UK Student movement

AWL HE workers fraction have produced this bulletin for the UCU strikes on 1-3 December 2021. Please download and read - and distribute if you agree! Let us know what you think - email awl@workersliberty.org. We have members in UCU and UNiSON and hold regular meetings to discuss building a democratic, fighting rank and file across campus unions.

Students in the Uyghur Solidarity Society at SOAS university in London are running a week of action (11-15 October), calling on students and workers to join in on their respective campuses. Awareness has been growing among young people especially through online activism. This week aims to turn that awareness into concrete action, to reach out to others in the university community, and carry out public protests to draw attention to and put pressure on those complicit in the genocide. On Monday 11 October, we held a stall outside campus with leaflets explaining our society’s analysis of the...

On 4-5 October, workers at the Royal College of Art struck in support of their long running campaign against casualised working conditions. 90% of staff are employed on “zero hours” and other forms of insecure contracts — the highest percentage of such employment in UK Higher Education. Strikes are scheduled for the next three weeks . RCA strikers will take heart from the important recent win at Open University, where 4,000 Associate Lecturers won significant improvements in their (fixed-term) contracts, including a pay rise and payments for all work. At Goldsmiths in south London, staff are...

A student involved with the Sheffield University Save Archaeology Campaign spoke to us. Back in February, a few students were emailed, asking us to attend an “informal chat” with the Deputy Vice Chancellor. Only a few of us were chosen and around a dozen or more of us turned up. She asked us for negative views as well as positive views about the department – she only received positive views. At a follow-up meeting, the Deputy VC laid out the conclusions from this “consultation”: they would close the Department of Archaeology and move two of its “areas of strength” into other departments. These...

Students United Against Fees is one group within a loose coalition of student activist groups operating under lockdown and protesting under lockdown. It called a small but lively open-air rally in London on Sunday 13 June. The group calls for a 30% immediate refund on tuition fees in return for higher interest rates on loans. The refund is compensation for loss of in-person lectures, library and other student facilities as well as exorbitant rents. The group, led by a handful of full-time elected officers from Student Unions, got some press coverage for their idea last month. It is fair to say...

The student union at SOAS university in London joined the Palestinian call for a strike on 18 May, and finished the week with a campus vigil for lives lost to colonial violence. London students went on to join the internationalist bloc at the Palestine demo in London on Saturday, connecting struggles from Colombia, Ethiopia and Palestine as a common struggle against oppression and state violence. Apartheid off Campus, a student campaign group, has called a day of action for Friday 28 May: “a call for students to unite for BDS”. The student union at SOAS university in London voted to reaffirm...

Many students at UK universities have rightly responded to the escalation of violence in Israel-Palestine by mobilising in support of the Palestinians. In some places there are campaigns to get universities to stop investing in companies that financially back Israeli military industries. We hope Palestinian solidarity campaigning continues beyond the ceasefire, and that university divestment campaigns succeed. At the same time we continue to criticise the blanket boycott policies which dominate on campuses (including academic boycotts), with their implicit backing for a “one state” outcome in...

The student occupations at Sheffield Hallam and Manchester Universities have ended, due to heavy-handed attempts by university management to criminalise the protests, and a refusal to engage with their demands. The students leave with their heads held high, however, as their three week long protest has demonstrated how to militantly oppose the marketised higher education system. The fact that universities still remain able to resist these immediate demands does not deter students from promising to continue with radical tactics. The campaigns that have emerged around fee and rent strikes this...