Intimidation has no place in a seat of learning | @guardianletters

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 &amp 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

British technology"s uncertain future | @guardianletters

‘Graphene has immense possibilities,’ says James Dyson. Photograph: Alamy

It is no surprise that British businesses are getting outpaced in the global commercialisation of graphene and other high technologies, even though they are getting pioneered by British universities (How the Uk trails the world on a excellent British invention, 4 December).

I am convinced that graphene has immense prospects, which is why Dyson is exploring potential applications (secret, I am afraid) with Andre Geim at Manchester University, and other universities in England. As quickly as Andre offers a appropriate researcher, the Dyson-funded undertaking will begin. University research is beneficial and powers future technology, even if there is no evident fast application. Competing internationally needs the very best technology in the world. This relies on investment and brains.

Dyson invests £2.5m a week in investigation, we have 1,500 engineers and scientists (though we desperately want much more) and we are working alongside dozens of British universities. All to build patentable technology that will be owned in Britain and exported close to the world. The government’s £350m investment to help doctoral coaching is promising, but will only be of long-term worth to Britain if the resulting research is nurtured and commercialised by British sector. It will fuel Britain’s future.
James Dyson
Inventor

• Aditya Chakrabortty’s article highlights one particular of the wonderful myths of Uk innovation policy, namely that the main source of productive modern new firms is academic inventions. This is no a lot more accurate in Cambridge than it is in Boston or Silicon Valley. We can’t financial institution on Manchester’s graphene analysis being the exception. It is the alumni of wonderful study universities that drive economic development by means of the chance to use their expertise and creativity in firms, in certain by solving troubles and establishing new goods for demanding buyers.

By the specifications of our most direct industrial rivals, the United kingdom government underspends on investigation and growth by about £4bn a year. Nonetheless, the gap is not in university analysis paying but in the funding of “exploratory development”.

This is the extended and risky procedure of trying to make new technologies function in true-planet applications. Germany has 22,000 scientists and engineers carrying out this in non-university Fraunhofer Institutes. The US funds this kind of operate via R&ampD procurements, with modest firms and not-for-revenue R&ampD organisations taking part in a crucial function.

We will only deal with the difficulty when we completely recognise what it is, rather than striving to get universities to perform a part they are not created for.
David Connell
Senior analysis fellow, Uk Innovation Research Centre, University of Cambridge, and Chairman, Archipelago Technological innovation

• I hope the new £61m National Graphene Institute at Manchester will reap some rewards (Letters, five December). Graphene is an exciting materials, and its unusual properties give fantastic hope that there will be rewards. Even so, like most wonderful new components, it is a solution seeking for troubles.

The greatest rewards will be to organizations that recognize and produce novel applications to business scale. Sadly, most of these will not be in the Uk, due to the fact governments considering that the 1970s have allowed our market to be broken up, offered off or shut down in the drive for brief-phrase gains by banking institutions and the stock market. There is now a plethora of centres for this and that, usually set up as government initiatives to show they are investing in the potential or as a sop to placate angry response to however another industrial closure. The difficulty is that, with out a secure Uk manufacturing base, they are investing in the potential for somewhere else.
Dr John Birtill
Highcliffe Catalysis Restricted, Guisborough

• Martin Durrani’s letter (5 December) touches on the closure of AstraZeneca’s research centre in Cheshire and its relocation to Cambridge and concludes that it “raises separate queries more than the north-south divide”, which indeed it does. This is not the initial time that effective and well-established research has been moved to the “golden triangle”, the most extraordinary example being the relocation of 2nd-generation synchrotron analysis from Daresbury, close to Manchester, to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory close to Oxford. Offered that all the preliminary and brilliant developments took spot in Daresbury, this was a odd and unfair selection, the motives for which have in no way been entirely disclosed. If it truly is effective and in the north, move it south. What assumptions and influences are at operate right here?
Daniel McDowell
Ludlow, Shropshire

British technology"s uncertain future | @guardianletters

Unfair criticism | @guardianletters

Geoff Layer’s criticism of the Workplace for Fair Access’s response to the government’s decision to minimize nationwide scholarship funding (NSP) for 2014-15 (Letters, 3 December) is wholly unjustified.

Right from the start off, our overriding concern has been to minimise the affect of these changes on students from poorer backgrounds. We have worked tough with Ucas and the Larger Schooling Funding Council for England to make sure that students acquire clear details about what is occurring and, if they wish, can change their selections prior to the Ucas deadline of 15 January. We also pressed for the removal of the £1,000 income limit on NSP assistance, which could imply many students see a lot more money in their pockets. In our advice to universities who now have to reopen their 2014-15 accessibility agreements, we made it clear that they ought to minimise any prospective unfairness to candidates.

Of program we will not welcome a lower in the government spending budget supporting poorer college students. We expressed our disappointment quite obviously in the statement we issued as soon as the government announced its determination. It’s really worth pointing out that we, with each other with the NUS, had been the only HE organisations to do so.
Professor Les Ebdon
Director of Honest Accessibility to Higher Schooling

Unfair criticism | @guardianletters

No need to be so gloomy about graphene | @guardianletters

Professors Andre Geim, left, and Dr Konstantin Novoselov. They have found how to exploit graphene, a new wonder material. Photograph: Jon Super/AP

I don’t wish to claim that the United kingdom is the ideal in the world at turning science into progressive items, but Aditya Chakrabortty’s report (four December) about the country’s efforts in exploiting graphene – the ultra-thin “wonder materials” produced from carbon – was unnecessarily gloomy.

Very first, in describing the function by Nobel laureates Andre Geim and Sir Kostya Novoselov at Manchester University, exactly where they discovered graphene in 2004, Chakrabortty fails to mention that the construction of the new, state-of-the-artwork £61m Nationwide Graphene Institute at the university has been specifically developed to inspire innovation.

2nd, he cites AstraZeneca’s closure of its study centre at Alderley Park in Cheshire as an illustration of Britain’s lack of revolutionary nous. Yes, the centre closed this year, but it has been relocated to Cambridge. Of course, that raises separate questions more than the north-south divide, but not to mention the centre’s move appears a unusual oversight.
Matin Durrani
Editor, Physics Planet

• Aditya Chakrabortty is appropriate that government must be seeking to science and innovation to improve our prospective customers for growth. Despite speak of continued austerity – which will no doubt be a function of the autumn statement – there is scope to treble the science budget in four years’ time.

On the most recent official figures, the government is planning to go further than just balancing the books in the following parliament. In fact, it is focusing on a surplus of £15bn in the structural budget by 2017-18. As an alternative of putting this funds aside for a rainy day, it could support the innovations Chakrabortty describes.

Building a a lot more innovative economy will assist raise our extended-run productivity, development in which is just .5%. If we maintain going like this, forecasts by the Office of Spending budget Obligation suggest that the pressures produced by an ageing population will mean public sector debt rises over a hundred% of GDP, generating latest public investing challenges pale by comparison.
Emran Mian
Director, Social Industry Basis

No need to be so gloomy about graphene | @guardianletters

Fair access to higher education | @guardianletters

Cuts to scholarship funding will hit entry to higher schooling. Photograph: John Harper/Corbis

The government’s choice to scale down its personal significantly heralded pupil scholarship scheme has amazed several of us (Report, 23 November). Yes, we knew cuts had been coming since of the absence of controls in excess of pupil amount development outdoors universities and via the determination to preserve the science and research budget. We knew the cuts would target on reducing pupil mobility by disinvestment in accessibility measures. We knew it was very likely that the poorer in society would most likely be hit the hardest. The surprise has been the response of the independent regulator, the Workplace for Honest Accessibility. Offa is there to safeguard and market honest entry to greater training. So what does it do when the government decreases the sum publicly committed to scholarships by 66%, halfway via an admissions cycle, when almost 200,000 students have utilized on the basis of the considerably vaunted access agreements? It does not inquire universities what they believe, it does not ask the applicants it is supposed to be safeguarding. Offa simply says it could have been worse. Should not it, as an independent entire body, be standing up for college students?
Geoff Layer
Vice-chancellor, University of Wolverhampton

Fair access to higher education | @guardianletters

Female philosophers | @guardianletters

Jonathan Wolff is probably a tad out of touch (Report, 26 November). There are any number of brilliant youthful and not so younger women philosophers in the United kingdom. The question is: do the males read the articles or blog posts, blogs and books of these girls? Do they listen to the contributions created by them at seminars, and conferences? A lady professor of philosophy would have been capable to feel of 6 or seven ranking professors of philosophy whose operate they admire, who also take place to be girls: Helen Beebee, Nancy Cartwright, Tina Chanter, Jen Hornsby, Catherine Malabou, Onora O’Neill, Jenny Saul. Perspective is a humorous thing. At Manchester Metropolitan we are holding a series of lectures in spring 2014 by philosophers young and old, senior and early occupation, on various factors of the hoary subject Women and Philosophy. The men have been expelling us ever given that Plato.
Professor Joanna Hodge
Manchester Metropolitan University

Female philosophers | @guardianletters

The golden age of female philosophy | @guardianletters

Jonathan Wolff isn’t the very first particular person to be puzzled about why, although 5 very well-known female philosophers emerged from Oxford quickly right after the war, number of new ones are carrying out so right now (How can we finish the male domination of philosophy?, 26 November).

As a survivor from the wartime group, I can only say: sorry, but the cause was without a doubt that there had been fewer males about then. The trouble is not, of course, guys as such – guys have accomplished excellent ample philosophy in the previous. What is wrong is a specific fashion of philosophising that benefits from encouraging a whole lot of clever youthful men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly develop up a set of games out of easy oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about. All this can go on right up until someone from outside the circle finally explodes it by moving the conversation on to a quite distinct subject, following which the games are forgotten. Hobbes did this in the 1640s. Moore and Russell did it in the 1890s. And in fact I think the time is about ripe for someone to do it right now. By contrast, in these wartime lessons – which had been little – males (conscientious objectors and so forth) had been current as well as girls, but they weren’t keen on arguing.

It was clear that we were all more interested in understanding this deeply puzzling world than in putting each other down. That was how Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Mary Warnock and I, in our numerous techniques, all came to consider out alternatives to the brash, unreal fashion of philosophising – based mostly primarily on logical positivism – that was current at the time. And these have been the concepts that we later expressed in our own writings. Ultimately, I can verify that I’m still alive and doing philosophy. Next spring, Acumen will bring out my little book Are You an Illusion?
Mary Midgley
Newcastle on Tyne

The golden age of female philosophy | @guardianletters