Cops Off Campus protest at the University of London, six December 2013. Photograph: Paul Davey/Corbis
The repression against pupil protesters covered in the Guardian last week (Police accused of extreme force at protests on campus, six December) is not restricted to London. In the exact same week as the clashes with police at University of London, 5 college students at Sussex University were suspended for their position in a peaceful occupation, and Sheffield and Birmingham university managements went to court to avert protests on their campuses.
Activist groups across the nation have called a nationwide day of action for the appropriate to organise and protest, and for “Cops off campus” on Wednesday eleven December.
University of London management is dealing with protests simply because of its program to shut down the student union, University of London Union its refusal to recognise the trade union, IWGB, that represents the vast majority of its outsourced ancillary staff and its failure to give these employees with simple rights this kind of as pensions. Solidarity with campus staff has been a central theme of recent pupil protests.
These protests have also raised wider questions about the marketisation of our training program, from improved costs and soaring pupil debt to the privatisation of student loans to the working of universities as companies.
Staff and students are opposing not just the police but the university bosses, personal contractors and government the police protect.
Daniel Cooper University of London Union vice-president and 104 student representatives from about the Uk
Complete checklist to be published on www.ulu.co.uk on Tuesday morning
• We unreservedly condemn the escalating use of police towards peaceful protests at the University of London. It looks clear that the university management is not negotiating with college students and staff who protest – like occupying college students – but is just attempting to suppress dissent. We condemn the blanket injunction that prohibits occupations in Bloomsbury campuses right up until June 2014.
We get in touch with on all who care about the potential of our universities to object to this invited invasion of the police onto campuses. Police intimidation has no spot in a seat of finding out. Several workers and students have fled repressive regimes. We are horrified at supposedly “liberal” university managements adopting these tactics.
We demand an fast repudiation of the injunction by the university management, no more police on campus, and for management to engage with college students and personnel about the issues that led to the protests in the first place.
Molly Cooper Unison service group executive, Sean Wallis UCU NEC & University College UCU president, Simon Deville Birkbeck Unison branch secretary, Elizabeth Lawrence UCL UCU President and a hundred academics and members of greater schooling trade unions close to the United kingdom Total record to be published on www.ulu.co.uk on Tuesday morning
• Rather than responding to a set of eminently realistic and practicable demands to try to defend the appropriate to schooling and just operating circumstances in our university, senior management at the University of London have decided that, when faced with the choice amongst dialogue and repression, they will to turn to the latter.
Describing the student occupation as “a disgraceful and aggressive act, which positioned the security of our personnel at threat”, Chris Cobb, chief operating officer and university secretary, declared: “The university will always help peaceful and reputable protest.” The mendacity of this statement is breathtaking. “Disgraceful and aggressive” describes really properly the behaviour of management ready to ban all protest in Senate Property, regardless of how peaceful, collude in the arrest of students, and get in touch with police and safety guards to evict protesters just before getting into into any severe dialogue whatsoever.
College students and workers are becoming bombarded with advertising and marketing talk about “the student knowledge”, but as soon as they act as anything at all other than compliant consumers, their spaces are taken away and their appropriate to political expression and assembly quashed.
It would seem that people who run our universities will move heaven and earth to boost fulfillment statistics for the National Pupil Survey, but are perfectly at ease with police punching their students in the face. This is intolerable. We demand that the university’s vice-chancellor and its collegiate council act quickly to rescind the closure of the University of London Union and the prohibition of protest at Senate Property, and stop calling police on to our campuses at the least indicator of significant dissent. Universities must be run for students and employees, not towards them. If senior management refuses to comprehend this, individuals who perform and understand in our universities will have to draw the consequences and act to show that we have no confidence in those who run our institutions.
Alberto Toscano Reader in vital theory, Goldsmiths, Bill Bowring Professor of law, Birkbeck,Lynn Welchman Professor of law, Soas and 197 academics and personnel at University of London colleges
Full listing of signatories at bit.ly/1cwphbI
• John Harris’s piece (University of strife, 7 December) illustrates the failure of what passes for present day management. Much less than a generation ago universities have been communities presided above by a vice-chancellor whose stipend was that of a effectively-paid professor, no greater than ten instances the average of all staff. Academics, college students, administrators, technicians, secretarial employees and cleaners could all truly feel they have been producing a contribution that additional up to a greater whole.
Following the mantra “We must pay the going fee for a CEO”, we are landed with a bloated administration that drains funds from the institution at the expense of the two the academics and the minimal-paid. There is now a little, very properly-paid elite pursuing ephemera of branding, competition and worldwide development, underpinned by a well-remunerated cohort of box-ticking managers. Contracting out security, cleaning and catering saves a pittance at the cost of the minimal-paid.
What puzzles me is where lies the managerial magic that makes it possible for Balfour Beatty to make a profit and the university a saving, which is not inside the competence of the university itself. In all probability the same university gives programs it claims to be at the cutting-edge of management. To their credit, the college students seem to be to be looking for a solution to this conundrum.
JR O’Callaghan, Emeritus professor
Gidea Park, Essex
Intimidation has no place in a seat of learning | @guardianletters
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