FORTY-SIX universities, mainly but not entirely made up of ex-Polytechnics, were put on a list by the Labour government, after the introduction of tuition fees, as being deeply in debt and candidates for bankruptcy and closure.
The secret list, made public by the use of the Freedom of Information Act, shows that the jobs of tens of thousands of lecturers and thousands of ancillary workers are at risk following the decision of the Labour government to no longer adequately fund the country’s university system.
It also indicates that students who are already getting tens of thousands of pounds in debt, and are already being shoddily treated as lecturer shortages and cancelled courses negatively affect their education, now face much worse – universities being closed, and their education being brought to an abrupt end, with nothing to show for it except a crushing debt.
The Labour government and the university chancellors have charted a way out of this crisis, and this way out is to turn education into a commodity, upping the annual purchasing rate (tuition fees) up to £18,000 by 2010, as requested by the leading universities.
This level of fees will see the lesser universities either closing, or amalgamating in groups to form new universities, alongside the doubling or even trebling their current £3,000-a-year fees.
The fact that on the list of universities going bust are major universities such as Queen Mary, University of London, and Liverpool John Moores University, as well as South Bank University, and Greenwich University shows just how deep the crisis is.
Another aspect of this crisis is the turn to higher interest rates throughout the capitalist world to control an explosion of inflation. This ‘control’ will include huge cuts in government spending, including spending on higher education.
Universities are to be told to sink or swim on their own, with the futures of millions of students at stake as well as over a million workers, from lecturers to ancillary workers.
Already up and down the country hundreds of lecturers and other workers are being sacked.
The only solution to this crisis is for the National Union of Students, the UCU lecturers union and the unions of the university manual workers to unite to defend wages, every job and to oppose the closure of universities, insisting that they will not allow education to be turned into a commodity.
The university unions must seek the support of the entire TUC for the demand to restore free state education, and the allocation of proper and adequate funding of university courses and adequate payment for all sections of the staff.
In fact, they must seek the support of the entire trade union movement for this struggle, explaining to it that without free state education society will be polarised between the very rich and the poor the way that was in the first half of the 20th century, before the Welfare State.
A united trade union movement must fight all cuts, and occupy universities to stop closures or amalgamations.
It must demand the abolition of tuition fees and the abolition of all of the loan debt that has been accumulated.
It must demand the restoration of free state education, and call for the nationalisation of the banks and the major industries to provide the basis of a planned socialist economy to support free primary, secondary, higher and post-graduate education.
There is only one way that this can be achieved. There must be the organisation of a general strike to bring down the Brown government and to bring in a workers’ government.
