My union branch ie Goldsmiths UCU has voted for indefinite strike action. We are faced with something like 95 redundancies with departments or courses being wrecked or closed down. We have a management who will not negotiate properly and will not countenance any other plan for the university other than to create a different kind of institution.
They're doing this without proper debate or consultation with heads of departments, professors or the union. As is usual in these cases, we have a layer of management whose main job is to fire people. So we have a situation in which a group of people (management) have a high standard of living on the basis of creating a low standard of living for others.
What's being noticed is that some of these people have created a world for themselves in which they move between colleges and universities repeating this job. Quite often they're not academics and so have no attachment to a 'subject' or 'academic discipline' and no attachment to the college or university in question.
There is a grotesque and twisted irony about this in that this is all taking place in what are institutions of learning, study, reflection, research - y'know, all that high minded stuff, that, to be honest, many of us rate quite highly! So on the one-hand we talk the talk this way about the importance of 'higher learning', while these hacks try to turn the institutions where this is supposed to be going on, into institutions based on principles of profit and exploitation.
