I’m one of about 35,000 university lecturers in this country. That’s too many and too expensive, says the government. Between three and five thousand of us will have to go.
So a lot of us are pretty uneasy at the moment. Will we find anything else if we’re made redundant? Teaching in the schools comes to mind. But there’s not much chance there. Even though we’re qualified to teach at university level, not many of us have the right qualifications for teaching school children. In any case the subjects' a lot of us specialise in (philosophy, psychology, engineering, and so on) aren’t school subjects at all. And anyway there are hardly any school jobs about.
Few of us thought it would come to this. True, for quite a few years both Labour and Tory governments have been telling the universities to tighten their belts. They’ve been telling them that they’re too costly to run and not good value for money. And the universities have cut down. They’ve spent less on things like stationery, grants to staff and students; equipment. They’ve tried not to replace staff who’ve left or retired. But they’ve not saved very much-you can’t by economics of this kind. The only way you can really save—the universities know it and the government knows it—is by having fewer people on your pay roll. Because that’s where most of the money goes—on wages.
Yet, somehow, the universities thought, or at least hoped, that everything could carry on as before. Maybe enough people would retire or leave of their own accord to allow “natural wastage” to make the necessary cuts. Maybe the next government would be more sympathetic to the universities than the last one (didn’t the Tories say they would be when they were in opposition?). Maybe the country’s economic situation would look up and cuts in university spending be seen as less necessary. After all University lecturers did think they were a cut above most other workers. They did think their work was particularly important and that their status guaranteed them immunity from the vulgar business of redundancy.
How’s the government going to decide which of us are to go and which to stay? It’s a difficult one. In the past university jobs have been considered as held for life and usually that’s the way it’s been. You only got sacked if you went out of your way to get on the wrong side of your Head of Department in your first three years (your “probationary” period) or if you committed serious (very serious) moral indiscretions with a student (“moral turpitude”, it’s called). Now, suddenly, ways have got to be found of quickly getting rid of people in large numbers. The government knows the universities aren’t going to be able to solve it for themselves, so it’s going to tell them (“advise”, I believe,is the official terminology) who’s got to go.
Not that the University Grants Council — the government body that deals with the financing of universities — will be naming names. It will be “advising" universities to cut out certain departments or faculties and telling them that, whether they do so or not, they’ll no longer receive funds for their running. The surplus staff will then be declared redundant and their students distributed among other Universities giving lecturers who have kept their jobs there an increased work load.
What about the situation in the university I myself work in? It’s one of those, so rumour has it, which are most likely to be heavily affected. The University Grants Council has said it will be sending out letters in June with details of where to make the cuts.
This leaves plenty of time for rumours. And at the moment, with the summer term barely a fortnight old, it’s all rumours. We’ve all already heard half-a-dozen quite different “leaked” versions of what’s going to happen. On the cards, according to a sober senior academic, is that the whole university will close. Another rumour is that it’s only one faculty, Social Sciences, that’s going to shut down. From other quarters there’s talk of medium-sized departments such as languages, philosophy and classics bearing the brunt. Others predict less drastic cuts with the extinction of just small lightly staffed departments—such as Art, Statistics, Music and my own.
How are we reacting to this unprecedented state of affairs? In various different ways. Some linguists, for example, have thought about using their redundancy money (will there be any?) to set up a translation agency in the town. But is there a market for one here? Doubtful. English lecturers talk about writing their long dreamed of best seller. Other colleagues are offended that they haven’t been “consulted”. Some are confident that the University Grants Council, who after all are only academics themselves, haven’t got the power to force sackings on the universities.
What about our union? Won’t the AUT (Association of University Teachers) give us any protection? The AUT moved from being a professional association to a fully-fledged trade union several years ago after a ballot of its members. The idea was that under the collective TUC umbrella, we’d have more protection more bargaining power. Since then the AUT has managed to negotiate wage rises at about the same rate as inflation which, some would say, is no mean feat. It uses tough language too and until recently has refused to even contemplate the possibility of redundancies. Now, though it still says it will fight hard against redundancy proposals, it’s yielded to circumstances by admitting that redundancies are possible and even likely. And when the government axe falls it’s difficult to see how the AUT will be able to help us. It’s likely to take a test case to the courts to determine whether universities are legally empowered to dismiss employees who, according to contract, have life tenure. But most of us agree that this is unlikely to resolve things in our favour.
So perhaps by the time you read this, the affair should have been settled. And you’ll be able to read in a future issue of Socialist Standard how the famous University Grants Council letter has affected the jobs and lives of this writer and his colleagues.
Just a final word. Why is it happening at all? Many people in the universities would say that it’s because we’ve got a reactionary philistine government in power which is determined to spend as little money as possible on education and public services. There may be some truth in this. But it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. It was the last Labour government which started to make serious cuts in the education budget, which caused many redundancies by shutting down Colleges of Education, and which began to talk about and pave the way for redundancies in the universities. So, in government, both parties have moved in the same direction. The continuing recession in world trade has forced them (as it’s forcing governments elsewhere) to limit investment in the training of skilled manpower which is what universities are about. The end result of this had to be unemployment.
This brings me back to those of my colleagues who wanted to be “consulted”. When it was pointed out to one of them that workers in many other occupations were being sacked without being “consulted”, the reply was: “Yes, but we’re not down the mines”. This nicely summed up the view long held by most university lecturers that they’re a kind of privileged élite with special status and nothing to fear, that they’re somehow in a different category from workers in other jobs and that their employer, recognising this, will somehow treat them in a special way.
In fact university lecturers, whatever their image of themselves, are just as much members of the working class as anyone who, in order to live has to sell his energies to an employer for a wage or salary. He will also tell them that, in times of economic crisis, “status” doesn't make their job one bit more secure than that of their fellow wage-slaves “down the mine”. Universities are an important part of the profit system, giving to a section of the working class (the students) the intellectual skills that their future employers will need and will buy from them. And their employers will be in business for one reason alone—profit (or, if the government’s the employer, to provide the employing class with the services necessary to realise that profit).
Here’s hoping that the present shake-up will at least shake some of my colleagues out of their comfortable self-satisfied view of the world. Here’s hoping that their first direct taste of working-class insecurity will make them use their intellectual skills to look closely not just at their academic specialities but at how present-day society works. Here’s hoping that they'll sec its absurdity and come to the conclusion that social sanity means the end of the wages system and the end of production for profit. There is no other way of ending that terrible ever-present wastage of human skills and energies known as unemployment.
Howard Moss
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