warning attached to this sentence that the judges would not be this ‘lenient’ to future protesters.  This whole process did indeed have an immensely chilling effect across the campus: it has helped create a culture of fear and silencing that few are now prepared to face down. Appearances notwithstanding and outside the smart seminar room environment, official hostility towards critical thought and activism has been intensified and consolidated.

As we continue the struggle despite diminished numbers and in the face of difficulty, we draw courage from comrades such as you. We look forward to hearing you in the coming weeks but we felt that you would wish to know more about the platform on which you stand.  You will be alert, we know, to the ways in which an institution can act as a very real victimiser in one aspect and attempt, very deliberately, to project a more progressive image in another. We have been pilloried as opposers of free speech and ‘totalitarians’, as those who protest and challenge the status quo often are.  As you yourself say of political struggle, it is ’a beautiful thing because there is joy in it but there are huge burdens.’

When you speak to us in the coming days, perhaps you can guide us by addressing the question which you yourself posed last week; it is one that has troubled us in the face of our own struggles: ‘What does integrity do in the face of oppression?’

Yours in solidarity,

Students and academics of Cambridge Defend Education

It is in the context of this international situation that we face the news that the ‘English Defence League’ plan to hold another demonstration in Cambridge on Saturday 23rd February.

The EDL is a violent street-based organisation who have proved time and time again that they have no interest in peaceful methods. Their demonstrations are provocative, violent, and fuelled by hatred, and everywhere they have marched they have been met with opposition. Not content with targeting Muslims and immigrants with threats of violence, the EDL have also threatened students as a single homogenous group. Cambridge Unite Against Fascism will be leading a counter-demonstration to show the EDL that they are not welcome in Cambridge.

Ahead of this event, it is important to spread awareness of the danger of fascism, how it has manifested itself in the past and the present, and what can be done to combat it. With this in mind, local anti-fascist activists and academic specialists are organising a teach-in on Sunday 17th February in the Keynes Room at King’s College.

Topics of discussion will include the history of fascism throughout the 20th century (with the examples of Italy, Germany, and the UK), the politics of fascism and anti-fascism, and what can be done to combat fascism today, including first-hand activist experiences from the UK, Greece and France. Speakers include academics from Cambridge and elsewhere, including worldwide authorities on historical cases of fascism, as well as activists from a number of European countries. There will be opportunity for discussion and debate throughout the day.

This is an important step in building momentum to oppose the EDL in Cambridge and fascists everywhere to ensure that our society remains open, diverse and peaceful.

It is now all the more urgent that the teach-in is a success in light of the Union Society’s last-minute announcement that they will be hosting French fascist Marine Le Pen (the leader of the Front Nationale) next Tuesday 19^th at 4pm. The last session of Sunday’s teach-in will be discuss the politics of the FN.

Their occupation has received national media attention in the Guardian, Independent (as well as here and here) and THES.

Rush message of solidarity to the students at occupysussex2013@gmail.com and sussexagainstprivatisation@gmail.com.

In their statement, the occupying students say the following:

“After continually being ignored by university management and left out of all negotiations regarding the proposed privatisation plans, Sussex students have occupied the University’s conference centre.

Over the last few days the campaign has picked up widespread national press coverage and messages of support have been pouring in from Students’ Unions, organisations and influential individuals.

The management at Sussex have shown a blatant disregard for the views and wishes of the campus community in the way that they have instigated these proposals. The lack of transparency, and openness from a University that has a reputation as a ‘radical’ institution, is tantamount to a management position which is eroding the spirit of Sussex. All methods used by staff and students to engage with management in discussion are being ignored.

As a result of this top-down decision, and many others which have not involved adequate consultation with this vibrant and close-knit campus community, people are feeling indignant and feel as though all routes to ask management to listen to and act on our concerns are dwindling.

We call on the management of the University to immediately halt their plans; to undertake a full and proper democratic negotiation with staff and students about the future of campus services; and to ensure that student and trade union representatives are fully represented and informed during all stages of future processes and decision making.”

Regular updates here: http://sussexagainstprivatization.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/solidarity-statement-sign-now

Similar outsourcing plans have already been implemented in Cambridge: the University Library tea room is now run by the same company that owns Costa coffee, which is you might have noticed their prices going up.

Given the alarming rise of the Golden Dawn in Greece, the politically-motivated massacre on Utoya in Norway and marches by the English Defence League in the UK, the resurgence of far-right sentiment has become one of the most pressing issues in contemporary national and international politics. In advance of the EDL march in Cambridge on 23rd February, this event brings together anti-fascist activists and academic specialists to discuss three important topics:

- Fascism in History (10:00 – 12:30)
- The Politics of Fascism and Anti-Fascism (1.30 – 3:00)
- Fighting Fascism Today (3.10 – 5.10)

Speakers include John Pollard (Trinity Hall), Martin Ruehl (Trinity Hall), David Renton (author, Struck Out: Why Employment Tribunals Fail Workers and What Can Be Done (Pluto, 2o12) , as well as activists from Greece, France and the UK.

These plans, spearheaded by universities and science minister David Willetts, are in response to a report by Dame Janet Finch which recommended “gold open access” for all scientific research published in this country. The idea is that publicly-funded research should be freely available for anyone to view, but the large subscription fees demanded by the journals place scholarly work behind an insurmountable pay-wall. Journals charge extortionate fees given what they actually do; services like typesetting, formatting and peer-review are all handled by the academic community itself, with the journals acting merely as third parties that facilitate these services. Many academics have already taken action against the hefty profits that the major journals extract out of universities; as of January 2013 a global boycott of publishing company Elsevier had 13,000 signatories. Despite this, British universities currently pay £200m a year in subscription fees to journals.

Given this, the prospect of open access looks attractive. But this is where the Finch Report comes in. “Gold” open access proposes to keep the publishing industry satisfied whilst simultaneously providing free access to scholarly articles. How? By taking the money out of the UK research budget and making the academics pay. Specifically, a researcher wishing to have their work peer-reviewed and made open-access will have to fork out “article processing charges” of £2,000 per article, to be paid out of the science research budget.

The plans disregard the alternative “green open access” favoured by many academics. In this model, articles are submitted to journals the same way as they are now, but in addition are also published on a free open access website. Such a model has already proved highly successful in several branches of science, and is an attractive low-cost solution to the open access problem.

The proposed plans put the interests of the publishing industry before those of UK scientific research. The government has shown a clear bias to the needs of large for-profit private companies, a bias in keeping with the current climate of increasing private influence in higher education and research, and a bias that can only be countered by local, organized resistance.

The NSS is a blunt instrument. Think about it: can the full totality of your ‘student experience’ really be measured by choosing a number between one and five? Quite simply, it is a bad quantitative metric. To make matters worse, the results are fed into a national database by which different universities can measured against one another. The NSS is part of the ongoing drive to marketise higher education. It provides the statistics with which management will decide who to make redundant. Moreover, it is ridiculous on its own terms: how can a student’s experience in Cambridge be meaningfully measured against that of a student in, say, Newcastle or Brighton, given that these differing experiences will be unique and unrepeatable. A four in Cambridge means nothing when set against a three in Edinburgh, because the two different ‘quantities’ of experience are incomparable in a more fundamental, qualitative manner than the NSS administrators are prepared to countenance.

The hypocrisy of asking students to fill in ‘satisfaction questionnaires’ and to complete surveys which aim to quantitatively measure the ‘student experience’ – however vacuously or broadly the category might be defined – is that the current crop of students have no benchmark against which to measure their own experience. The empirical survey runs up against its own unperceived limits as soon as one tries to reach beyond the narrow horizon of the continuous present.

Students’ unions, including the NUS, must find their own workable means of providing students a forum in which to air their views and provide thoughtful criticism of their teachers in a constructive manner. The results should not be shared with those who might want to use such statistics as a means of disciplining the labour force with threats of redundancy.

Save yourself some time: don’t fill in the NSS.

Interested? Got opinions? Read or heard something you’d like to share?

ORGANISE 2013 is looking for writers to contribute short articles for an online blog and paper bulletin to inform and provoke on these and other issues. The above list is not prescriptive:  if there is something you think ought to be on the list, write the article. Proposals for longer pieces of original research, reviews and reports of related events are solicited. We also welcome advertisements for relevant upcoming events. Articles will appear in the ‘Comments & Analysis‘ category of this blog.

For more information please contact lgmbk2 or ojh23 (at cam.ac.uk) asap, and please forward this message on to interested parties!

How else can we really explain the potential demise of the public education and health care systems, unless it is seen through a lens which shows humans’ relations to knowledge and health as not something to be valued in and of themselves, but reduced to cold cash payment only?

By what parameters has capitalism failed by? If we are to judge it by its own, it has, in some senses, never failed. Around us today, we only see its inevitable consequences, the entirely predictable end product of system based around greed and exploitation.

Ha-Joon Chang – by far one of the most interesting economists of our day – suggests that since the end of WWII, implicit social contracts have been held between a state and its people: “In these contracts, renewed legitimacy was bestowed on the capitalist system, once totally discredited following the great depression. In return it provided a welfare state that guarantees minimum provision for all those burdens that most citizens have to contend with throughout their lives – childcare, education, health, unemployment, disability and old age.”

He goes onto suggest that cuts – motivated by organisations like the IMF in a mad attempt to keep capitalism afloat – are rewriting social contracts by the back door, forcing people onto the streets to guard their livelihoods. Chang emphasises that economic change forces a political change which, he argues, threatens the make up of a democratic state.

Chang’s writing is food for thought, and I would agree that austerity is anti-democratic. But I would take things further; Chang, like many, leaves open the possibility of a ‘responsible capitalism’ of the type Ed Miliband seems so obsessed with. How can such a system be possible? It makes about as much senses as a ‘more equal ableism’ or a ‘less sexist misogyny’.

The problem may be less immediate, less obvious – in the case of the globalised economy, the wage slaves are just shuffled off to sweatshops in other countries – and it becomes similar to the way in which our society responds to sexism. It is not ‘misogyny’ to sexually objectify a woman; it is ‘banter’. It is not hateful towards women to encourage them to expose themselves and hold their sexuality up to a male gaze for approval and dismissal; it is popular culture.

Obviously, the issue of women’s rights and female emancipation cannot be directly held equivalent to capitalism, but the same principle of internalisation will apply on under ‘responsible capitalism’. We can pat ourselves on the back, congratulate us on our humanity, before going back to the same cycle of exploitation and misery, which has simply become the norm. Capitalism has not failed itself; it has failed us – to that end, it should be done away with.

Making such a move would be difficult for our dear administrators. It
would involve a rewriting of charity law, as well as inventing a
mechanism by which Cambridge students could no longer apply to the
Student Loans Company, but instead would apply to the university’s own
fund – this is, after all, a large fraction of what state support really means.

Cambridge’s priorities must be met however, and that priority is
research. This is for the simple reason that Cambridge has two assets
on which it can draw: its reputation, and its endowment funds, newly
bolstered through the 800 campaign. Severance from state regulation
would mean that the University could charge fees higher than £9k -
indeed, because of its reputation, the University knows it can charge
fees up to the American level, or just below, and still reel in the
student numbers, as the rising costs of some postgraduate courses
show.

High fees would allow more funds to be siphoned into STEM research
(Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine), the real root of the
University’s survival plan, or what the Wilson Report on
Business-University Collaboration calls the ‘London-Cambridge pharma
corridor’. STEM research is costly, and if the University is to
continue to rake in the government rewards/incentives for
internationally cited research, then it needs to have the cash beyond
the five year plan of hiring University Council has already
recommended. High fees would supply the constant capital the
University needs to reproduce its machines.

That supply of money is, at root, extracted from human labour. The
high fees the new wave of students would pay wil themselves be
extracted from the wealth of the few, a wealth which can only be built
on the back of cheap and exploitative labour. And here’s the crux:
those people, the ones who will produce that wealth, are the model
citizens produced by the universities themselves.
This is a process which works within our University as much as between
other universities. If we look at the average humanities graduate,
you’ll see that they perform badly paid or often free labour in order
to further their job prospects. The same applies to a vast amount of
STEM graduates as well. That free and cheap labour they perform is
entirely contributive to any economic productivity which will allow
for the constant capital which the university machine requires. On
top, the labour performed *in* the university is itself wholly
underpaid: a vast quantity of staff in the university receive less
than a wage for the reproduction of their own 21st century lives (the
cambridge living wage), and that’s not even to bring in the manner in
which postgraduate teachers are relied on for underpaid labour time
which nonetheless provides the backbone for the ‘unique cambridge
experience’.

That experience is central to Boris’ plan. The Universiy knows it can
eat into its reservaes for some years in order to beat other
universities in the hiring game; but it also knows that there are
other universities willing to sell out more to companies in order to
bring in the private funding. Brunel and Cardiff can provide courses
in GlaxoSmithManagement, courses which might face
some resistance from the ivory-tower minds of Cambridge. So as long as
the students keep coming, Leszek knows that he can raise the fees on
them – and that means separating from the state regulations.

Separation from regulation is wonderous for Leszek potentially, but
bodes ill times of students, for with the maligned ‘interference’ of
the state comes the still occasionally visible  aspiration of the
university to be a public institution. This is what, at heart, allows
students the rhetoric of democracy and equality in the university -
not the ancient statutes of the medieval foundation.
Without the illumination of a discourse of public rights and duties,
the call for democracy,. transparency and fairness within Cambridge
would fade to a whisper, without any political
concordance. Given over to private finance, why should any university
bureaucrat – or even members of the sacred Public – give any heed to
what the wider social interest may be? Once the remit of the
university is so patently given over to the joint-stock company, the
principle drivers become the owners of that stock, not their customers
the students, and the driver of those share-holders would be – indeed,
legally is obliged to be – profit.

The mind of VC Boris is most likely still in the agonies of balance
sheets and development office conundrums – but the limit of his
cerebal function is clear: sell sell sell! Buy buy buy! All within the
safe, soft peddling language of the trusted university official, Boris
plans from his desk in Old Schools the rise of the machines – and with
it, the managed decline of democracy.